Just like at the restaurant and in my parents’ house when I was a child, a small bench had been placed in front of the bathroom sink in the apartment on Place Jacques-Cartier to make it easier for me to have access to running water, the mirror and the medicine chest. My roommates curse when I inadvertently leave it there and they stumble over it, but most of the time I remember to stow it in a corner or push it under the sink to avoid accidents. When you share an apartment with three drag queens who are drunk or high more often than they should be, who’re coping with a hangover most mornings and take refuge in the bathroom, hiding their eyes melodramatically because daylight hurts and reality kills, it’s best to take precautions.

When I got home that morning – it was too early for even a semblance of life in the house – I went straight to the bathroom, I pushed my little bench into position, climbed up on it, holding onto the sink with both hands, and looked myself straight in the eyes. It’s something I’ve always done in times of crisis, when I wanted to get back in touch with myself. At my parents’ home, at the restaurant, here in the apartment on Place Jacques- Cartier. It seems to me that you can’t lie when you look at yourself in a mirror.

For years I’d dreamed about what was going on right now, never daring to think that it would, but there it was, real and tangible: Gilbert’s looks went way beyond my wildest hopes and it was all happening to me, who’d always felt unworthy of being loved. But something was blocked inside me as if one final key to one final lock were missing, or one door in my heart was stubbornly refusing to open. I knew it was pointless to chalk it up to Gilbert’s illness: love, the real thing, at least what I thought of as true love, wasn’t concerned about this kind of detail, it struck with no concern for its victims or the price they’d have to pay. It wasn’t caution then that was holding me back.

So what was it?

It was one of two things: either I was incapable of letting myself go, of abandoning myself to love regardless of the consequences, or else – and this was much more serious – I was incapable of loving. Had I got my fingers burnt in childhood, frustrated when I sought my family’s love and the love of people who would have been my friends but who’d quickly turned into torturers until my heart was closed forever to any form of true love, to anything that went beyond friendship and demanded that I let myself go without hesitation? If I could find the key to letting myself go somewhere deep inside my heart, if I let myself go and used it, would my life be completely transformed? Would I be driven mad by love, ready to drop everything for a guitar player with an uncertain future?

And deep in my own eyes I read – I could swear that it was a voice I didn’t hear but read deep in my eyes – a tiny little voice, a green little voice with gold sequins, that was saying to me, Poor fool, you’re two steps away from doing it, let yourself go for once, make the leap, stop analyzing everything or you’ll end up all alone in your corner, like a rat, because you’ll never have known what it meant to let yourself go.

I would have liked to listen to that voice in colour, throw myself head over heels into irrational passion, run to the Théâtre de Quat’Sous and proclaim in front of everyone, “I love you, too, Gilbert Forget!” But to my great despair I couldn’t do it. The key could not be found and the door in my heart remained shut.

And yet, and yet, deep down, if I really, really looked, I knew that I loved Gilbert. Not just because he was gorgeous or because of his good points, which were many, that was too easy, too obvious, it was the very basis of love and anyone can succumb to it, it was also for his weaknesses and his vulnerability. I’d seen Gilbert capable of doing everything, thinking he was invincible, I’d seen him weak enough to break at any moment, I’d also guessed at the touching child who’d never recovered from an immense sorrow that he saw as a betrayal, and he had bowled me over so much that I wanted to do something good for him, become some kind of relief to his manifold pain. If he loved me as he said he did, for once I was going to let myself be loved!

And in the end, it may have been at that moment that my plan began to germinate in my head.