Two blues that never spoke to each other, never even met.

The Bibliothèque bleue is not in the history of literature. Few people have heard of it. And yet, for two centuries, it circulated door to door through the French countryside.

Troyes, 1602. Nicolas Oudot prints small booklets with blue covers: almanacs, lives of saints, tales, remedies, calendars. The paper is made from recycled rags and the quality shows. The texts are often truncated, poorly reproduced, recovered from older manuscripts. Peddlers take to the road to distribute them.

For a century, the authorities look the other way. Then in 1701, restrictions target peddling. An edict of 1757 goes so far as to threaten death to anyone distributing clandestine books.

And people read anyway. Or are read to. The Bibliothèque bleue goes where learned books do not. It arrives, clumsy and approximate, at the thresholds of homes where someone — a priest sometimes, or the peddler himself — reads aloud to the others.

We know that a copy of a peddler’s Christmas carol was found in Marie-Antoinette’s library. The contempt displayed. The secret reading.

What the Bibliothèque bleue transmitted above all was know-how. How to cultivate a plot of land. How to repair. How to heal. A reclaiming of technical knowledge by those the institutions never trained.

But there is another kind of lack. One that cannot be resolved through knowledge, gesture, or use. A lack that no longer points to what one does not know how to do, but to what one cannot be.

This is where blue changes direction. And becomes romantic.

This rising blue does not come from nowhere. Since the twelfth century, the Virgin has carried it. The romantics inherit it.

In 1774, Goethe publishes The Sorrows of Young Werther. The hero loves a married woman. But it is not only her he cannot have — it is a way of existing in the world that is denied to him. He will die from it. The novel triggers a wave of suicides across Europe. The desire for the unattainable pushed to its limit.

Caspar David Friedrich paints the same thing. His figures are always seen from behind, facing the horizon, the sea, the mountains. We never see their faces. Only what they are looking at, that horizon they cannot reach.

In 1802, Novalis publishes Heinrich von Ofterdingen. At the heart of the novel: a blue flower. The hero searches for it. He does not find it. He cannot find it. The Germans have a word for this desire: Sehnsucht, the longing for what one has never had, a wistful yearning. A blue that rises. That aspires, desires, but transmits nothing.

The Sehnsucht crosses the nineteenth century and changes vehicles. Jules Verne and H. G. Wells redirect this desire toward possible worlds, journeys, machines. The unattainable stops being merely dreamed, it becomes projected. Today, Elon Musk extends the logic in a new form: making elsewhere reachable, transforming the unattainable into a program, a trajectory, a destination.

There is another desire for the inaccessible. This one is found thousands of kilometres from Germany. The blues is born in the cotton fields of the American South, after the abolition of slavery that abolished nothing. The same verse repeated twice, the resolution that resolves nothing. Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin carry this into literature. They knock on a door that does not open.

The blue from below, meanwhile, kept moving.

Wikipedia. Forums. YouTube tutorials. The blue of hyperlinks. That colour signalling everywhere: here, you can go further. The same practical knowledge circulating outside institutional walls, without accreditation, without privilege. It is not a valid source — not according to those who decide what that means. Millions of people learn anyway.

The two blues never mixed. Sehnsucht, Musk, and Mars, for those with the means to desire infinity. Wikipedia, forums, tutorials, for those who fix things themselves because they cannot afford to pay someone else.

Yellow became giallo. White became doctrine. Blue never gave its name to a genre. It circulated unnamed. Without theory. Without legitimacy.

The same colour. Two worlds.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

More colours:

Before the mark.

An innocence already suspect. It may be the only colour that comes with instructions.

Writers did not follow them.

Gallimard’s Collection Blanche has existed since 1911. No image, no visual seduction: a red border, a name, a title, a white background. What matters is inside.

First reversal. This white is anything but innocent. Haughty. Exclusive. Almost mute. It turns its back on the reader waiting to be taken in. Quiet arrogance. Closure disguised as openness. Editorial silence.

In 1953, Roland Barthes publishes Writing Degree Zero. White writing: a flat, neutral, unadorned language. Albert Camus as its central figure. The Stranger opens: “Mother died today.” No affect. White.

This white is not innocent either. Constructed. Deliberate. Achieved by withdrawal. A language stripped to the bone. Withdrawing from language takes work, takes effort. Discipline. Asceticism. A gentle violence done to expression.

Herman Melville looks at white and steps back. In Moby-Dick, an entire chapter devoted to the whale’s whiteness. Not its size, not its strength. The colour alone. This white terrifies because it can mean anything: purity, death, God, nothingness. Too much meaning at once. Illegible. Ishmael finally names what has undone him: not what white means, but that it can mean everything. The mute void of the world. Innocence does not hold. It yields.

What everyone calls purity becomes an abyss.

Stéphane Mallarmé goes further. In A Throw of the Dice Will Never Abolish Chance, white is no longer background. It becomes text. The silences count. The spaces interrupt. Resist. White acts. You no longer pass through it. You read it. You stumble.

Withdrawal in Barthes. Architecture in Mallarmé. Absence becomes pressure.

The blank page of innocence. Skin without mark. Without age. Without history. The body held in that before-state — before time, before the mark, before life imprints itself. This white has run through literature for centuries. It runs through the news as well.

Nabokov looks at it. Lolita is built on this desire: the little girl as white surface that the adult gaze wants to possess before she becomes something else. Before she gets dirty, grows old, acquires a thickness of her own. Humbert Humbert does not want a woman. He wants this white. The unaltered. The still intact. Nabokov knows this. He shows it. He does not absolve it.

Literature names. Reality funds it.

Proust gathers his young girls in bloom at the precise moment they are about to cease to be so. Balzac does the same. The entire nineteenth century treats female youth as a perishable commodity, to be consumed before colour returns, before life leaves its marks. This desire is not new. But it has changed in scale.

The Epstein files. Lists. Names. Islands. Planes. Men protected by their money, their networks, their whiteness — that whiteness too, the whiteness of privilege that needs no justification, that moves without being stopped, that buys its own invisibility. This is no longer fiction. It is organised impunity.

And the bodies desired in this canon, literary and real, are almost always white. Young white femininity as universal aesthetic standard. As though purity had a race. The crime has its criteria.

This is not an accident. It is a construction. An exclusion. A market. A target.

And this market is lucrative. A scalpel with a promise: the return to innocence, to the before-state. Skin without mark. The blank page.

The body, like the page, nevertheless calls for its own defilement. But we pursue the illusion anyway. Nelly Arcan, Britney Spears, Marilyn, they left their skin, their health, their lives there. Everyone pretends not to see that it is the same impulse. That the fiction and the private island share the same fundamental desire: the desire to have what one should not have.

There is also a white that goes unseen because it is everywhere. This white possesses and dominates. It is not a colour. It is a position. A centre that does not recognise itself as a centre. A norm that mistakes itself for the universal. To be white, in the colonial order, is to be the page: transparent, neutral, self-evident — while others are the text that is read, judged, translated.

Frantz Fanon named it plainly. Black Skin, White Masks: white as imposed language, as civilisation decreed universal, as a mask forced onto the face of the colonised. The colonised who must whiten to exist in the other’s gaze. Who must erase their colour to access humanity as white defines it. Whiteness as the condition of entry.

Toni Morrison did the same work on the literary side. In Playing in the Dark, she shows that the whiteness of the American canon is not an absence of colour — it is a colour that conceals itself. That operates in silence. That decides what is universal, what is literature, what counts. Whiteness as power that does not need to name itself because it has already won.

The blank page is not neutral. It has a history. A race. A language.

And Melville resonates differently now. The white whale as blind force that crushes everything in its path without even knowing it. That does not turn back. That explains nothing. That does not have to.

That too is white. What does not have to justify itself.

The white we believed neutral, virgin, and pure — literature cracks it open. Turns it over. Forces it to speak. Because that is its work: to look underneath.

The blank page calls for the stain. It exists only in tension toward what will break it.

Innocence carries its own ruin from the start.

What does it say about us, this need to scratch the surface with the tip of a pen? To break this white. To shatter it. To paint it. To mark it?

Ink.

From the beginning.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

More colours

Allô Police was what’s known as a yellow press publication. The expression comes from late nineteenth-century America and describes a popular, sensationalist press that relied on scandal and crime to sell. Across the Atlantic, in 1929, the Italian publisher Mondadori launched a series of detective novels with bright yellow covers. Il Giallo Mondadori would become so popular that the word giallo, yellow, simply, would come to designate an entire literary genre, and then a cinematic one.

No direct connection between the two. The Americans didn’t inspire Mondadori, and Mondadori didn’t inspire the American tabloid press. And yet the same yellow imposed itself on both sides of the Atlantic to designate the death drive : those scenes we watch despite ourselves, those descriptions we devour because they remind us we’re alive. Two cultures, two eras, one point of attraction, a colour that changes form to keep working on the same zone.

Yellow is a deeply ambivalent colour. The colour of the sun and of gold, but also the colour of betrayal and marginality: traitors and heretics were made to wear yellow in the Middle Ages; it was imposed on Jews under the Occupation. A colour that marks, that exposes, that singles out those we look at differently.

Nature has known this far longer. The yellow of wasps, poison dart frogs, and snakes is aposematism, a strategy that warns while making it impossible to look away. Elsewhere, the same yellow becomes seduction: in certain birds, it attracts as much as it signals. Always this double address: come closer, but at your own risk.

This idea of warning was carried over into traffic lights.

The yellow light is the suspended instant between the permitted and the forbidden. Neither the red’s stop nor the green’s permission. It is the moment when something in us chooses to accelerate, and that something resembles the death drive.

Italian cinema understood this before anyone else: it is in that suspended space between the permitted and the forbidden that something essential about us is revealed. Mario Bava begins this transformation in 1963 with The Girl Who Knew Too Much, a thriller with a refined aesthetic, where violence is staged with choreographic precision. Dario Argento then pushes the formula to its extreme. His murder sequences are genuine visual set pieces, drenched in saturated light, accompanied by the hypnotic music of Goblin. In Suspiria, the colours are pushed so far they become abstract, red, blue, and everywhere that yellow bathing the murder scenes like a warning we have chosen to ignore. What once hid behind a convenience store counter now fills the screen, claimed, unashamed.

The sordid becomes almost art.

Almost.

That is where the giallo disturbs and fascinates in equal measure. It takes violence seriously as aesthetic material, neither condemning nor glorifying it. It looks. Slowly. Carefully.

Allô Police did the same thing, in its way. Less elegantly, certainly. But with the same fundamental appetite: crime rendered in images, offered to the gaze of the reader who wonders, turning the page: what does it say about me, this desire to see?

The fascination doesn’t change. From the convenience store to the screen, from the blurry photograph to Argento’s meticulous frame: the schadenfreude remains beneath the varnish.

The yellow traffic light. We know. We accelerate anyway.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Abonnez-vous maintenant

More colours

We move forward anyway, but we carry everything. The years in a job we never chose, the mornings we get up because the bills don’t pay themselves, the debts that make every step heavier. And beneath all that, older, more stubborn: the humiliations we thought we’d forgotten, the regrets that became habits, the small wounds that surface without warning. And time passing.

The past doesn’t stay behind. It works its way in, layer by layer, without our noticing. It becomes a shell. It shines, pretends to protect, serves as shelter on the days we don’t have the courage to go out.

And despite all of it, we make ourselves presentable. We polish that surface — soft, firm, lustrous — as if the outside could make up for the weight within. The shell gleams. We hold on to it.

But one step is enough. A distracted step, a step that never even saw us. And everything is destroyed. The patiently polished nacre, the hard appearance built year after year, gone without ever having been noticed.

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On Saturdays, I return to that image. I offer my own piece and share the texts I’ve received, the way one gathers the echoes of a single light.

This week’s photograph shows plastic ducks left sitting in a rain puddle. I took it a few years ago at the Jean-Talon Market, in front of a very popular fruit stand — and you can see why.

Here is my text, written from my impressions of that photograph:

Danger Zone

It had rained for three days without stopping. The plastic ducks floated in the puddle as though they had always been there, as though no one had placed them. Their yellow was too bright. Too deliberate. You could not look in their direction without wanting to look away.

The neighbourhood children had not played outside since Tuesday. No one had noticed exactly when. No one could have said how long the silence had been pressing down like that — slightly damp, slightly too large.

People measured. They came back to measure. The water did not move while you watched. It waited for you to go inside.

The thing grew by degrees. Slowly, with an intention that could not be named but that was felt in the calves, in the back of the neck, in the way the blinds stayed drawn on rue Principale. Someone had counted the ducks. Or perhaps not. The number circulated anyway, imprecise, slightly different each time it was repeated.

On the evening of the fourth day, the puddle had overflowed onto the sidewalk without the rain having picked up again. It had expanded from within, according to a logic that did not belong to the weather. The ducks were not drifting. They held a formation that no one could have described with any precision but that everyone recognized having seen before.

There was little talk of it. A kind of unease came with putting into words what was happening, as though naming the thing gave it permission to go on.

Then the sky emptied all at once, toward the end of the afternoon. The light came back yellow and low, the same colour as the ducks, and that too was something no one preferred to say. The puddle shrank over the course of a few hours. The ducks drew closer to the centre without the water pushing them there.

The sky returned to where skies end. Nothing more seeped out of this story.

The participants this week were very generous in their respective texts, all in French:

Suzy Wong

La mare des vieilles vérités

Image de Johanne…

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a month ago · 4 likes · Suzy Wong

Le Substack de Amrit

La chaîne de solidarité

À l’invitation de Johanne…

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a month ago · 6 likes · 1 comment · Amrit et le bonheur de vivre

See you Monday, for another photo!​​​​

On Saturday, I return to that image. I share my own piece and the texts I’ve received, gathering them like echoes of the same light.

This Monday, I’m offering light and shadow, a very simple wall with a lot of potential.

Leave the link to your piece in the comments, we’ll come back to it on Saturday.

A young woman, not unkind, but rigid as a broom handle. She managed hair the way you manage a sixth-grade class two weeks before summer break. With me, she had gradually become an unsolicited hair tutor, complete with syllabus.

Bleaching short hair? “It’s not good for your hair.” Sure, but short hair has time to recover from a deep bleach trauma, it seems to me. It does its therapy, grows back in the right direction, without ingrown ends or complaints.

Then there was the three-week rule. Immovable. No exceptions, no context. If you bleach, you must bleach again at three weeks, or the horror descends: the yellow band. The announced catastrophe. The imminent aesthetic disaster. Social shame, probably. And let’s not forget the treatments : hydrating shampoo, revitalizing mask. What I saw, mostly, were the costs adding up, stacking, accumulating. Every three weeks: steady income for her. For me? Another hole in an already thin budget. At that price, the yellow band can live its quiet little life. It’s self-sufficient, and it always ends up under the scissors anyway.

Especially since, not a small detail, I did this for years with another hairdresser, before I moved. Every six or seven weeks. No problem. And besides, I like the grow-out: a little ombre, alive, honest. Prettier to my eye than that smooth, uniform block that looks like a Snapchat filter applied directly to the skull.

But no. It had to be done “properly.” Meaning: the way she had decided, in her head, for an abstract client who was not me. At a certain point, it’s no longer advice. It’s control, with a blowout and a professional smile on top.

So I fired her.

I don’t book with the hair-orthodoxy ayatollahs.

I’m going back to my old hairdresser. I tried the “all natural” prescribed by the new one for a year. It’s not ugly. But I don’t like my head. And I think it matters — not wanting to shave everything off every time you catch yourself in a mirror.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Subscribe if you’d like to play along too.

On Saturday, I return to that image. I share my own piece and the texts I’ve received, gathering them like echoes of the same light.

This Monday, I’m offering a playful photo. It’s light, with that familiar rainy spring feeling—not sad, though… bright yellow, with reflections of the sky in the puddles.

Inspiring?

I hope so.

I’m looking forward to reading you!

Leave the link to your piece in the comments—we’ll come back to it on Saturday.

Partager

On Saturday, I return to that image. I share my own creation and the texts received, gathering the echoes of a single light.

This week, the photo is a visual fragment from Jean-Paul Riopelle’s work titled Tribute to Rosa Luxemburg, depicting a bird—a dove with reddish outlines and outstretched wings.

Here is my participation….

Spring 2020 smells of disinfectant and silence. She gazes out the window like it’s an aquarium; people outside move slowly, masked, separated by a distance made mandatory because we’d forgotten how to touch.

On her computer screen, a man calls to his mother. A knee presses into his neck—eight minutes now. She turns off the video. Turns it back on. Turns it off again.

On the table, an open book. An underlined sentence she doesn’t reread.

She thinks of S.

1995—He’d arrived from New York, without papers, with a story the Canadian authorities wouldn’t believe. They shot at me. He said it with the voice of someone who’s repeated the same thing too often and never been believed. She listened, and something in her resisted unconsciously. It wasn’t malicious—it was almost normal. A comfortable skepticism, the kind you can afford when no one’s ever shot at you.

She thought: he’s exaggerating. She thought: paranoia. She didn’t phrase it exactly like that, but it was the undercurrent of her mind. History had granted her that luxury, the privilege of disbelieving what would never touch her.

He knew things she had no inkling of. Other books, other knowledge, a way of reading the world that school hadn’t taught her because it wasn’t her world. He’d shown her how what happens can be read as a conversation between the living and the others. She’d glimpsed it. She hadn’t known what to do with it.

And she’d been surprised that he was intelligent. She hadn’t admitted it that way. But the surprise was real, and surprise always reveals something about the starting assumption… In hindsight, she felt deep shame.

Do you know Queen, Freddie Mercury? she’d dared to ask. He was thirty, fresh from New York. It was 1995. He’d said yes with a politeness that must have cost him. She felt shame about that too.

In the street, he never took her hand. A calm feline, unhurried, with the slow, deliberate gait of someone who occupies space carefully. She found it beautiful. She hadn’t understood it was calculation, the kind History had etched into his body long before he met her. Walking beside a white woman without touching her. Becoming invisible without vanishing. Never seeming to flee a place.

He too bore his chains. I know what your grandparents did to mine. He’d said it one evening, without raising his voice. There was truth in it, and she knew it. But there was also a way of using History as a stage, of turning their bed into a place for settling scores. She’d resisted certain gestures, unsure if it was fear, discomfort, or shame holding her back.

Neither of them was free—not her, not him. History was in the room with them, in the street, in the silence between sentences. It never left.

She’d said no to the child. No to the money she didn’t have. She knew exactly what she was refusing, and it wasn’t him, the man, but everything else. What it would have cost, what she would have become. Keeping your eyes open doesn’t protect you from everything.

The asylum claim was denied, as expected. He left. It took her years to recover from something she couldn’t quite name. Not him exactly, but what they hadn’t managed to be for each other.

In her hand—though she no longer knows for how long—a feather. Found that morning on the balcony. Gray, slightly stained. Probably a pigeon, not a dove, but it feels the same in her palm.

Her daughter sleeps in the next room. She was born four years after S. left. Years later, a Facebook notification: your daughter, is she mine. She hadn’t replied. Some questions don’t need answers.

Outside, someone crosses the street looking over their shoulder. An ancient gesture, a learned one. She watches until he disappears around the corner.

The feather is gray and faintly bloodstained, and she still holds it.

The participations for this week are all in French… counting on some English ones for next week!

Suzy Wong

Le Brouillon du Divin

À la demande de Johanne…

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a month ago · 4 likes · 3 comments · Suzy Wong

Le Substack de Amrit

La colombe est une bitch revêtue de blanc

À l’invitation de Johanne…

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a month ago · 6 likes · 4 comments · Amrit et le bonheur de vivre

Hold the feather

Unintentionally, sure. But the road to hell is paved with good intentions and comfortable couches, and there I was, sleeping like a baby in the middle of the afternoon, flat on my back, no shame whatsoever. Two hours. Gone.

You’re going to say: come on, your body needed it.

Maybe. But you didn’t see what crawled out of the couch after.

Because when I nap, something shifts. I go into the couch a relatively functional human being and come out a creature. Like a bear at the end of hibernation, hasn’t eaten yet, Mr. Bear already on her case with his big springtime ambitions — and she’s got fangs, fur in full chaos mode, zero tolerance for anything that breathes. Or a cactus. The kind that grows in a forbidden desert, covered in inch-long spines, and if you’re unlucky enough to brush against it, it cuts you without even looking up. No warning. No mercy. No apology either.

That’s me. After a nap.

Nobody wanted to come near me. Nobody wanted to talk to me. Nobody wanted to love me, even charitably, even from a safe distance. The evening was grim. Flat. I grumbled about everything. The cat I don’t have. The floor, freshly washed, as it turns out. The ambient air.

I went to bed early anyway, small moral victory, but my daughter was out — the little criminal — and like any perfectly reasonable mother, I waited for her to come home, grumbling in the dark like the same old bear, the one who knows spring is coming but finds it takes forever.

The door. The goodnight thrown into the darkness. Sleep.

By morning, I should have been fit for human company again. But no. A headache had moved in instead. Discreet at first, polite — then it started doing squats in my skull, lifting weights, building muscle, settling in as a permanent roommate with all its stuff.

It’s still there.

I tried to paint bookmarks. I destroyed paper with great conviction. Too much water, too much friction. The paper started pilling like an old washed-out sweatshirt. The tape proecting the border finished the job: when I pulled it off, it took half the surface with it. An artistic crime scene. I threw them out.

After lunch, in a fit of questionable optimism: let’s get some air. Walk to the dog park with the big guy. Twenty minutes along a boulevard not built for inner peace, me calculating my trajectory to keep Mr. Anxious Shepherd from announcing the end of the world to every passerby.

We arrive.

Park closed. For “soil regeneration.” In April. On ice.

We did the loop anyway. There, around, back. The dog sniffed things. I looked at the fence with the quiet solidarity of someone who understands that you close things off to let them recover.

Coming home, the couch looked at me with the treacherous tenderness of a toxic ex.

“Come on, just five minutes,” it murmured.

I refused. Heroically.

Because I know now that naps are interdimensional portals. I always come back. Just… not the same day.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

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Abonnez-vous maintenant

On Saturday, I return to the image. I offer my own writing and share the texts I’ve received, gathering them like echoes of the same light.

This week, the image held cold and two motionless bodies. I saw thaw in it, the push of life beneath the stone, that movement that begins again even when nothing seems to move.

offers us a special kind of embrace.

Suzy Wong

Le câlin qui gèle pas

Y’a un vieux prophète de fond de cour, Saint-Bernard-du-Dégel, qui dirait …

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2 months ago · 4 likes · Suzy Wong

gives us an exquisite minimalist line.

And we can always add more texts, French and English, if other players come forward.

Here is mine

Two children frozen on the threshold of a dream. The older presses the younger against his side, one arm around the torso, the other buried like a root beneath the armpit. The younger leans forward. Is he trying to escape this too-insistent embrace, or simply to continue a movement that winter has held back? His mouth, barely open, hovers between a cry and an inaudible laugh. In the silence of the stone, a pulse can be sensed, faint, stubborn, the heartbeat of something alive beneath the cold.

Snow has come to seal their sleep. It falls, settles, erases shoulders, softens arms, smooths the edges. It quiets the world, layer after layer. The bodies merge, become a single white mass, compact, almost without memory. The cold keeps watch. The stone folds back into its original stillness, that place where time has no age.

Then, slowly, water reclaims its rights. The snow cracks, slides away in sheets, revealing fragments. A cheek, an arm, the curve of a back. And in this reappearance, something persists: the inclination of the smaller one, that gesture once thought stilled. It is not a struggle, nor a sudden impulse, but the quiet pressure of a stem beneath the soil. A force that does not name its desire, but pushes because nothing else is possible.

Pause for a moment. Light skims the stone, still cold, yet crossed by a new clarity. Look: the two bodies seem to move, almost imperceptibly. The space between them shifts, like a shared breath. The smaller one advances. Barely. But enough for the motion to be felt, a murmur within matter.

The older does not hold him back. He carries him. His arm, rather than a barrier, becomes a contour, a support. This gesture of restraint gives the movement the time it needs not to break. It is the holding before flowering, the tremor before form.

Outside, bells answer the light. People speak of a rolled-away stone, an empty tomb, a risen body. But that is not where your thoughts go. Your vision overflows the myth: a resurrection without promise, a silent uprising, the secret life of stone. It is what matter does, every year, when the cold consents to withdraw.

In the days that follow, the snow completes its retreat. The movement becomes invisible again. It is not gone, only returned to the stone. In spring, the statue stands there, motionless, offered to the gaze.

But now, you know. Nothing is fixed.

You will return next year. It will be there, in the light, in the insistence. And the smaller one will lean forward again, as if for the first time.

See you Monday!

If you saw something, leave a trace

I really tried everything with this big goof.

The first time, he was on fire—600% motivation, a heroic surge, the voice of the wolf rising from his belly, echoing across the snow. I thought, this is it. We’ve found our athletic destiny. At 65 (for me, not for him), it was about time.

Then came the second attempt.

He had understood everything. Sometimes I swear he’s more intelligent than 75% of the population… and I’m being generous. He looked at me for a long moment, with the quiet gravity of a dog who sees straight through human absurdity.

And then—he collapsed.

Spectacularly.

He flattens himself into the snow, theatrical, unmoving, like a dying star—black on white, blank, vaguely depressed, deeply committed to the role. A low whine, just enough to break your heart. Not a muscle moves. Not even the suggestion of effort.

Just a large, furry refusal:

No. I’m not doing this.

The dogs’ strike.

Total. Solemn. Irrevocable.

We never tried kicksledding again.

Or any dog sport, really, because it’s always the same story. This dog refuses to perform. End of discussion.

He’s not a circus animal. He’ll gladly do a few easy tricks—give a paw, offer kisses in exchange for a cookie—but follow pointless rules for no reason? Absolutely not.

And honestly, I respect that. No way I’m going to “break” him just to make him obey commands that only entertain the human.

Still, I thought I was getting a working dog—active, tireless. Instead, I got a slightly unhinged little creature (much calmer this year, I have to admit) who does exactly as he pleases. I’m still a bit confused.

Apparently, herding dogs aren’t built for endurance. They’re not marathon runners—they’re sprinters.

And yes, I see it.

That first ten minutes at 600%? It’s real.

So that’s our life now.

We go all out for ten minutes, then collapse for an hour… and then we do it all over again.

I wouldn't mind a steak...🥩

What story do you see in this bouquet? Even just a line…

Here’s my version… I felt like playing too.

He had said: same hotel, same room. I fumble a bit with the elevator doors. Upstairs, an endless corridor—the standardized highway of a faceless hotel. I take off my coat, fold it over my arm. I move fast, almost running, my wet boots slipping on the worn carpet that swallows sound. Room 328, just like 330, like 419. Hurry, hurry, this stolen time is never enough. I’m already unbuttoning my blouse; the glass reflects a woman determined, in love, already disheveled. Yes, that’s her. I knock three short times. Too hard… I hurt my hand.

He opens. My momentum stops. Flowers? His smile falters as he realizes the mistake.

I grab the bouquet, laughing out loud.

What was he thinking?

These tulips, beautiful, inconvenient, impossible to take home. I set them down beside the coffee maker we won’t use.

I turn to him, sitting on the bed, a little uneasy, and jump onto his lap with a kind of carefree ease. No more flowers. Just us. This game without promises, these moments outside of time where tulips bloom in Holland and cherry trees in Japan. The sheets unfold on their own, an instant battlefield.

The door closes behind us; coats back on, bouquet in hand. He drops me off a few blocks away, careful not to draw attention. But what am I supposed to do with these flowers? At a red light, I roll the window down. Cold air rushes in. Without thinking, I throw the bouquet into the snow. A burst of laughter, mine, wide and bright. His follows, knowing, without a word.

The light turns green.