Écouter
Notes on displacement
I named the painting before I knew I needed the words.
It started as a big print on some kind of canvas with a plastic layer on top. I took it out of the trash on big trash day, years ago, in Lac-Beauport. What gets thrown away in Lac-Beauport is very different from what gets thrown away in Saint-Roch. I’ve painted over it a few times now. This time, hung from a nail in the side of the tambour, layer by layer, cleanup by cleanup, it finally told me what it was called.
Écoutez-moi. Listen to me. Imperative mood. Not a question, not a request — a directive aimed at no one in particular and everyone at once.
The situation is ongoing.
This week my property management texted to arrange picking up the washer and dryer — apparently they were never mine to keep, which was news to me. I texted back that maybe they could get them when they came to clean up the yard — something I’d been asking about for weeks without response. Yesterday they came and cleaned up the yard. The washer and dryer are still here. That’s not exactly a win, but it’s not nothing either. I asked for something directly and something happened. I’ll figure out the appliances.
And separately, with no explanation I can identify, the painting ended up in the parking lot next door. It was propped against a building, next to the words BOB SNicht, words that were spray painted on that wall long before I arrived.
I don’t know who moved it. Curiosity, mischief, malice, or just Saint-Roch doing what Saint-Roch does — absorbing things, rearranging them, deciding where they actually belong.
I screwed it to the fence with two rusty screws I found in the yard. That’s the whole effort. Two screws, some rust, and the decision to put it up somewhere new anyway.
I had a hard day this week. The kind where everything lands at once and you can’t tell anymore which weight is which. A door closed on something I’d been hoping for. I found myself in an old loop — the one where I catalog everything I’m not, everything I’ve failed to become, everything that’s still unresolved.
And then, almost by accident, I came across something I’d written. Months ago. I read it back like it was someone else’s and thought: that’s true. That’s honest. That’s not just whinging.
From this chair, I can see that we’ve both been trying to survive an unsurvivable situation by finding oxygen anywhere we could get it.
S’ecouter. To listen to yourself. Even when the voice sounds unfamiliar. Even when you’ve been so busy surviving that you forgot you had something to say.
The painting is called Écoutez-moi and it lives on my fence now. BOB SNicht is still next door, has been since before I got here, will probably be there after I’m gone.
I’m still learning to take up space in this neighborhood. Still figuring out which walls are mine to use, which screws are strong enough, which things I put down will stay where I left them.
But the painting came back. And I put it up somewhere new.
Couche par couche. Layer by layer.
The situation is ongoing.
