Patterson Island, Port-Cartier
Home.
I used to say I didn't have any. Those were my single, early twenties year. What an asshole I was. Single people mostly are and it's not really their fault. They don't have any bearings to evaluate their relevance in the world, so they think their little life is the stuff of Opera is written from. If you're single and you manage not to be a drama queen, you're a saint.
I went back to Port-Cartier last week-end. It had been six years and ten years I hadn't seen the place in the summer. So I went back and took Josie with me. Showed her where I was born and all. Figured out that after five years, it was overdue.
The place was never kind to me, sure. It was nothing personal. Cities don't judge. I was just not cut out to live there. It's a place where men are outside, hunting, fishing and playing sports. Reading? Writing? Being an artist in general? Not so much. Maybe if you can twang a guitar at parties, but then again. It's a party thing, it's not serious. It's not personal, it's not a conservative town with a vendetta on intellectual and artists, it's just the way things are over there.
Different logic, is all.
Long time ago, I was discussing with a friend about the process of moving on. He told me: "You have to embrace who you've been to move on. All of it. If you don't you'll spend years pining over who you were, instead of becoming somebody else." I went back to Port-Cartier with that in mind. I knew it was a part of who I was. More than I wanted it to.
Yeah.
Josie and I walked to all my old favorite spots. The bay, Patterson Island, the river next to the camping grounds where I spent my last few summers. Places where I was left alone. There is an endearing vulnerability to a town that fits so well within the confine of one man's mind. Every street, every trail, every corner and shortcuts, I remembered. A day and a half later, we were back to my parents house. We had seen it all. No stones unturned. Was that it?
Home is where the heart is and it sure never was in Port-Cartier. But this town is a part of me. I grew up there and inherited its cold logic somehow. Also the flagship work ethic of its citizens. My upkeep is more emotional, psychological, artistic, but it's growing. I can feel it. I'm turning thirty soon. I have a home with people I love (yeah, my dog is a person. Screw you!) and I understand just a little better how I got there. There is nothing time can't crush and it's not always a bad thing.