Notre-Dame-Des-Sept-Douleurs (Blk) (Can)

Notre-Dame-des-Sept-Douleurs is a place that exists geographically, but it is also a place that exists in my mind. When I was a child, we crossed the village sign during our journeys between Sainte-Anne-des-Monts and Rivière-Ouelle. Whenever I saw him, I looked away, shivering in horror. This name terrified me. I imagined a dying village with suppliant houses, deserted streets and squeaky chairs still rocking the memory of the deserters. And now, after several years of overwork, I found myself exactly at this place. At the center of all my anxieties, not knowing who I was, taking the blows and hating myself more than anyone. It is a thick fog that has settled inside my head, a black and opaque sky. I now lived in this island that I had built, imagined myself. I was lying in the dark on the rainbow bed. Then in August 2019, when I started to get the upper hand on myself, I decided to go visit Notre-Dame-des-Sept-Douleurs, the village. I first discovered something quite significant: it is an island. I took the ferry and arrived at an idyllic location. A village on dirt roads with no more than 35 people and whose soul has not been perverted or distorted by humans. A village without a grocery store or service station. A beautiful place. With trees and flowers, a lighthouse, colorful wooden houses and fish whose pure flesh dismantled my definition of the color pink. The village I imagined as a child, I crossed it slowly and I never want to go back there. Now, I will go to the real Notre-Dame-des-Sept-Douleurs, the one where I eat fish that smells of the river and whose color mystifies me.