![]() I don’t know its name, but I think it’s in Siberia. You’re probably wondering what city is the coldest in the world, I said. There are two wide, swift-moving rivers that snake through the city, and bridges everywhere, crumbling bridges that resemble dark sutures if you’re looking down from an airplane. It would make our suffering easier to handle if we were at least the champions of it. Winnipeg is one of the coldest cities in the world, which is frustrating for Winnipeggers. And when you go outside you absolutely cannot stop moving or you’ll die. And, when it’s that cold, there are these things called sun dogs, two small suns that show up on either side of the big sun. I told him that in the winter it gets so cold that all the smoke coming from the chimneys of the houses stands straight up, in columns it can’t move or float around like normal smoke. I started to describe the city, superficially, how it’s very cold in the winter and hot in the summer. He asked me where I was from-Seattle? I said, No, Canada, a city called Winnipeg. We talked about movies, about the ones we loved or hated, and how we both enjoyed seeing movies alone in the middle of the day. We stared out the window and drank our coffee. but boring, and he really wanted to travel and study and have adventures. If he didn’t have an answer, he’d say that there were rumors and there was speculation but that the true story behind whatever it was he was talking about-a building or a person or a monument or a battle-would forever remain a mystery. He said that he sometimes worked as a tour guide and was really good at making up believable answers to the tourists’ questions. Luc told me that he was nineteen years old and lived with his parents. ![]() He prefers me to call him my husband, but that’s a whole other story. I guess “boyfriend” is a strange word because he and I were both in our forties at the time. I told him that I was waiting for my boyfriend to show up. The young guy-whom I’ll call Luc-asked me what I was doing in Paris. We went to a café nearby and sat upstairs at a long counter that looked out over the street. After all, it was obvious that we both had the time and the money, from our ticket refunds, so why not? I was about to head back to my hotel when the young guy asked me in English if I’d like to have a coffee with him. So there we were, the young guy and me, standing out on the sidewalk in the middle of the afternoon. Eventually, the projectionist told us that it was impossible, he couldn’t get the machine to work, and we could ask for our money back. It went on like that-lights down, lights up, lights down, lights up-as though Earth were spinning too fast on its axis. Then, a few minutes later, it stopped again and the lights came up. The projector started working again and the lights went back down. The lights came back on, and we, the two of us, waited. The lights went down and the movie started, but after a minute or two the projector stopped working and the screen went black. There were only two of us in the theatre: a young guy, who sat at the back, and me. I can’t remember what the movie was I think it was American, maybe a Wes Anderson film. One afternoon, I decided to see a movie at one of those old cinemas near the Boulevard Saint-Michel. I was staying at a cheap one-star hotel called the Tiquetonne, which was on Rue Tiquetonne, by the Étienne Marcel Métro station. It was 2011, and I’d been alone in Paris for four or five days, walking around, going to museums, sitting in parks, watching people, just waiting, really, for my boyfriend to meet me there. This content can also be viewed on the site it originates from.
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