Here I start anew.  En ce moment, je commence.  What do I start?  De quoi agis-je?

I will take my world and convey it: its winds, its seasons, its scents, its self.  There is where I am, but where is here?

Here is where the wind blows diesel exhaust into your nose, cigarette smoke into your hair, Thai spices onto your tongue.  Here is where it shifts the dying leaves one day, one breeze closer to winter, and amuses itself by scattering and regrouping those who have  already given up their lease along the cobbled, indifferent sidewalks.

Here is where the wind slips delicately over the smooth wood of the benches, pushed along by the dusty roofs of cars that pass by.  The wind blows even when no car will run and my hands will never thaw, to remain clutched around my pen's silver petroleum-based form forever.

Hardly a romantic start to the end of the beginning, but that it is such could not be disputed: when will the day come when I will not sit on this bench at all, when to see a car pass would disturb the sense of society, when the wind will blow the leaves into the hair of the walkers and cyclists, going home to a house which will not be livable when the winter rolls in, the wind bringing the snow in feet, not inches?

But this is a start to an end of an end: le début d'une fin d'une fin.  Blood will flow and wind will blow et j'espère que je me sauve.  To be close to those we love is to at once let ourselves be blown in the wind and to stand like a rock against it, for if one chooses the wind of the change they desire, to stand in that wind is to not change at all.

So is this the start of the end of the end, or is it the end of the start of the end, or even the end of the start of the end?   

Who knows, who cares; it will go whether or not we do, for the wind cannot stop the wind, and the leaves are falling.