Winter

Winter has set in here in Paris. It rains sometimes, and then it is no better than anywhere else; the cold comes in through my bedroom window and I resent the stiffness and weight of wearing so many layers. I dream about the sticky heat of Hanoi, of the gay litheness of dresses, of swimming at Doc Let beach. Stu sent me photos from when I had just come back in August, I was so tanned. I loved being so brown, I felt that I had discovered my body anew after it changed colour. Winter turns me a sallow green – it is all in my mind, but I grudge winter with a will.

Often it is beautiful though. The sky clears, opens up, things become crisp. The sunlight is distant yet generous, touching and sharpening. Autumn has turned over to the winter now I think, and still my greatest pastime is to squash the brittle leaves under my feet, like we leapt shadows as kids. Mostly they make a disappointing crackle, but it’s the true crunch that I seek, just like a crisp or cropped grass in a stubbly field. I thought to myself this week that the weather in Hanoi was not really that satisfying, I simply stopped loving the sun so much after a while. A miserable climate sharpens the sweetness of good weather. I wonder too if it’s maybe a good thing after all, that the weather should dictate my mood most of the time; it seems far better than being unhappy about real life.

Amber left France today, for a new life in San Francisco. She didn’t want to go, I don’t think, but work visas would not allow her to stay. I don’t think it’s quite sunk in yet that she’s gone, what with the strike keeping us all from each other and Paris. I cancelled my French class to see her for an hour on Tuesday; when she came into the cafe to see Ashley and I she was stressed and ill with a fever, but she lit up the room with her simple, warming humour. I found myself thinking about Berlin and how much I enjoyed travelling with her; there is something both charming and disarming about her. She divulges herself openly and bluntly, and then immediately is afraid that she has been crude; and yet to me it echoes the small fears and insecurities that I am too distant and ashamed to discuss, what I was trained not to mention with all my Britishness.

How I’m going to miss her! She is such an entertaining mixture of intelligence and frivolity, of passion and despondency. She gave me so much of it, so many corners of her states, her emotions. It was my comfort to help her, thinking all the time she was almost talking about my own moody transience, that in hearing it I heard my own fears and could wash them away too with a few words bestowing confidence. I think that I learned a lot about laughter having Amber as a friend, and about human fragility; it never made me jealous that I sometimes felt a little brittle and stiff beside all her warmth and goodness and gayness. I will miss her singing, and her lovely high broad cheekbones, how she smiled always, that she made me excited about the future, and marvel at the present.

So she has left us to the Paris winter. Antony is a beautiful place to be; the silence, the stillness, the clean empty streets. I take Anne’s old street bike out to the parks, exhilarated as always by the great rush, the wonderful motion and momentum, and the lovely clicking, squeaking, whirring of all the bits of metal and wire running smoothly and simply together. It was like this in Sweden, bearing down with a swift stroke along the smart flat tarmac, the sky high and spread and lovingly blue. The greenery is in hundreds of tones in shattered pieces like a Matisse. The combination of the tight cold and the abundant sun gives colours a strange shadowed brilliance, a faceted quality, as if split into little bright bits. Perhaps it is better that she has gone – she would not belong in this cool strange winter, she is an affirmation of warmth, of goodness, of comfort to me. She is like the uncertain trees, bared open, their colour cut up and refined, and they will all be left naked soon and without protection.