Montréal

Montreal. The city is an impostor. It would become my home. It beckons me sweetly yet insidiously to dissolve in the echoing jazz borne on the cerulean wings of its wind and in the singing drawl of a melanin-bankrupt denizen.

Montreal. Beautiful stranger. You shall soon give up the secrets of your tresses and the enveloping wrinkles of your brownish-white streets to me, once I get used to your ways and your speech and your idiosyncrasies.

Montréal. These initial salty pillowcases are the ransom I've paid for you.

Montréal. Meet me half-way. Teach me happiness in the insular bubble of individuality. Teach me to be content unto myself, and shower upon me the seasonal comfortable blossom of friendship. Give me you, and let me keep myself. Teach me to accept the accent marks in your name, and your nasal speech. Teach me to accept you, and accept me in turn. Supplant (but gently) the centre of my universe. Make me love you, but let me keep what I had loved safe in the granary of my unconscious mind, hidden under a dusty sack of songs, or maybe filed away beneath an innocuous emotion that darts in unnoticed some rain-and-whiskey soaked late-evenings. Make me come back to life. Adsorb my green-leaved fears and doubts onto your powdery-white skin, and when next spring you shed your skin, let me look back and be happy that I came to your doorstep one late August afternoon, with an inertial heart and a half-formed tear welling in a lonely corner of my eye.