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Rue Saint Antoine last Wednesday

October disappeared in a whirl of events. Unexpectedly, I lost a friend. I still don’t know how to express the feelings around that event through writing. Putting words on paper usually helps me understand what I think; it leads me along a soft path, turning life’s landscape more blue and less cloudy—like a drawing in a tactile children's book, where every step, every phrase, and every word is a new discovery. But this feeling—this sense of dying as a fact—is one I couldn’t embrace through writing. At least not yet. Last week, I saw a tree being cut down and broke into tears while mashing butternut for a soup. Tears came out of nowhere—well, out of everywhere, I suppose.

The decision was simple and maybe a tiny bit (un)usual for the occasion: go out and celebrate life. We saw Bob Dylan’s concert on Thursday, in a concert hall at the edge of the known world called La Seine Musicale. I’d seen Dylan years ago in Belgrade, and that concert had been disappoi…