Seen in a Montreal Park

I drive by this park every day.

Yet,
Today is different,
even when it is just a hot, lazy summery day.

There is a pretty young woman sitting in the tree shade,
leaning against its trunk.
Today.

Her dress creeping upwards,
Her lips barely quivering,
She is reading a book of poems,
Today.

She is reading one specific poem
Today.

This one. The one I am writing right now.
The one you are reading as I write.
Today.

METAMORPHOSIS

Here I am, after half a century of existence, looking at myself in my dermatologist's examination room.

He too is looking at my blotches of discolored skin.

"You have vitiligo", he tells me, "and it is an autoimmune disease. It has no cure. There are some treatments available but the results are neither permanent nor guaranteed".

He asks me if I have insurance. He then prescribes me some expensive ointments which might or might not stop the progression of the spots.

I might as well use some medieval witch's brew.

Here I am, half a century old, turning into a spotted snow leopard.

I have been told several times that I am a rare breed. My skin is telling it to me now. I am becoming one with an endangered species.

I have always felt to be on the verge of extinction. Now I share the fate of a big wild cat.

There are about 5000 snow leopards left on this planet. That is still much more than Armenian writers and thinkers. As for Canadian writers of Armenian descent, they are only a handful. Snow leopards are, at least in theory, a protected species.

Armenian thinkers have never been protected. Quite the opposite.

Armenian thinkers have always been fair game. They have been denounced, ridiculed, hunted down, murdered, betrayed, jailed, exiled, and relentlessly eliminated; mostly by fellow Armenians, and regularly by their imperial overlords, the Ottomans Turks, the Persians, the Russians, the Stalinist Commissars.

At the age of fifty, my skin is telling me that it has had enough of my fifty-year old tan and that it wants to get back to the way I was born. My colour is turning into a much paler and fairer skin. Sort of like the inside of my palms.

Had I lived in India, I might actually be worshipped. As I lose my darker complexion and become the owner of a lighter shade of skin, it would be interpreted there as me moving into a higher realm and being literally reborn with a fairer tone.

While I love Indian culture, I don't particularly care for their version of racism. Or, for that matter, for any version of racism.

My skin is probably telling me that its colour is irrelevant.

As my physical bodily prison has decided that it needs a new "paint" job, I now have to face the true dragons that shake the foundation of all humanity.

As I lose the tanned skin tone, my wrinkles seem to disappear. The scientist in me tells me that this is an optical illusion. Fairer skin reflects more of light; therefore, the darker creases of the wrinkles are less visible. But then again, as my skin acquires the colour of a newborn child of the Caucasian race, I might actually be getting younger.

I am aging backwards.

I, the wizard. The one who now knows my true name.

Recording now my flight of the learned osprey, whose Promethean shape I take when I burn to transmit what is inside me.

Forever in love with Fata Morganas.

On my way to extinction. Forgetting what I know as I grow younger.

Forever. Forgetting.

I. Merlin.