In 1993 I fell in love with New York City which would, years later, stage an unfortunate love affair and share its demise.

     The parking meter in Montreal is an entity created to consistently emphasize my absentmindedness. It is short enough to evade my peripheral vision every time I am marching confidently toward a visible future. Since I don’t drive, I can hardly relate to the parking meter drama that accompanies the city’s daily rhythm but I was married to the Parking Meter Angel who would feed coins into the expired meters just before the traffic police would threateningly turn the corner. What more could I ever expect?
     The perfect marriage collapsed under an abstract dream - a dream of attaining integrity through balancing tension. Tension and integrity, but instead I plunge into a nightmare of terror and intensity. The street in Culver City is smoked out of sight.

     As I’m reading Salman Rushdie on my flight to L.A., the book turns around and flies me back three years to the summer of 2000. The summer it all started for me and, as it turns, for Salman Rushdie. Only I don’t need beautiful young strangers to try save me from myself by making love to me in my hours of death. All I want is to make sense of the past and let it go in peace before I meet my future. But since, for all practical purposes, it is always now, my past keeps approaching with every page I turn and my future will always stay behind, buried in the rubble of an elapsed moment. And I’m always sitting on the plane reading, waiting for linearity to finally collapse on its own inconsistency.
     Salman and I, two exiles searching in New York, in the hour of its doom. Are we merely two specks caught up in the same gust of wind? Was it two pilots that brought the downfall of that city or was it us? Was it the city that was hit? A famous writer in hiding and a shadowy one for whom none is looking.

     Judging by the number of hair salons, the citizens of Montreal have a hard time facing reality without having been pre-emptively treated to a sleek professional coiffure. I don’t trust anyone who claims to be an artist just because of a peculiar fixation on the bad hair day experience. A bad hair day is infinitely more sufferable than a bad head day, for instance. So, I dye and cut my own hair. But then, in a nihilistic feat inspired by the questionable turn of the millennium, I shave my signature long hair and embrace a stark reality of diminishing reflections. Suddenly, men I have no reference for appear in my life to submit erotic applications. Montreal has a famously neurotic climate so, in a feat of romantic colonialism, I accept an out of town submission.

     In September 2003 I step into the N.Y. subway. The familiar smell of age-old human fumes escorts me to my destination on the train appropriately labelled F as it carried my lust to the desperate embraces of my lover for the long year leading to the collapse of the New York skyline as we’d known it. I am going to Park Slope, to the apartment where he used to wait for me sleepless. Now he is someone else’s lover. I stay in his apartment while he stays at hers. Her embrace burns me. Real estate is quite dynamic in the city of vulnerable colossi.
     It seems that everyone is in a dire need to get in shape – running frantically and drinking diet Coke, spas proliferating like fat cells. I distrust the oil industry – it thrives on war - so I keep my fat under natural scrutiny.

     Summer of 2000, we visit the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. Unbeknownst to me, my companion, the man who came to visit from New York, will become my obsessive lover for the year to come. Nothing seems to hint that the sparkling affection I feel will soon mutate into a hopeless obsession.

     In New York I peep into my dream and meet people from Culver City. Out of the meeting and into the sunshine of an April afternoon, the city is blooming in white and violet. It should be officially pronounced the city of spring and then marketed to all the world’s romantic tourists. Two girls stroll by in sandals and my suede coat is a statement of another era.
     The emptiness of the small East Village bistro is alluring save for the mirrors trying to catch my image. Violently claiming the deserted space music fuses dissonantly with my mental banter. If it is true that certain frequencies can kill us by syncing perfectly with our heart beat, I am in no danger.
     The street outside trembles giddy with the advancing summer light. Memories are playing the voice of my lost lover, the voice of my anger. The sonic dissonance dissolves into the song of our separation. All at once I have to keep an ear to my heart beat endangered to sync up perfectly with the sneaky music. The salad is fine, but the tomatoes have been in the fridge and the bread is flaky. “Johnny, tu n’est pas un ange, ne crois pas que ca m’derange. »

     We land in L.A. and spend an enchanted week in the botanical garden of urban America, getting all the aroma therapy I need to compensate years of unconscious olfactory deprivation. The nature, the horizontality and the liberal, chaotic spirit of that rural city make sophistication that, from a distance, appears so severely lacking in Hollywood culture, feel redundant. Only out of its natural scene, is the entertainment industry ob-scene. In its own lush environment, it feels almost organic - just another scent amongst the myriads of humans and flowers.
     In Culver City the streets are lined with the absence of trees. It smells of my austere sunny dream, which meets me halfway down the street. My husband is walking next to me.

     Mortified by all the implications of my separations, I would like to close this chapter, to run away, to hide back in my childhood, but instead I stop, turn and face them. It was a sad and bitter pill, pain hiding in the most mediocre, the most mundane of gestures and utterances.

     Back to New York, the city of elation, phallic dreams and wakeful opportunism. Like a breathing entity, it shared my wound and sustained my blow. Now, reclaiming its space and its story, it is blooming, intact.
     Found out a little magic garden, the Botanical Garden is its majestic name - an oasis of intimacy hidden in the rare pauses of a metropolis that never sleeps. The stone bench is warm from the sun. A strand of hair is tickling my forehead.

     Nail salons mark every corner with their unequivocal indispensability. A professional manicure is a must in L.A. On the other hand, I don’t trust anyone who capitalizes on chronic conditions such as recurring growth. A violent scratch reminds me that perhaps I do need professional help after all. Then again, anything could break a skin.

     Amidst the yellow walls of my ex lover’s apartment, I sleep very little. The thin walls are friendly to the street noise. He painted them yellow in homage to our love that barely was. I love yellow, but someone of my ancient childhood told me once that yellow was the colour of hate. Our fragile love collapsed the day the world exploded with hatred. A memorable date permanently encoded in the emergency telephone directory. I have dialled 911 only once, just before he came to visit Montreal that summer.
     Amidst the yellow walls of my ex lover’s apartment, my stomach is inconsolably upset. I shed five pounds in two days and keep them off as a souvenir of a glorious failure.

     Dyeing my hair fuchsia in Montreal - a tedious process that obliterates the white hairs I have grown so transcendentally fond of. My little marks of drama sprinkled on my head like the dishevelled strings of a once linear web, the web of time. I still dream of Culver City…