Like Lightning

My camera hung heavy around my neck. I followed C around the landscape of her family's farmland nestled in a remote French village, 30 minutes by electric bike from the city of Lille. It was March, tipping into April. The spring air was crisp and what little dusting of snow there had been was already melted. Up until then, C and I spent every weekend at grungy basement parties or black tie events. Sometimes there would be a dinner of her parents to attend to, or a family function, or a family friend's family function. Sometimes there were dancing and etiquette classes on the weekends in order to attend all those black tie events and functions. The social life of the French elite was always moving.

C's home - and life, to be fair - was straight out of the episodes of Gossip Girl I used to binge all night with my friends in middle school. Her home was on an acre of land removed from the noise of city life, but her family still had a loft in Lille for storage and events, as well as a cottage in Bretagne where they went for the summer.

C's home in the village was a structure of sprawling glass. In the first week I found myself getting lost on the way from C's bedroom to the dining room. From the kitchen, you could look out the glass wall facing the backyard as you made a morning espresso, gazed over the swimming pool, trampoline, and chicken coop, and watched the singular distant neighbor's horses run in the afternoon light.

After being there for a month and a half, I knew I was half-way through my exchange and already missing France, my host family, and most of all, C.

On this rare weekend afternoon in late March with no parties or gatherings to distract me from the end, I think C could sense my sadness and my conflicting feelings of preemptive reverse homesickness. We were in her kitchen, watching the horses run when C blurt out in French, "We used to have another neighbor. Do you want to see their house?"

She tells me to bring my camera.

I'm confused, but I agree. Most of my time in France as a sixteen-year-old girl was spent confused and agreeing to stuff. It hadn't steered me wrong yet. It was easy when C's attitude towards life was a mix between "Carpe diem!" and "Why not?"

Within the first few weeks of being on exchange in France, C quickly became my first and maybe only ever "muse" (even though I don't necessarily love that saying, looking back, there's no denying it. To this day, I've never taken as many photos of someone as I did of C. Her passion for life was something I didn't want to look away from.) When she told me to grab my camera, I didn't ask why. I just knew it meant something good was about to happen.

C lead me out the house, past her family's large stone gate and wooden door, out past their long driveway, and towards a haphazard structure that I somehow hadn't yet noticed. We stand there. She asks me, "Haven't you wondered about this yet?"

I'm embarrassed to say non, so instead I make vague French noises.

Beside C is an enormous farmhouse, half burnt to the ground.

C shakes her head. She tells me, "You are too lost in your thoughts."

I take a moment to absorb the sight in front of me. C was right. I would've had to have been "off with the faeries" as my mother would say, not to notice the stone, wood, and ceramic building, abandoned and crumbling beside C's home. Around the huge structure were scattered debris, remnants of someone else's past life: a tractor, its wheels, a child's plastic blue tricycle. We poke our head through one of the windows, each double-pane broken and see a cast iron frying pan poke out from a pile of splintered wood, ash, and earth. A pair of shoes. She leads me back around the front of the house. She points to the only remaining piece of the roof.

C tells me, "It was years ago. Lightning struck the roof and the whole place burned down, except for this part. The family made it out with no injuries, but they never came back."

The only part left of the orange tile roof is a cross in black tile. C explained to me that the black tiles were placed in the shape of a cross by the family before the lightning struck. The cross coincidentally, was the only part of the structure that wasn't affected by the fires at all.

Looking at it, I got a chill up my spine. C had nothing more to say about the building or the family that used to live in it. To her, it was something cool she had grown up next to. For me, it was an awakening, not of the religious variety but spiritual all the same. I couldn't fathom how I had been here for almost two months and had never noticed this hulking husk of a home beside me. It was the kind of thing I would have dreamed of stumbling upon back in Canada.

In my adolescence, I was always looking for weird places to explore and conjure up stories in. Yet here it was, a real abandoned home with a real story just a hop, skip, and a jump away...and I had been totally oblivious to it. I'd let myself get so wrapped up in the sadness I felt about leaving, I'd missed what was right in front of me while I was there.

I snapped a quick photo of the roof. I took a lot of photos that day and on that trip in general. This photo was probably one of my worst. It's blurry, way too zoomed in, and the lighting is lack luster. Still, it's my favorite, more than any photo I took at any black tie event. When I look at it, I'm still filled with that creeping chill that threatens to tap me on the shoulder at any moment. I remember that when I'm too lost in sadness, it's best to look up, to take a picture; to snap out of my head and click into the moment. Otherwise the moment might just strike and leave you behind, wondering where everything went. Like lightning.