The Ephemeral Immateriality of Living

     Words are perhaps the only medium I have for understanding what happens to me, to those around me. Words let me articulate, to try and grasp for sense, when perhaps there is none. And so it is in the geometric shapes of these things we call letters that try desperately to materialize sounds that float like bees from our mouths into these concepts we call meaning that I try and try and try to seize, in a vain effort, what it is I feel.

       But feeling, truly feeling, is not a matter of words of all...it is a silence within the locket of a heartbeat trapped within the walls of my ribcage.

        Life is shifting like these words that are fickle and float about me in my mind to my throat.

        So much seems like it is changing, changing, changing. Life as an ex-pat materializes and dematerializes in a mirage of circumstances. People here today are gone tomorrow. I realize this is not unique to life in the city of Paris; it is a mere microcosm of a larger dance of ephemerality. Nothing is constant, nothing is eternal. And yet I get attached.

         I uprooted from California and unattached myself only to become attached to Paris; why cannot I chop my roots entirely, survive without them? Why must my heart ache for something?

          I have a dreams and plans but am terrified by the possibility that life, the cruel mistress, might have other ideas, might want other things. Does she know what I want? Does she know what it is I think of at night before I sink into the realm of unconsciousness?

           Does she know that for every human being going to sleep as I write this that there are a million and one dreams she is crushing and others she is accomplishing,


           does she know how infinitely ephemeral and immaterial she is?

           

My Love-Hate Relationship With Writing

     Writing and I are like fighting lovers...lovers best separated by interludes of absolute and utter eloignement wherein I cease to think about him and turn my attentions towards reading, research, laundry, taxes, the stale edge of baguette sitting in my kitchen.

      But we always, always come back to one another, eventually, precariously, as if nothing had ever passed, as if time had stood still and in the blink of an eye thrown us into the future where I could graze my palms over his smooth back and kiss him softly in the nook where his neck meets his jaw line, the tender patch of skin protected by a layer of scruff.

       This is my attraction to the written word, electric and vibrating in my mind, quivering from my thoughts to the page.

        Much has passed in the blink of the eye that separated us this time.

        I started and finished my Master 1 Recherche in Paris, with flying colors mind you.

        I still work in au-pairy-nanny-land, and still live in Paris.

        I'm a year older, not necessarily wiser, though I'd hope so.

        I'm more stuck than ever oscillating between two countries. The ex-pat ambivalence has set in strongly, and now begins the dance between the two pays I now call home. Don't make me choose just one, dear God, please don't. I'll never win.

        Do I really want my PhD? I'm beginning to wonder. Could I live with myself if I didn't do it? I don't have the answer yet......

         Just what is life like on the other side of the Atlantic, what's it been like in my absence? What have I missed? But oh how roots are wonderful here...

          This blog is to be continued, even if only for my own pleasure, if no one reads it, oh well....it is enough that I have written, that writing and I have returned to one another....

          we are, it seems, soulmates.