At the beginning of March, I was in Quebec, invited by a poetry festival. It wouldn't matter at all if it weren't for the fact that it had been only fourteen years since I had set foot in Canada for the first and last time, on an exchange with a high school in Ontario, a few hours from Quebecois lands. There I made a best friend with the intensity of adolescent friendships: I remember how we said goodbye crying with the promise of meeting again someday. It has taken fourteen years for those children, who were fourteen years old at the time, to meet again now, as functional adults. Upon learning that I would be in Montreal for a few days, I wrote to her. We arranged to meet at the station. I had a few minutes walking from the hotel and she a couple of hours by train.Over the years we have kept track of each other without much depth. She has seen me start publishing books and try to turn them into a way of life; I have seen her get married, buy a plot of land in a small village near Ottawa, build a house there, and now live there with her husband. On the way to the station, I felt, guiltily, a little lazy: did what I was doing make sense? I reopened Instagram to check her profile, full of wedding portraits, photos of the new house, traces of that normal life that bored me. What if we had nothing to say to each other? What if life had made us take opposite paths, antagonistic desires? What if that special friend had become a normal person? I also knew that she was coming with her husband: the doubt doubled. The laziness, too.We hugged emotionally, strongly, crossing the pedestrian crossing and finding ourselves in the middle of the road, protagonists of our film. I met the husband: elegant, polite, and kind. I discovered that genuine thing that had brought us together for the first time, so long ago, the special connection that remained intact despite the years. We sat in a cafe at the station and began to talk non-stop.
First, the husband accompanied us. Then, we touched upon the most superficial topics: an attempt to explain fourteen summers and fourteen winters in a few minutes. She wouldn't stop insisting on how lucky she was to have found that man; the blessed luck that had brought them together; that she couldn't believe it, she said; that she was very happy. In the background, she recalled the wedding photos, the Instagram posts. And what if it was true that that special friend had become a kind of tradwife from Canada?Later, however, the husband had to leave to make some work calls. We were left alone. We were able to talk, then, about the most profound things. I started by telling her about my father's death, which had happened just after we said goodbye that winter of 2012. From there we went to her parents' separation, painful and inexplicable; about a first boyfriend who passed away while they were together and with whom they continued to date; about an abusive relationship she described with surprising wisdom; about having a Muslim husband, a thirty-year-old young man from parents from Somalia (yes, the husband I was telling you about); about not having converted to Islam despite pressure from his family; about when she was diagnosed with fibromyalgia and, just that year, she started medication for a mental disorder. She spoke with such sharpness, about all of this, with such clarity, with such sanity, that it contradicted my intuition.I would never have said it, seeing the photos that filled her Instagram, or hearing her talk about the wedding as her highest life triumph, the ultimate salvation, total happiness. All my prejudices now capitulated before that friend who showed me that she could be intelligent, progressive, and feminist while articulating desires completely different from mine. And not only different from mine, but different from those that correspond to the good feminist card that we distribute here, denying nuances. I realized that all that said much more about me than about her: about my fears, my solid ideas. She had many reasons to have made creating a family her lifeline: who was I to condemn her?We said goodbye and I continued thinking about her for several days. I still think about it. About that relentless lesson. That things are not as they seem. That we need time to understand others. That we must approach what we don't understand. That, when we know the stories, the stories change. That the surface is never where stories end. That here, in Barcelona, in Catalonia, we want to resemble each other too much, and we forget that there are other ways of pointing to the same places. And that, many times, contrary to what we would like to think, ours resemble us very little. Or almost not at all. And that's fine.
