The Gipsy Kings are playing in the background, Tu quieres volver; the downtown lights shimmer through my windows, a rather wet evening is unfolding out there…

Christmas is on my doorstep. 2007 has gone by so fast it might have been a dream. So many good things have paved the way to this evening, as well as a few sad ones, that I can’t help smiling. Life at its best. It’s no special evening though, a simple Saturday night towards the end of December, way after that has happened and a bit before this now takes place.

Le vent nous portera. I didn’t expect it, but I’m on random… Je n’ai pas peur de la route.

Somewhere across the globe, it’s almost morning. Sleepy eyes will soon look for a smoking cup of coffee while I sip on my Greygoose very dry martini – two garlic-stuffed olives no less. It’s sometimes hard to grasp the time difference, especially when Skype can nullify it almost completely, linking two opposites and making us feel like we could touch each other.

Aznavour, La bohème. Are we still in our bohème years or are we looking back at them? Is a time always destined to become the good old days of some future date? Will we look back and melt or are we melting today?

Le rapace, Francois de Roubaix. Ok, this is not random, it’s my nostalgia playlist. Siempre hay que esperar. But in two weeks or so, I will be flying east, so far and so fast that I won’t be able to catch my breath until later. It will be the trip of a lifetime, in many ways. The beginning of the apotheoses, the end of a long intro. A loop closed, another opened. Blissful stress of living every minute a thousand times.

A short walk outside tonight lead me to the Seawall to take a picture of the giant Christmas decorations in a cluster of five trees right next to home, to show Marie, way down there, some artificial northern lights…