Of journeys we don't choose

Contains passages addressing medical conditions

I was dozing off. 

I would have liked to sleep, to let myself be carried away by the rhythmic hum of the wheels on the tracks. But every time my eyes closed, reality pulled at my eyelids. Through the ringing of a phone or the passing of another train that made the whole carriage vibrate.

Tired of struggling with this inexhaustible adversary, I surrendered my body to the train and wandered through the bucolic landscapes of southern France. My eyes skipped over fields, old farms with distant church towers, allowing me just enough time to capture certain details but never enough to imprint them as memories.

A smell suddenly brought me back to the present, and I turned my head in all directions, scrutinizing the passengers, without really knowing what I was looking for. Because, although I had recognized this scent from the past, not being particularly skilled in labeling, I didn't know which shelf or which box in my memory to find it. I just knew that I knew it, and it shouldn't have been there.

I turned my head to the right, to the other side of the central aisle, since the scent seemed to be emanating from there. For a moment, I felt embarrassed because no one sniffs the air so abruptly anymore; today, we hide the musk. Sweat, sex, blood. Everything is concealed under layers of creams, lotions, and deodorants. Some called all these artifices progress, others civilization. Personally, I've always considered these olfactory games a kind of denial. A lie we tell ourselves to detach from our animal nature and repeat to others to convince them of our respectability. In short, one of those many social veneers that chips away as soon as routine coughs.

Anyway, I ignored this occasional embarrassment; I was too agitated. And besides, I didn't sniff the physical but the intangible. I had turned into a kind of temporal bloodhound, following a trail whose footprints faded in tangled neural pathways. But I was a very bad tracker, and my prey remained out of reach, elusive. That unpleasant sensation of having the word on the tip of my tongue - or rather here, the image in the depths of my nostril - annoyed me for a moment longer.

Fortunately, my eyes joined the hunt. And when I saw the stranger across from me - a graying man - lift his shirt, pinch the fat of his belly to form a veined roll, and finally plunge a needle into it and push the plunger; everything became clear!

In the cerebral ether, the previously blind bloodhound emerged from the ferns tickling his nose and raised his head. There, at the top of a bushy axon, nestled between two dendrites: the memory! I dove into it for a new journey and in the blink of an eye found myself in my grandparents' room.

I'm eight years old. The curtains are still closed. I've come to say goodbye because it's time for me to go to school. My grandfather is sitting on the edge of his bed, a needle stuck in his side. The smell is so overpowering it nearly knocks me out. This fragrance... why did I hesitate? It's so obvious now. It's the scent of diabetes, or should I say the scent of insulin injections. The ones he gave himself morning, noon, and night, not to mention his slew of pills organized in a pillbox by my grandmother. I remember his belly dotted with red marks. The child that I was didn't fully understand, he just knew it was important.

I finally emerge from this spatio-temporal interval and return to the comfort of my seat. Around me, the aroma still lingers but has lost some of its transcendent power, while the man on the other side has put away his equipment. He looks at me and smiles. I think he's embarrassed, so I smile even more brightly than he does. It's a smile I would like to fill with words. To tell him that I understand now, that I sympathize, that I wish we had more time, although of course he doesn't hear any of that. We are just strangers, and smiles don't speak. The strangely real empathy I feel for him is just a clever hormonal trick, a powerful sensory potion that projected me two decades back in time and whose effects fade in the face of the resolution of the mystery.

A robotic, Toulouse-accented female voice rises in the air to announce the next station. I stand up before the end of her message, retrieve my bag from the overhead rack, greet the memory of my grandpa, and head towards the nearest exit. There, with my luggage between my legs, hands firmly gripping the handrails on each side of the train door to minimize the swaying of the journey, I wait.

I try to lose myself in the horizon, but the window here is too small. My gaze can't quite make the leap; it lacks too much momentum. The landscape flashes by like a fast-forwarded film when you're searching for a scene, and all the other images seem unimportant until the one that marks the beginning of a new shot.

The train stops, and I disembark. Almost alone; at most, I count fifteen other people. I've been fooled by the sun because it's colder than it looks. On one of the platform benches, I put down my bag to take out a jacket and put it on. Then I light a cigarette, ostensibly to warm myself, but not really because I'm obviously craving one. I turn towards the train. The tinted windows hide the old man, but I can make out his silhouette. I like to think he's still smiling at me, so in doubt, I wave to the shadow that waves back as the metallic machine starts up again.

I stand there for a moment, dazed. Then, taking a drag, I hear the crackling of paper mixed with that of tobacco, and I realize that the train has indeed disappeared. I don't see it anymore, don't hear it anymore, don't smell it anymore. The ground no longer trembles at its mere mention. It has dissolved into the movement, like a completed mourning.