Anatomy of Despair
to hold on…or let go
“Peux-tu le voir?” Jean-Jacques asks, pointing through the window past the barbed wire that separates their yard from the neighbor’s to the pasture beyond. I lean in and focus, trying to see through the thick fog. Behind the branches of a young tree a white horse, a pony, comes in and out of the mist. The odd light flattens perspective and, with no landmarks for comparison, the pony looks larger than it is, mythical. I trick myself into thinking it is a unicorn, as if its horn, temporarily hidden by the mist, will appear at any moment with a turn of the head.
Jean-Jacques and Thérèse, a Parisian couple in their sixties, have invited me to spend the weekend in their country home, a converted farmhouse from the 19th century in the tiny town of Hodeng-Hodenger (population: 283) in the Normandy region of France, an hour outside Rouen. I’m on a year-long sabbatical hiding out in Paris and, after eight months, am finally making friends.
They pick me up at the train station. The cold, dense fog that has settled over the region this weekend does not lift and becomes a topic of conversation. Details that sunshine brings are rubbed out. As we walk around everything is veiled, imbued with a romantic longing as if we are characters from Wuthering Heights wandering the moors.
