January 10, 2026
I stood there, the northern breeze ruffling my skirts and sending a chill up my spine. I refused the cigarette passed to me with a quick shake of my head and went out into the courtyard, the bells now deafening. But their dissonance did not dissuade me from reaching the centre, and there, amid the crosshatch of pathways, the flora slightly less emaciated in the sunlight, I closed my eyes, searching for a whisper in the wind. I was burning, burning, burning. The clink of wineglasses over the garden walls, the reciting of Dante’s Comedy, the laughter of children in the square, and the clang of the bells in the tower now concealing my sunlight, it came back to me. It swirled round me, turned me over in my dreams.
And then I woke up in Montréal. Propping myself up on an elbow, I stared out at the snow and the clamour of eight a.m. streets, a siren somewhere in the distance, a buzz of overhead lights, the viciousness of winter subduing my reverie as I choked down reality.
Why won’t it slow down?
anastasiawrites 