a sidewalk cafe soleil in france all young and beautiful

on second viewing you relax, anticipation is what is happening. they're not all young and beautiful. some are silent and some start talking in fragments as if continuing an inner conversation.

each table a round little island. observing the others on the other islands, casually, aware of being observed themselves. an implicit indifference separates.

one sitting alone with others, that would be me, i think, then the disc skips forward.

then he sees sylvie abstracted  behind glass. his face ghosts. she leaves he knocks his beer over. follows.

he loses her

the small old city is a labyrinth. he watches a girl drying her hair. sylvie appears again in a window behind him. the lamp goes out. she goes out. he follows.

at a point she she seems to be leading him. he calls sylvie but she keeps going. they look like the same person, almost.

he smiles faintly, happy to be following her.

i can't follow the whole sequence because i have to walk the pointers, but he loses her, he returns to the cafe of dramatic arts. he sketches, scratches.

later he sees her and gets on her bus. it's not her. it's a mistake she says. but i'm not sure. a disaster, he says.

i go back to my walk. i wonder where my sylvia is, but i know too, she was never mine, and never even sylvia as i wanted. something very strange is happening. dislocations. i just have to keep going, observing i guess.

this was the dream of the inner harbor. something is in here, changing the sequence. it's not in my control.

my love and oscar. i give a big big hug. though i'm distracted, we're a pair.

the harbor, the children's hospital

now he's just inert in all the gazes, all the reflections, all the passing. he looks at the afternoon sketches, he flips them like wind. sylvie not sylvie among them, blurred.

i think it's going to end like that. he sits. he sees her on a train, shaking a hand, smiling, then gone. he sits. he has been thinking of her six years and now she doesn't exist. though she is his love. he's lost. his sketchbook flaps in the wind.

it keeps jumping images up, i want sequence and it wants sequence too i guess but of a different order sensible only to it (s/he?)
the rest anyway is a dream of the inner harbor. there is a lot of garbage and some waterbirds and lots of beaver makings. copp is very intrigued by the invisible beavers. we are a pair.

p.s. the obscure text above is musing about the film the city of sylvia. and i'm still in love with sylvia, the "wife " of my queer dead uncle.