Banal visions

When I was younger, around seventeen or eighteen, I was haunted by visions so banal and unspoken that the word haunting would seem a bit of an exaggeration to a third party. It was like certain dreams I'd have almost every night, years later, to the point of becoming hammered: dreams where I was alone at home, or at the supermarket shopping, and where time didn't pass, where gestures were mechanical and banal, where there was no one to see and nothing to do, where it was neither day nor night, dreams of boredom more suffocating than the worst nightmare.

Lying on my bed for whole afternoons, listening to Mike Oldfield, I'd get gently, politely depressed, without really knowing why, without even saying "I'm depressed" to myself; it was as wordless and visceral as hunger or sleep, and I'd have images running through me. I closed my eyes and saw the sun-drenched streets of Hanweiler's suburban neighborhoods, where I'd wandered so many times even though I knew no one there. I saw myself alone, naturally, a stranger in the midst of normality, of life at its most natural and everyday.

Ommadawn reminded me of the forest behind the municipal swimming pool in Germany. I spent a good part of my adolescence there, alone, in that forest. You had to cross the metal bridge. I went there on Sunday mornings, free afternoons and evenings too, sometimes. When you spend hundreds of hours alone, walking and brooding, it's rarely a path to others, and to normality. But what should I have done, bought a scooter, cut my hair, taken up basketball?

I'd developed this ritual of going for an evening walk in Germany, in Hanweiler; I liked the lights on the houses, the signs of the few shops, the sign indicating the brothel and the tobacconists. I'd go up to the gas station and buy cigarettes, beer, a small flask of hard liquor, and chocolate. Often a sausage from the stand next door. I'd stroll along the road, which was gradually leaving the village proper and becoming a succession of fences, warehouses, trees and fields, and I'd have my little feast. Anyone who hasn't experienced the pleasure of an ice-cold beer in winter at dusk knows nothing. It was a wanderer's pleasure, with my food and my can, hidden in the dark, and I felt very far from home.

I associate these places – the swimming pool, the forest and its paths, Hanweiler with its lights and gas station – with Christmas. Summer had no place in my imagination at the time – or let's say: no place at all, let's say I was in a kind of existential winter – and I remember that other ritual of snacking on gingerbread hearts, topped with chocolate, Ricoré and Weihnachtstolle, when I got back from Germany. In the end, it was very childish, or let's say a cross between childhood and some of the more dangerous games that grown-ups don't suspect, like in Stephen King's novels about clowns and the Losers' Club: I'd tag swastikas, or inverted crosses, vandalize statues of the Virgin Mary, wander through the forest with my saw-toothed knife, wander alone in the streets of Hanweiler, then go home to mom, in the warmth of the hearth, and when the TV showed grave desecrations, people would look at me laughing, good-natured, Stéphane the kindly metalhead of the family, so picturesque.

I often scanned the illuminated windows of houses in Germany and elsewhere. I wanted to see what people's homes were like: were they wooded, did they have books, paintings, were they sitting in front of the TV, or standing in the kitchen talking, taking a bath, tinkering in the cellar? I had a family and a home like everyone else, but I spent my life alone in the streets after school, enjoying the cold, and looking out of the windows, trying to imagine the lives of the inhabitants.

It reminds me of that Stephen King short story, All That You Love Will Be Carried Away. The story of a salesman who spends his life on the road and in motel rooms, and whose hobby is to jot down in a notebook the wacky, comic and tragic phrases he finds in the restrooms of highway stops. And who ends up standing in front of a farmer's field one winter evening, when his life is definitely unbearable, with a gun. He stares at the house, trying to imagine what the family members are doing, and gives himself a minute to kill himself, or not.