Dreams

I received a dream interpretation dictionary as a gift when I was eleven. It was nestled amongst other Christmas gifts, and inside my father's parents had signed their names and "Christmas 1999." I remained so fascinated by the volume that other the years the spine of it cracked and gave way to thick scars of broken binding. I used the book to decipher my frequent lucid dreams, as I was not--and never have been--one to write them down. Much like taking photos on vacation, keeping a scrapbook, or recording memories and thoughts in a journal, I prefer to guard my dreams in memory where only I can touch them.

As a child, I dreamt in vivid technicolor, soaring high definition images swirling through my mind and rising from my pillow-cradled head. I cannot remember when the frequency of these dreams started waning, though I have not lost my ability to recall dreams from long ago when triggered. A color. An object. A certain look or tone of voice...even deja vu itself can set me off to remembering an exact dream from years before.

In despite of all of this, I have only dreamt of my deceased father twice. Once he lead me through a dim house and I asked him what it was like where he was. He responded "It's great up here, it's so great!" The other occasion was the night before a trail race and in the dream he'd coaxed me into stopping running to eat a hamburger and I never finished. It is a slight understatement to say that the next day at the actual race, I was paranoid I wouldn't finish...Thanks Dad.

Curiously enough, I must confess that is my mother who is visited by my father the most. I cannot help but be saddened by this...I can't understand why it's her he visits. Perhaps I can rationalize it, but I can't rationalize the feelings behind my sadness.

She told me this evening that just one night ago she dreamt of visiting my dad in our old house, the house we lived in before they divorced. My stepdad had gone with her. Apparently the kitchen in the old house had been remodeled, and my obese father had metamorphosed into his slender self. He was crying. He said he was sorry for everything. My mom and stepdad consoled him in the dream.

* * *

I am a finder of patterns, a wielder of motifs, a lover of tropes. What are dreams and literature but an irrevocable fusion of the two?

* * *

My mom doesn't really read this blog. She didn't know, until tonight, about some of my previous postings this week about my own relationship to my father. I find it funny, eery even, that she dreamt of him a few days after I wrote about what I've held in.

Maybe my insinuation is too strong...maybe I believe a little too much in the idea that there is far more to our existence that what meets the eye, far too much mystery for us to rationalize away. And why ruin it?

* * *

Maybe my Dad is reading this blog, from wherever he is. And if he can't read it, maybe he is getting the message somehow anyway.

If he is, I hope he knows he's forgiven.

Writing Hungry

I spent last Friday night in my bed in my studio in St. Barts listening to the rain drum on the rooftop and writing. Like many other things forgotten in the hustle of daily life, I hadn't realized how hungry I was to write until I sat down to do it, until I forced myself to say fuck it to inhibition and put words to (virtual) paper.

So I threw inhibition to the wind and wrote. The more quickly I wrote, the more ravenous I became. I woke up this morning wanting to write. No, needing to write. A need comparable to the need to eat or breathe. As my life is a life of words, feeding that need is only natural.

So who cares if this post is shitty. Or if it isn't my most beautiful post ever. Anne Lamott says you have to let your first drafts be shitty, so I'll consider this blog an entire first draft of whatever I may write in the future.

Who cares if sometimes I write in English but think the same thoughts in French. Or that I (paradoxically) have more trouble being precise with the images I'm trying to create because I have at my fingertips a bilingual brain competing with itself. Or that I can hear the French behind my English. Who could've ever thought that being bilingual would make writing harder...or maybe this is just me.

All that matters is that my writing self is starving and wants to be fed, so all it matters is that I give that self some food.

Secrets

Humans are by nature secret keepers. I know in my heart this is true. We keep malignant, benign, funny, and even stupid secrets, and we keep them out of fear or even the belief that keeping them protects us. But I'm a firm believer that if we can probe into a secret and understand its roots, we can understand ourselves much better.

I confess my own secret is this: I have always wanted to steal someone's boyfriend. Or husband. Or someone entirely unavailable or uninterested. I have wanted to lure someone into abandoning someone else for me. I have wanted to wreck homes and break relationships and smatter them into a million pieces. This is brutal honesty.

A long time ago, when I was a teenager, I was accused of having succeeded in this when one of my best friends and her boyfriend called it quits. Then, it had never crossed my mind. But it awoke in me that thought that maybe, because she seemed convinced that I was capable, I was capable of doing this.

I know I want this just once because it would signal to me that I am enough. It would assure me that I have the power to enchant. It has nothing to do with love itself and everything to do with having the power to ensnare. It's a brooding feeling that lies deep in my gut, the dark side of my being that never quite breaks the surface. It's something I will never act on, yet it lies coiled dormant.

It has surfaced this week because of a certain gentleman I see every day who is highly unavailable, sometimes it surfaces with people whom I've known for a long time but whose head I know I will never turn. It's the glimmer of a dream that one day someone will wake up and say "Goddammit, I missed out," or "I let her get away," and regret it for good. It's the evil vixen within me who wants to smash hearts like crystal.

And I know where it comes from.

It comes from being six and having freshly divorced parents. And having your father leave your mother for another woman. It comes from hating that other woman because she hated you even though she never said it but you could feel it in her look and in her touch, even though you did nothing to deserve her hatred except exist. It comes from not understanding why that other woman could possibly be so cold to you but so warm to your father and feeling like hugging you was simply obliging your dad's wish that you could all get along. Form a fake family of sorts.

It comes from the feeling of abandonment that you weren't good enough for that father to want to stay, the notion that she was too powerful and too ensnaring, that she was more than you were.

It comes from being sixteen and holding in this secret about her for the time when you'd be ready and be an adult and could confess such complex sentiments--feelings too much to put in words for a little girl who couldn't quite understand them--to your dad, but then realizing it was too little too late, because your time with dad was up. Fini.

It comes from the darkness deep inside this twisted little heart that fears that her relationship to her father and her past will poison any romantic relationship she might ever have in the future, so she finds it somehow better to keep herself out of the muck that is love.

I am a secret keeper, and I know humans keep secrets. These are some of mine.

Comptine d'un autre été

I am a collector of songs. I collect music and forge it with memory to move me to different times and places in my life, to journey to moments that I hardly remember have passed, to forsee others that have not yet come. There is something profound about this work of collecting. Within the span of several minutes I can relive my deepest experiences of elation or sadness. Collecting songs allows me to plunge within my own being.

One song in my collection is the "Comptine d'un autre été" from the movie Amélie. Last September it was my swan song of departure, my ode of contemplation. I played it as I packed my suitcases and prepared to leave home. I played it again last week as I packed yet again three suitcases: two for Paris, one for Saint-Barths. It is, as the title promises, the song of another summer.

I play this simple melody now as I sit sheltered from tropical rain and compose. Music inspires me infallibly. It moves to contemplation and composition. If only it could help me to unearth the story buried within me. There is a creator within me, and she's never left even though I have--at times--abandoned her. I'm struggling to get to know her again.

I used to be fearless and could talk to the creator within me all the time. I fearlessly brandished pens and notebooks as a young teenager, delved into my own realm and just composed. Then I went to high school and she slipped a bit more. And then I went to college and she slipped away.

I am afraid of the blank page now. I am afraid of it because I fear I have nothing worthy of saying. I am afraid that each word I place in front of another will sound ridiculous and cumbersome. I am afraid that I have no interesting stories to tell.

I am afraid that fear is a useless emotion for my purposes.

Perhaps the fear of the blank page is my quarter life calamity, an adults-only disease that plagues me because I was raised in a culture that largely values cheap spectacle over refinement and sports over Shakespeare, a culture that associates refinement and education with elitist snobbery. Maybe this is why I'm fleeing with all my might to the ivory tower and above all, to France, where the writer is a near religious figure and a privileged intellectual.

I'm on my knees praying that France will solve my writer's block calamity, that it will galvanize all that is within me.

We will see in another summer's time.

L'Histoire de St. Barths

I arrived in St. Barts two days ago to begin working for a new Parisian family as their nounou chic. In other words, I am a fancy nanny. And despite having had 48 hours or so to let sink in the reality that I am on one of the most exclusive isles of the French West Indies, I'm still rather incredulous.

St. Barths is beautiful, with humidity thicker than my throat holding back tears. The water beats back to shore, the sand worn down from the relentless violence of waves. Yet all is tranquil, secluded. The villas give way to the chatter of the small aircraft which shuttle between here and St. Martin, with white gates to guard privileged French privacy. And so this is how the other half lives...

Though I have been brought here by my new family, I feel like an intruder, peering into another realm to which I know I do not belong. I feel as if I know a secret which I could never convey, a secret that would die with me. But I must say...all of this would probably one day make good fodder for a novel.

We shall see.

Intermission

When I was young, I believed that time was slow. I believed that in order to write, I needed a story to tell. Now that I am grown and time has quickened, I know that sometimes all one needs is the life one leads to light the way.

* * *

I arrived home in the United States about one month ago, with the thought that one month was a vast expanse for me to stretch out my visits, to say hello to those I love, an infinite and endless boundary. The clock, however, doesn't always allow me to trick myself. In two days I leave to start another phase of my summer, before jet setting back into the country for a beloved friend's wedding, and then abruptly departing for Europe.

All the come and go has certainly got me thinking about time...attachments...the inevitability of departure. I am happy, beyond happy, to be going back to Paris, to France. But I cannot help but feel an inexplicable sadness again.

* * *

That France is my home now is undeniable. That I am a (temporary?) expat is now irrefutable. How strange it is to feel alien to one's own country...but what country is that? My brain lives in the murky waters of no-man's-language, a fog of French and English. America may literally be my patrie, but France is my ame soeur. She seduces me in ways that America never can, nor ever will. She is my refuge, my inspiration, my blood.

This is something I will never be able to convey to those who have never felt entirely at home in another place and culture...something I cannot even explain to my own family. My only extant justification for the force France wields over me is that she is within me...that what I feel are the echoes of centuries of French blood buried within my skin, eyes, hair...tongue. I wander the Faubourg St. Antoine wondering if my great grandmothers set foot there, gaze at Pont Neuf and imagine the carriages pass over stone, and feel like I belong.

I have not figured out yet if you will all lose me to the continent, cannot divine if I will be lost to France forever, because the proposition itself is lovely. But there are things--and there have always been things, larger forces at hand--that seem to guide my life.

* * *

I am still post-grad, post-Berkeley...but not post-France. And until I am post-France, which may, in fact, be never...I will not put any limits on anything...I suppose I'll keep writing here, for myself if no one else.

A la prochaine.