Parve — nec invideo — sine me, liber, ibis in urbem

Exile is a strange darkness. My heart is black. It used to break, but now it shelters an endless dusky pain instead. Or is it my liver that aches? That's where French people hurt. No, it is because I am Prometheus, liver pecked to bits anew every day. 

The difference between here and there is so stark. I can count out change there, speak to the cashier with no accent. I return as an alien. Here I am a cartoon, a sad Poindexter, a creature with no context. But let the metaphor work in the other direction; after all, this isn’t Tomis on the Black Sea. There are planes. I could leave if I had to. Let’s pluck the pleasure from this bad relationship that I choose not to end for a mass of compelling reasons, let's stop throwing the sorrow into lugubrious relief. Living in exile is like being horribly in love – the payback, pleasure in the sorrow has to be psychologically significant or we wouldn’t do it. So I will find the pleasure and ignore the cost. Yes, I stretch my hand into the dark water, search for something down there – even if it is just a minnow. 

Here is my pleasure - it is the nostalgia. Tears not quite shed. I can summon up huge expanses of earth where I am not alien. Quebec, for example. All of my childhood myths crowd together on the Plains of Abraham. We learned that the French, searching for a northwest passage, came down the St. Lawrence; that Pierre Radisson floated down into Minnesota; that missionaries tried to convert the Indians. And all of it spread out forever under those huge skies, relentless, and troubled with roiling clouds. These same skies hung, hang over Minnesota, land of the silver birch, the same hugeness and cold brittle air. I am at home in Quebec. The names of the Indian tribes and their languages live on in the places there, like they do in Minnesota. 

At home, part of my fantasy was that Jefferson never sold Louisiana and that we in Minnesota spoke French. Those people are actually alive; they live in Quebec. That French is mine, that bizarre, broad accent and twangy nasals that melt the vowels down. North American French. My multiple mythologies find a home in Quebec. 

Most of all, Quebec has fall. When I was in Quebec last fall, I swam twice in the early evening in the hotel, a heated pool half in half out of the building. Fluffs of condensed air billowed from the surface of the water outside. I could see the pinkish orange of the setting sun between the gusts of clouds. This memory is a minnow, grab it, it flicks between my fingers, it slips away, but I touch it. I could live in other places. But just not here. Just not here.