Marcel Lucien lay in bed next to his girlfriend Clara Fontaine, in her farm house located at the edge of the predominantly Francophone town of Casselman, Ontario. Clara was sleeping peacefully but Marcel was quite simply restless. He looked out the window and saw that it was snowing. Ah, snow. Marcel absolutely detested the stuff. He loathed having to shovel it, and walking in it, and despised how it got into his supposedly waterproof boots, froze his toes, and made him fear frostbite.
Still, dealing with the snow was something Marcel had to learn, along with a lot of other things. Moving to the Ontario region of Canada from his hometown of Quartier Morin, northern Haiti, was quite traumatic for the smart, handsome and troubled Marcel. Canada was simply different from anything he'd ever experienced in the Caribbean. It was like adjusting to life on another planet, it would seem. Nevertheless, Marcel decided to make the best of what fate dealt him, and embraced his new life in Ontario, Canada.
The 2010 Earthquake which devastated the island of Haiti, and left its Capital, Port-Au-Prince, in ruins forever altered the lives of the denizens of the first independent Black republic. Marcel was a twenty-year-old student at Universite Notre Dame d'Haiti, at the time. Just a young man with a dream, striving to move forward in a tough world. Marcel came to the Haitian Capital to study business management, and during his second semester, he got a lot more than he bargained for.
Marcel still remembered the tremors, the collapsing buildings, the panicked screams of shocked, stricken people, and the death and misery that followed the devastation. Hundreds of people dead, a city in ruins, and a nation brought to the brink. Those days were vividly imprinted in his mind and would haunt his consciousness until the day he died. Morose and tired, Marcel tried to go back to sleep. Unpleasant memories from his past tugged away at his consciousness, preventing him from slumbering.
Life had become somewhat better, for Marcel, since those days. More stable and productive and safe at any rate. In Canada, Marcel found a certain measure of tranquility, after a fashion. After doing day laborer gigs in Casselman, he found a more stable job as a bank teller with RBC after returning to school. Recently he graduated from the University of Ottawa with a degree in accounting. Yes, things were going okay for Marcel...
Last night was so pleasant, a shame that Marcel was awake in the wee hours of the morning, worrying about his old life, in a faraway land. Still, he had no choice. File it away under the things he could not change. A smile crept into Marcel's face when he thought of last night. After living in Canada for three years, he had much to be thankful for, including his permanent residence. Still, his favorite thing about his new country was a certain voluptuous dame...
