you are a strange melody
following, following me
a puppy without a leash
down and down the
ladder
through the streets and the window
sills
you wag your tail
and graze my legs
settling like a stash of rags.
and oh my bones
how they yearn
for your song to take its turn
haunt me haunt me incessantly
to the grave of creativity
where i rise where i rise
oh you are relentless spies
picking out my hair, my clothes
old torchons and dictionaries
begging for attention.
a siren call in the snow
underneath the stone cold
so sad the passage of time
a tragedy engraved in rhyme.
Sunday, September 9, 2012
so i wander through the streets
cobblestone, the scent of meat
postcards
peeling skins of history
tattered flags
my heart remains a mystery.
but you, my love, have never left
waiting for me on baited breath
a saint, a swami on the corner
with each return we greet
another.
please stay please stay
you do say
come back again another day.
and yet i part and yet i
part
and leave you with a broken heart.
my mind runs bloody along
the river and bleeds into
the muddy stones
gravity snatching it to drink
and licking all like an icecream cone.
and yet i go and yet i go
oh how cannot you love me so?
a phantom on the borderline
a wretch twisted reverse
through time
down the docks and between the
stairs
turned on their lovely hairs
speckled with the flesh of geese
left alone the world does cease.
and yeats and eliot comfort me now
left along the lonely plough
surrounded by a hulk of solitude
i do smile, and lie to you
and you
and you.
crowded among the lonely books
backs breaking, death with looks
aging, aging ever younger
above the bed, over the clutter
in this silent room with music
the beams of wood above
abuse it.
and yet i go, and yet i go...
torn between the world so.
cobblestone, the scent of meat
postcards
peeling skins of history
tattered flags
my heart remains a mystery.
but you, my love, have never left
waiting for me on baited breath
a saint, a swami on the corner
with each return we greet
another.
please stay please stay
you do say
come back again another day.
and yet i part and yet i
part
and leave you with a broken heart.
my mind runs bloody along
the river and bleeds into
the muddy stones
gravity snatching it to drink
and licking all like an icecream cone.
and yet i go and yet i go
oh how cannot you love me so?
a phantom on the borderline
a wretch twisted reverse
through time
down the docks and between the
stairs
turned on their lovely hairs
speckled with the flesh of geese
left alone the world does cease.
and yeats and eliot comfort me now
left along the lonely plough
surrounded by a hulk of solitude
i do smile, and lie to you
and you
and you.
crowded among the lonely books
backs breaking, death with looks
aging, aging ever younger
above the bed, over the clutter
in this silent room with music
the beams of wood above
abuse it.
and yet i go, and yet i go...
torn between the world so.
a poem.
I have sat by the Buddha’s trees
And waited for the depths of night
In the engine room of reality
To come and save my soul.
Shall we go then, shall we go then
I do say
To attempt and sway
You to come along with me.
On the streets and in the alleys
I have waited for your shadow
Been crushed by the weight of silence
with the fleeting echos turn.
Along the seine, along the seine
i walk and wander, wine in hand
speaking of my fantasies
my artist heart to beat again.
But you are coy--oh how you are coy!
You tease and tempt with all your might
and i am left with none but air
and broken glass and fickle clocks.
in the nooks and through the crannies
i hunt for you, ephemeral
but labrythine you ever taunt me
creep and crawl up through my spine.
shall we go then, shall we go then
i do say
to attempt and sway
you to come along with me.
i sing of love and a girl at war
on the picnic blankets of the shore
in dentist's chairs and libraries
in the musky scent of old book stacks
on the steps of the bridges
under the rain of hallowed months
with bending, breaking umbrella backs.
up the mountain, in the plane
over to the sea again
i flit and flicker through my days
searching for the endless ways
to stitch and sew you to my brain.
but i am but a clockwork orange
ticking ticking ticking still
oscillating between high and low
between the segments of split personalities
do i stay or do i go?
shall we go then, shall we go then
i do say.
Friday, August 31, 2012
a thought
On grey mornings like this a breathless solitude washes over me. Today is a homesick day. An uncertain day. Today I feel like I have nothing to offer the world but a twenty something with little job experience, a mind with no other certain gift to society. Why is it that this century makes me feel like a commodity whose only value is what she produces for bigger, greedier, money hungry machines?
The job market depresses me, the state of American politics and society depresses me, and my sense of helplessness to change it depresses me. It is all so pointless. I want to retreat into my words, this language called English that nobody around me speaks or understands, and create something of beauty, of wonder, that makes the world wake up and see what is going on.
i do not have job experience. but i keep telling myself to follow my pen, because my pen and my words have always worked, unfailingly, for me.
so my pen and i go forth on this icebox of a morning into the grey abyss.
The job market depresses me, the state of American politics and society depresses me, and my sense of helplessness to change it depresses me. It is all so pointless. I want to retreat into my words, this language called English that nobody around me speaks or understands, and create something of beauty, of wonder, that makes the world wake up and see what is going on.
i do not have job experience. but i keep telling myself to follow my pen, because my pen and my words have always worked, unfailingly, for me.
so my pen and i go forth on this icebox of a morning into the grey abyss.
Friday, August 10, 2012
Possession: Portrait of the Artist
There must be a well inside of me that has burst.
I have started writing and now I cannot stop. It's like I am a flooding river who cannot be contained, a dike in Holland that has burst and refuses to be rebuilt. I am absolutely manic and producing thousands upon thousands of words, and I cannot control them, they are not coming from me but someplace beyond my grasp, I am just a vessel.
I am writing in my head, characters are speaking to me, I am a woman possessed.
Proust wrote himself sick, to his death, him too a man possessed and writing, writing, writing all night.
I will finally profess and proclaim it, this thing I have never been able to admit to myself nor declare to the world:
I am an artist, and I paint with words.
Ut pictura poesis.
Thank the heavens I live in the country for whom the ultimate artist is The Writer.
il faut faire la poésie comme la peinture.
There is no going back now.
I have started writing and now I cannot stop. It's like I am a flooding river who cannot be contained, a dike in Holland that has burst and refuses to be rebuilt. I am absolutely manic and producing thousands upon thousands of words, and I cannot control them, they are not coming from me but someplace beyond my grasp, I am just a vessel.
I am writing in my head, characters are speaking to me, I am a woman possessed.
Proust wrote himself sick, to his death, him too a man possessed and writing, writing, writing all night.
I will finally profess and proclaim it, this thing I have never been able to admit to myself nor declare to the world:
I am an artist, and I paint with words.
Ut pictura poesis.
Thank the heavens I live in the country for whom the ultimate artist is The Writer.
il faut faire la poésie comme la peinture.
There is no going back now.
Thursday, August 9, 2012
Bullets to the Heart
The last time I went ¨home¨ to California was in December. Winter in my hometown felt like fall in Paris, was no where near as cold as I remembered it. It was the day after Christmas and I was eager to see my family and my friends. Of all the things I have missed as an ex-pat, people are what I missed the most. You certainly fell into the category. I was impelled to take the long flight home with you at the top of my visit list. I had to see you; it had been so long.
I was afraid before boarding the plane that I would somehow be different, unrecognizable to everyone back home. The changes were not merely physical, but invisible, hidden inside my being. I was hesitant, afraid I wouldn't know you anymore, but when you showed up on my doorstep and crossed the threshold into my family's house and smiled at me, a full body smile evidenced by your posture, I recognized the you I'd known forever: the you I'd known as a child, as a teenager, in college. The you I knew I'd always loved and loved still. You disarmed me right then and there
When I answered the door, I felt as if I'd stepped out of Wonderland, out from behind the looking glass. You saw me and through me simultaneously, the transparent remainders of the pre-France Lindsay you had known mingled with this new Lindsay. You hugged me and I felt safe in a way few people make me feel safe, but I could not deny that you were and are an emotionally loaded gun for me, with your hand on the trigger and the muzzle pointed at my heart. You cocked the weapon silently when you entered my home, threatening to tear through me with your bullets at any moment.
The illusion, though, of thinking that I knew you still, was lovely. A beautiful drug, it is, the ability to deceive oneself. I should know. I did it for you for seven years. That night when you sat on my couch and talked to my mom and my stepdad and my brother, it was like I was seventeen all over again and wanting you to see what I was so convinced of: that we were it for one another, that we could work in the way I wanted to. I felt it so instinctually in my gut that I forced the illusion on myself until it became my reality. This is the power of an artist, to create stories where there are none and see patterns that don't exist, to create a fiction. My fiction was this: all I had to do was wait until you outgrew yourself and figured the puzzle out on your own while I stood right in front of you with the patience of a saint.
One day I gave up hope that you would unpuzzle it all. I forced you down to the place you always told me you wanted to be in my life: friends. But damn the doorway, because when you came to see me that night in December, I saw the shift in your eyes and the smile on your lips and knew I was living a lie. I'd flown 6000 miles and come 9 hours of time difference to have it confirmed in my foyer.
On the cusp of a new year, things got complicated. We were both tipsy and drunk men say what sober men think. I managed to hold my tongue. You did not. You asked to speak to me, alone. And you did. And you told me exactly everything I'd been wanting to hear. Spell broken. Puzzle undone. You'd woken up, or so I thought. You'd seen what I'd seen. You told me you wanted us to be more, that I was everything you'd ever wanted. Said you'd known all along what you were doing but had been too scared to ever admit anything. I had always forgiven you because I thought you were ignorant of your own actions, ignorant as ignorant can be and unaware as the only the best of fools can be. This was the first bullet sliding through my chest at 900 feet per second. I resisted the urge to cry in front of you. I let it lie in silence, tried to play it nonchalant. My heart ran figuratively bloody around my feet.
You still took me aback. I waited for you to run and retreat. I didn't say anything. You pursued, gun to my heart. You told me the next day you meant every word, when I tried to slip out cleanly and like nothing had happened. I told you we needed to talk. You were my emotional assassin.
My best friend told me I was going to break your heart. I truly believed her. I believed that this time, I was the one with the power in her hands, the power to inflict upon you every thing you'd ever put me through. I didn't want that for you. I didn't know what I wanted, to be honest, at least not right away. But I didn't want to hurt you.
Then you put me through the ringer again.
I returned to France. You could not decide. You wavered again. You did not know if you wanted me. I thought you'd seen with clarity, had finally seen what I'd seen in the looking glass. You couldn't decide, so I decided for us, because I finally realized after all this time that I had let you treat me the way you had. I had spun the illusion and made myself believe my own fiction. That could not excuse your behavior and still doesn't. I figured I could forgive you, though I would need time. Bullet number two to the heart, but I was still breathing.
Then you had to go and commit. To her. To a stranger I will never meet and do not ever want to meet. I had to find out in that way too? Bullets three and four in rapid succession, through the ribs and out the back, slicing through me as if I were a paper doll and my heart were nothing but flimsy canvas. The you I trusted, the you I thought was you, the you I thought existed....vanished. Every bit of you I thought I knew became my own lie. I had constructed you, you were my greatest fiction yet. I had made you so real I believed in the character I'd made of you. I'd managed to fool myself.
On nights like these, seventeen year old me lives in the depths of the many layers that, like thin flakes of filo dough, band together to form the person I am now. Seventeen year old me is innocent and just wants to love you. She is too naive to know any better, and her benevolence make her forgive you. She holds on to you for nearly a decade and never gives up hope on you, her one flaw is that she trusts too easily and is far too loyal to you because she believes in who she thinks you are. That character she thinks you are is a lie.
But what is not a lie is that you wrenched her through seven years of indecision and did not care to put her out of her misery. So she did what only she could: she took the gun you held to her heart and turned it on you. She cut you out of her life. She was pained to pull the trigger, but knew she had to do it: it was her or you, and for once she needed to be selfish.
The bullets are gone and my heart has stopped bleeding. But the scars are still there, and my fear is palpably real. I do not want to craft fictions in my head anymore about anyone else. I am scared I will wish something into existence so badly that my artist heart will craft a fiction that it will believe, make someone into something they are not because that is how I perceive them. You have made it difficult for me to trust my own instincts and gut feeling from this day forward. Perhaps this is why I am so afraid right now. I know what it's like to take a bullet to the heart.
I was afraid before boarding the plane that I would somehow be different, unrecognizable to everyone back home. The changes were not merely physical, but invisible, hidden inside my being. I was hesitant, afraid I wouldn't know you anymore, but when you showed up on my doorstep and crossed the threshold into my family's house and smiled at me, a full body smile evidenced by your posture, I recognized the you I'd known forever: the you I'd known as a child, as a teenager, in college. The you I knew I'd always loved and loved still. You disarmed me right then and there
When I answered the door, I felt as if I'd stepped out of Wonderland, out from behind the looking glass. You saw me and through me simultaneously, the transparent remainders of the pre-France Lindsay you had known mingled with this new Lindsay. You hugged me and I felt safe in a way few people make me feel safe, but I could not deny that you were and are an emotionally loaded gun for me, with your hand on the trigger and the muzzle pointed at my heart. You cocked the weapon silently when you entered my home, threatening to tear through me with your bullets at any moment.
The illusion, though, of thinking that I knew you still, was lovely. A beautiful drug, it is, the ability to deceive oneself. I should know. I did it for you for seven years. That night when you sat on my couch and talked to my mom and my stepdad and my brother, it was like I was seventeen all over again and wanting you to see what I was so convinced of: that we were it for one another, that we could work in the way I wanted to. I felt it so instinctually in my gut that I forced the illusion on myself until it became my reality. This is the power of an artist, to create stories where there are none and see patterns that don't exist, to create a fiction. My fiction was this: all I had to do was wait until you outgrew yourself and figured the puzzle out on your own while I stood right in front of you with the patience of a saint.
One day I gave up hope that you would unpuzzle it all. I forced you down to the place you always told me you wanted to be in my life: friends. But damn the doorway, because when you came to see me that night in December, I saw the shift in your eyes and the smile on your lips and knew I was living a lie. I'd flown 6000 miles and come 9 hours of time difference to have it confirmed in my foyer.
On the cusp of a new year, things got complicated. We were both tipsy and drunk men say what sober men think. I managed to hold my tongue. You did not. You asked to speak to me, alone. And you did. And you told me exactly everything I'd been wanting to hear. Spell broken. Puzzle undone. You'd woken up, or so I thought. You'd seen what I'd seen. You told me you wanted us to be more, that I was everything you'd ever wanted. Said you'd known all along what you were doing but had been too scared to ever admit anything. I had always forgiven you because I thought you were ignorant of your own actions, ignorant as ignorant can be and unaware as the only the best of fools can be. This was the first bullet sliding through my chest at 900 feet per second. I resisted the urge to cry in front of you. I let it lie in silence, tried to play it nonchalant. My heart ran figuratively bloody around my feet.
You still took me aback. I waited for you to run and retreat. I didn't say anything. You pursued, gun to my heart. You told me the next day you meant every word, when I tried to slip out cleanly and like nothing had happened. I told you we needed to talk. You were my emotional assassin.
My best friend told me I was going to break your heart. I truly believed her. I believed that this time, I was the one with the power in her hands, the power to inflict upon you every thing you'd ever put me through. I didn't want that for you. I didn't know what I wanted, to be honest, at least not right away. But I didn't want to hurt you.
Then you put me through the ringer again.
I returned to France. You could not decide. You wavered again. You did not know if you wanted me. I thought you'd seen with clarity, had finally seen what I'd seen in the looking glass. You couldn't decide, so I decided for us, because I finally realized after all this time that I had let you treat me the way you had. I had spun the illusion and made myself believe my own fiction. That could not excuse your behavior and still doesn't. I figured I could forgive you, though I would need time. Bullet number two to the heart, but I was still breathing.
Then you had to go and commit. To her. To a stranger I will never meet and do not ever want to meet. I had to find out in that way too? Bullets three and four in rapid succession, through the ribs and out the back, slicing through me as if I were a paper doll and my heart were nothing but flimsy canvas. The you I trusted, the you I thought was you, the you I thought existed....vanished. Every bit of you I thought I knew became my own lie. I had constructed you, you were my greatest fiction yet. I had made you so real I believed in the character I'd made of you. I'd managed to fool myself.
On nights like these, seventeen year old me lives in the depths of the many layers that, like thin flakes of filo dough, band together to form the person I am now. Seventeen year old me is innocent and just wants to love you. She is too naive to know any better, and her benevolence make her forgive you. She holds on to you for nearly a decade and never gives up hope on you, her one flaw is that she trusts too easily and is far too loyal to you because she believes in who she thinks you are. That character she thinks you are is a lie.
But what is not a lie is that you wrenched her through seven years of indecision and did not care to put her out of her misery. So she did what only she could: she took the gun you held to her heart and turned it on you. She cut you out of her life. She was pained to pull the trigger, but knew she had to do it: it was her or you, and for once she needed to be selfish.
The bullets are gone and my heart has stopped bleeding. But the scars are still there, and my fear is palpably real. I do not want to craft fictions in my head anymore about anyone else. I am scared I will wish something into existence so badly that my artist heart will craft a fiction that it will believe, make someone into something they are not because that is how I perceive them. You have made it difficult for me to trust my own instincts and gut feeling from this day forward. Perhaps this is why I am so afraid right now. I know what it's like to take a bullet to the heart.
If I Ever Get Around to Living
Summer nanny duty means highs and lows and frustrations all around. Like my boss thinking I don't understand her rapid-fire French when I do, and me reminding myself to not interpret her very sharp tongued frankness personally. Sometimes it makes me want to retreat into the comfort of America, to the land of Americans with easy dispositions and carefree manners. It's funny that such slight comments make me feel so vulnerable, cut me down to size, make me feel like coming to France, trying to do what I am currently doing, is a mistake. That I am a fool on a basic level for this experiment in all things French.
It also means me feeling burned out as hell on kids. I like kids, I do. I have always liked kids. I was nearly a second mother to my own sister, who is twelve years my junior. But I'm starting, after two years of being an au pair, a nounou, a general kid watcher, whatever the hell you want to call it, tired. I don't want to spend all of my twenties taking care of kids before I happen to have kids of my own...
Apparently it's supposed to be different when they're your own...I will have to get back to you on that one.
It means that I am starting to feel trapped, but it is such a hard thing to feel when it is I who have knowingly walked into this trap. And I now fully realize that I, indeed, work for the one percent. No, in fact, I work for the 0.01 percent. I work for the mondain, the socialites, the people Marcel at once admired, detested, and attempted to cotoie in A la recherche du temps perdu. These people who pay me--and I admit I have agreed--to exchange much of my decision making freedom for money. I miss my liberty.
I feel in so many ways that I have not been living. That instead of living I have opted for the security of planned futures and easy roads that avoid any and all types of conflict that might make me uncomfortable. There is a strong wind of fate blowing and there is something around the corner that I sense coming, but I am admittedly terrified and feel like a child who wants to retreat and hide behind her mother's thighs.
For instance, this afternoon, ¨my¨ ( I call my two young girl child charges mine as a matter of affection), wanted me to call Frenchman. They were being girl children as only girl children can be and laughingly imitating me kissing said Frenchman as a matter of spun, Disney-esque fantasies. So I caved and texted him and said they were giving a beau ¨spectacle d'amour¨ in the pool. Apparently this insinuated a sexual sort of spectacle, which is not what I meant at all, but alas I am not French and while I have a more than solid grasp of the language and culture, this was not what I wished to convey. Face palm numero uno.
The girls then wanted to ask him lots of questions and be general goofballs when my eldest girl child charge asked to ask him a question. I conceded. Frenchman said she could ask but he might not respond. She promptly blurted out:
¨Have you ever had sex with Lindsay!?¨
Faee. Fucking. Palm. NUMERO OH SHIT.
He responded that that was an indiscreet question he would not respond to. Face fucking palm for King. This is the part where I RUE ever agreeing to send the text that made him call me to talk to my girls. I did it in my moment of weakness and to please them, but now I am banging my head on the wall.
Why?
Because the French are probably the most private people I have ever met. You do NOT ask questions like that, you do NOT share unnecessary private details with just anyone. I am terrified he thinks I blab non-stop private things to just anyone, or worse, that I have told anyone and everyone about things we have discussed in private. Or that I have assumed that we are together or that we are something that we aren't because hell, I do not know and it's still early. I realize the irony in posting this on a public medium, but rest assured, I do take some fictional liberty and I DO NOT SHARE every last detail. OH dammit. Dammit.
I could barely hear him at the end of the convo because of the shitty network on this tropical island on which I am stationed and I am super afraid I upset him, so I sent him a text apologizing at the end there and for putting up with the kids. Goddam it now I rue everrrrrrr texting him. I want to run and retreat and bury my face under a mask and a mountain of blankets, to hide behind my mother the way I did when I met strangers for the first time.
I am somewhat aware I am probably making--as I am the champion of doing--a slight matter into something bigger, a mountain out of a molehill. I keep telling myself to quit dwelling and let it go, I can hear my mother telling me, like she did my entire childhood, to do the same thing, but instead I obsessively brood and repeat over and over and over in my head.
FUCK.
He is the last person i want to fuck anything up with, and that scares me. I realize how illogical I am being right now: a little gaffe or faux pas or something of that sort is not going to scare him away or really anger him in the long run if he is truly interested. I guess I'm more ashamed about what I deem a mistake in cultural sensitivity. But part of me wants to turn, bolt out the door, and run back to America with all its Americans who speak American English and drop every idea I ever had of staying in France and surviving. Or of having a relationship with a Frenchy. Part of me wants to slap myself and ask myself WTF I am thinking, am I out of my effing mind? Don't I know this is a bad idea?
Most of all, I know I feel this way because i feel so, so, so incredibly vulnerable about so many things right now and I'm just terrified of messing up somehow. Afraid of exposure. I am above all scared of this Frenchy, of where my life might be headed. So instead of being brave, I want to swallow myself whole and disappear. Sensing the beyond insane urge to retreat, run, retreat, run run run run run. Run faster.
I know, though, logically, that that is not living. And it's high time I get around to living. I just hope I have enough courage, to said goodbye to the things that hold me back and embrace those that set me free.
It also means me feeling burned out as hell on kids. I like kids, I do. I have always liked kids. I was nearly a second mother to my own sister, who is twelve years my junior. But I'm starting, after two years of being an au pair, a nounou, a general kid watcher, whatever the hell you want to call it, tired. I don't want to spend all of my twenties taking care of kids before I happen to have kids of my own...
Apparently it's supposed to be different when they're your own...I will have to get back to you on that one.
It means that I am starting to feel trapped, but it is such a hard thing to feel when it is I who have knowingly walked into this trap. And I now fully realize that I, indeed, work for the one percent. No, in fact, I work for the 0.01 percent. I work for the mondain, the socialites, the people Marcel at once admired, detested, and attempted to cotoie in A la recherche du temps perdu. These people who pay me--and I admit I have agreed--to exchange much of my decision making freedom for money. I miss my liberty.
I feel in so many ways that I have not been living. That instead of living I have opted for the security of planned futures and easy roads that avoid any and all types of conflict that might make me uncomfortable. There is a strong wind of fate blowing and there is something around the corner that I sense coming, but I am admittedly terrified and feel like a child who wants to retreat and hide behind her mother's thighs.
For instance, this afternoon, ¨my¨ ( I call my two young girl child charges mine as a matter of affection), wanted me to call Frenchman. They were being girl children as only girl children can be and laughingly imitating me kissing said Frenchman as a matter of spun, Disney-esque fantasies. So I caved and texted him and said they were giving a beau ¨spectacle d'amour¨ in the pool. Apparently this insinuated a sexual sort of spectacle, which is not what I meant at all, but alas I am not French and while I have a more than solid grasp of the language and culture, this was not what I wished to convey. Face palm numero uno.
The girls then wanted to ask him lots of questions and be general goofballs when my eldest girl child charge asked to ask him a question. I conceded. Frenchman said she could ask but he might not respond. She promptly blurted out:
¨Have you ever had sex with Lindsay!?¨
Faee. Fucking. Palm. NUMERO OH SHIT.
He responded that that was an indiscreet question he would not respond to. Face fucking palm for King. This is the part where I RUE ever agreeing to send the text that made him call me to talk to my girls. I did it in my moment of weakness and to please them, but now I am banging my head on the wall.
Why?
Because the French are probably the most private people I have ever met. You do NOT ask questions like that, you do NOT share unnecessary private details with just anyone. I am terrified he thinks I blab non-stop private things to just anyone, or worse, that I have told anyone and everyone about things we have discussed in private. Or that I have assumed that we are together or that we are something that we aren't because hell, I do not know and it's still early. I realize the irony in posting this on a public medium, but rest assured, I do take some fictional liberty and I DO NOT SHARE every last detail. OH dammit. Dammit.
I could barely hear him at the end of the convo because of the shitty network on this tropical island on which I am stationed and I am super afraid I upset him, so I sent him a text apologizing at the end there and for putting up with the kids. Goddam it now I rue everrrrrrr texting him. I want to run and retreat and bury my face under a mask and a mountain of blankets, to hide behind my mother the way I did when I met strangers for the first time.
I am somewhat aware I am probably making--as I am the champion of doing--a slight matter into something bigger, a mountain out of a molehill. I keep telling myself to quit dwelling and let it go, I can hear my mother telling me, like she did my entire childhood, to do the same thing, but instead I obsessively brood and repeat over and over and over in my head.
FUCK.
He is the last person i want to fuck anything up with, and that scares me. I realize how illogical I am being right now: a little gaffe or faux pas or something of that sort is not going to scare him away or really anger him in the long run if he is truly interested. I guess I'm more ashamed about what I deem a mistake in cultural sensitivity. But part of me wants to turn, bolt out the door, and run back to America with all its Americans who speak American English and drop every idea I ever had of staying in France and surviving. Or of having a relationship with a Frenchy. Part of me wants to slap myself and ask myself WTF I am thinking, am I out of my effing mind? Don't I know this is a bad idea?
Most of all, I know I feel this way because i feel so, so, so incredibly vulnerable about so many things right now and I'm just terrified of messing up somehow. Afraid of exposure. I am above all scared of this Frenchy, of where my life might be headed. So instead of being brave, I want to swallow myself whole and disappear. Sensing the beyond insane urge to retreat, run, retreat, run run run run run. Run faster.
I know, though, logically, that that is not living. And it's high time I get around to living. I just hope I have enough courage, to said goodbye to the things that hold me back and embrace those that set me free.
Saturday, August 4, 2012
The Age of Worry
I arrived in Fontainebleau two weeks ago for summer nanny duty at the rockstar's countryhouse. The home is surrounded by stone walls that guard a silent road and dark forest looms in the distance. Down the way is Barbizon, famous for its painters, its minute streets, the lack of sound laid like a veil over a blushing bride. Stone sidewalks frame boutiques and ateliers and visitors meander the streets licking icecream from lush cones. Life is slow and comforting.
In moments and times and places like these, I feel in tune with the soul of France. At each bend in the road I discover more about France and its culture, and certainly, my time in Fontainebleau, round 1 for this summer, has added to my deepening knowledge of this country and its customs. My fondness and attachment grows stronger, binds me with loving chains and makes me afraid of leaving. France is where I have become a woman, might possibly be where I am meant to be, where I am meant to lead my life. Only time will tell. Regardless, I have always believed in the sly, coy smile of fate, that what is happening in one's life is in some way meant to be. I have included the people I meet--even randomly--in this belief. This summer is no different.
Next door to the rockstar's home, situated on the hidden portion of the property, is the guardian's home. There Manola tends to her garden, the chickens, the geese, and the ironing. Her husband, Thierry, rises early, drinks his coffee, and leaves for the day, much in the same way that the paysans hundreds of years before rose to tend to the fields and animals, to harvest fruits and to work in the rhythm of life. Not much has changed it seems to me. This summer, Manola has invited her nephew, Geoffrey, to stay with her.
Geoffrey and I are the same age, the ripe old age of 24, the age I am beginning to learn where worries condense like rain drops and pelt you with anxiety about the future. One evening he invited me to go out after I was done with work. We hopped in his car and sipped mojitos over three rounds of bowling and talked about the present and the future. He's a kind, gentle person, but had a rough childhood, so he's not yet passed his baccalaureat, floating from job to job, the memory of old nights of weed and alcohol imprinted in his past, unsettled and drifting.
"I'd leave right now with just my backpack," he said on the way back in the car. It was just after 1230 am and we were headed back to the countryhouse, me to my room upstairs on the second floor, him to his little chalet on his aunt Manola's property. The thought of uprooting with no money and no thought of where to go or what to do terrified me.
When we got back, instead of sleeping, he busted out a bottle of white Alsacian wine and opened a pack of Fortunas. He poured me a generous glass of the rich, sweet elixir and pulled a cigarette from the white box and lit it viciously, eating the tobacco with strong pulls that pushed the smoke into his ribcage. Then we got to talking.
About jobs, the future. About love. About everything. About worry. About superstitions. French ones. Like the one where if you break a glass of white wine, it's a good sign. Please jesus please, a second Frenchy has confirmed this. About the superstition that you never eat with 13 people at a table, because someone will disappear right after if you do...which Manola experienced and confirmed the next morning. Superstitions seem to me just ways to combat worry, real human worry, to make them controllable and containable and surmountable.
Who knows.
All I know is that Geoffrey and I ended up talking for two hours which really seemed like two minutes and that by the end of it all, I know I had entered the age of worry....the intimidating precipice of a life beginning with all the unknown stretched out before me like a blank and endless road and no gas station in sight. The only thing to do is drive, drive, drive onward. Geoffrey was my mirror that night, throwing into sharp relief everything I think I knew and what I know I do not know about the precipice I stand upon, the route ahead, my fear of the journey. Drive, drive, onward, onward, onward I must go.
So I do, hoping to turn the age of worry into the age of.......everything else.
In moments and times and places like these, I feel in tune with the soul of France. At each bend in the road I discover more about France and its culture, and certainly, my time in Fontainebleau, round 1 for this summer, has added to my deepening knowledge of this country and its customs. My fondness and attachment grows stronger, binds me with loving chains and makes me afraid of leaving. France is where I have become a woman, might possibly be where I am meant to be, where I am meant to lead my life. Only time will tell. Regardless, I have always believed in the sly, coy smile of fate, that what is happening in one's life is in some way meant to be. I have included the people I meet--even randomly--in this belief. This summer is no different.
Next door to the rockstar's home, situated on the hidden portion of the property, is the guardian's home. There Manola tends to her garden, the chickens, the geese, and the ironing. Her husband, Thierry, rises early, drinks his coffee, and leaves for the day, much in the same way that the paysans hundreds of years before rose to tend to the fields and animals, to harvest fruits and to work in the rhythm of life. Not much has changed it seems to me. This summer, Manola has invited her nephew, Geoffrey, to stay with her.
Geoffrey and I are the same age, the ripe old age of 24, the age I am beginning to learn where worries condense like rain drops and pelt you with anxiety about the future. One evening he invited me to go out after I was done with work. We hopped in his car and sipped mojitos over three rounds of bowling and talked about the present and the future. He's a kind, gentle person, but had a rough childhood, so he's not yet passed his baccalaureat, floating from job to job, the memory of old nights of weed and alcohol imprinted in his past, unsettled and drifting.
"I'd leave right now with just my backpack," he said on the way back in the car. It was just after 1230 am and we were headed back to the countryhouse, me to my room upstairs on the second floor, him to his little chalet on his aunt Manola's property. The thought of uprooting with no money and no thought of where to go or what to do terrified me.
When we got back, instead of sleeping, he busted out a bottle of white Alsacian wine and opened a pack of Fortunas. He poured me a generous glass of the rich, sweet elixir and pulled a cigarette from the white box and lit it viciously, eating the tobacco with strong pulls that pushed the smoke into his ribcage. Then we got to talking.
About jobs, the future. About love. About everything. About worry. About superstitions. French ones. Like the one where if you break a glass of white wine, it's a good sign. Please jesus please, a second Frenchy has confirmed this. About the superstition that you never eat with 13 people at a table, because someone will disappear right after if you do...which Manola experienced and confirmed the next morning. Superstitions seem to me just ways to combat worry, real human worry, to make them controllable and containable and surmountable.
Who knows.
All I know is that Geoffrey and I ended up talking for two hours which really seemed like two minutes and that by the end of it all, I know I had entered the age of worry....the intimidating precipice of a life beginning with all the unknown stretched out before me like a blank and endless road and no gas station in sight. The only thing to do is drive, drive, drive onward. Geoffrey was my mirror that night, throwing into sharp relief everything I think I knew and what I know I do not know about the precipice I stand upon, the route ahead, my fear of the journey. Drive, drive, onward, onward, onward I must go.
So I do, hoping to turn the age of worry into the age of.......everything else.
Friday, July 20, 2012
The Broken Glass
Before I left Paris for a crazy summer of nannying, the last night before, in fact, I happened to have an old college friend passing through town whom I hadn't seen since graduation. He's the kind of fellow that no matter how little or well you know him, he's genuinely someone it's pleasant to be around. And let's be real, I don't mind catching up and shooting the shit, particularly if it involves gossip surrounding mutual friends and acquaintances of varying degrees. Such was the genre of the drink date we'd set up, a small aperitif.
I arrived at Cafe Mabillon in the Saint-Germain des Pres neighborhood ten minutes past our scheduled rendez-vous at seven in the evening, a casual and chic Parisian sense of fashionably late perma-glued to my mental rendering of time's passage, and spotted him on the corner. He was as thin as ever, but he'd grown a long beard and his skin was radiant in the soothing ever-so-French summer sunset. He told me about his hostel and the hot pack of foreign women staying there.
I parked it and joined him on his conquest of the wine menu, ordering a cold glass of Sancerre (j'adore) to his red. And we started shooting the shit. Shooting the shit with an old college friend you haven't seen in a few years is a head fuck, and even more so when you conveniently expatriated three months after college graduation and haven't gone back since. Chatting with this gentlemen was like an insta-time warp back to a place--and dare I say it, a Lindsay--which I now struggle somewhat to recognize. Catch-ups of this sort also serve as good reign checks, the kind of checkpoints that stop and make you reflect and say "hot damn i'm doing even better than i wanted to be doing at this point in my life, in the lovely fantasy i have concocted should I ever need to sell my biography for film rights" OR they make you say "well. shit."
Luckily, I fall into the hot damn category of this sort of reflection. I'm loving my life and feel like it's more than I ever could've hoped for. My only conundrum at the moment is the ambivalence I feel for my two countries of residence: do I ultimately stay in France, get my dual citizenship, and most likely forgo a PhD and pursue other enriching projects? Or do I sacrifice myself on the altar of academia, repatriate to America where universities are more rigorous and better for an academic career, and sell my soul Faustian style for another 4-6 years to earn a shiny piece of paper and a tam? It's a tough decision for me, one I have not yet decided upon...one that I don't have to decide upon just yet, a decision that hangs agonizingly in the balance, the sorts of decisions I hate the most. The kind of decision that makes you wish you were a child again and didn't have to deal with these sorts of conundrums. But alas....
College Friend and I are both doing well in our own ways: we talked jobs, relocation (he moved from California to New Orleans), and then, we dropped the bomb. Somehow, wine loosened us and made us pounce somehow on the subject of The Love Life.
The Love Life is a sticky subject, and one that is even sticker for me than the aforementioned PhD conundrum. This is mostly due to the fact that I am a hard fit. Not because I have super demanding standards...though I do have standards. More due to the fact that I'm an odd creature, through and through, and I need an equal: someone intellectual, smart, creative. Someone who can hold their own against me. Blah blah blah. I refuse to mutter on and on about this. Point is: The Love Life has been a rocky road. It is getting rockier, what with all these friends getting married and serious and me approaching my mid-twenties. When you hit mid-twenties, the mentality of freedom and liberty, of "well hey, you're fun for NOW but i'm too young to get married, I'm probably not going to marry you, let's just sleep together" starts to disappear. The mid-twenties are the period of scary realization that "shit's getting real" and you are not far off from marrying age. Don't read me wrong: i am in no rush to get married. I would rather have none than the wrong one. But this does not stop me from the realization that in a few years, should I meet the right person, I could settle down. Yet another scary decision the child wants to run from hanging in the air....waiting for me one day.
The Love Life discussion College Friend and I were having inevitably (and admittedly, excitedly!) led me to describe my most recent (and continuing) Love Interest. He's a Frenchman...an engineer a bit older than I am. Holy cow if I was not turned on by the fact that the first time we grabbed drinks, he was reading an article on engineering IN ENGLISH on his portable tablet computer. God, I'm intellectually promiscuous. Nerds turn me on. He's also athletic, a good photography, funny, and thoughful. Now damn if I am not screwed.
When I left for France, I was jokingly told I would be swept off my feet and never come home. I swore it wouldn't happen. It has not happened for two years. Repatriation is on the one year horizon. This has been my plan since day one. My plans make me feel safe, secure, keep me from dreaded anxiety, fuel my perfectionism for excellence....but I am starting to realize they also trap me into not-living. Into the dead state where I wake up realizing I have perfectly executed, but I have not fully experienced.
I do not know if I want to keep living like this.
So I kept gushing to College Friend about Frenchman. I was so damn excited and so caught up in my girly grinning-ear-to-ear gush fest that in one single gesture I swooped my half-full wine glass so that all my Sancerre cascaded deftly in 5 seconds flat onto my dress and paraded in a silky string, tugged by gravity, to the pavement, where the wine glass shattered with a small but sharp shriek. I was tipsy. I wasnt, however, too tipsy to worry about smelling like Sancerre, or about the broken glass, which I felt guilty for murdering.College Friend grabbed extra napkins and the server mentioned I could dry my dress in the bathroom if I'd like to with the hand dryer. Non, merci.
It was at this point that an elderly gentlemen, tucked behind the small table behind us, caught my eye and said to me in broken English, "We call this...this broken glass, in France, we say it is a...a...a..," he struggled to translate his words, "a porte-bonheur. A sign of good things to come. Good things must be coming your way."
I looked at College Friend. A porte-bonheur, roughly translated, means "good luck charm," something that literally "wears" or "brings" happiness.
"Well, it must be good, since you were just gushing about Frenchman!"
Did I mention that two days prior to this breaking of glass on a Friday evening when Frenchman and I got drinks the waiter took my drink glass and it too, after he took it, fell off the serving plateau and proceeded to smash itself with the force of an Indy 500 race car into the cobblestone behind the Pub Saint-Germain?
I smiled. Please please please please please please.
The Broken Glass is my reminder that sometimes, I cannot be rigid. I can no longer fix plans and things and people. I must take life in measure, as it comes, imbibe it in sips and cherish it even when it ends up smashed on the pavement and is no longer drinkable. My life is a broken glass, hanging in the balance, between countries and decisions and two different lives and two different Lindsays.Two Lindsays who want different and similar things all at once.
I did not come to France to find a Frenchman. I came to France to train myself in French literature and language.
I did not come to get swept off my feet and break glasses and hope that they mean good things for my relationship with this Frenchman.
This Frenchman thing is scary, because what if we could be really (like I'm starting to suspect) good together?
I hear voices in my heads of all the foreign women whose relationships with Frenchmen have imploded and left them bitter and estranged in their adoptive homeland. I hear Maria, the Spanish woman whom I met last summer, telling me again like she did on the beach in the twilight that long-term, I should marry within my culture because I will never know if the fighting is because of "cultural differences or your personalities." Her ex-husband was French. I hear all the cliches and stereotypes about how philandering French husbands are.
I don't know who to believe. I want to believe in the fairy tale, but I can't do it fully. But this one is wonderful, I like him, I like him more than just liking him, I'm starting to wonder if we have long-term potential....who. the. fuck. knows. Either way, he's working his charm and I'm going to fall very, very hard at this rate. Frenchman is making it even harder to make up my mind about what I am knighting the "PhD, Country, Citizenship, and Future Plans Mega-Conundrum," which is really just the looming threat of a quarter-life crisis if you ask me. A huge hinge on which my life is swinging in two directions.
The very thing I came here NOT to do seems to be happening, and it has me questioning all it is I have ever planned for, hoping that I will continue to fortuitously break wine glasses, literal and metaphoric, all over Paris, it makes me want to buy the most expensive ones I can in the fanciest wine shops in the city and pummel them into the gates of the Luxembourg gardens and the banks of the Seine and pray to sweet Krishna, Buddha, and Jesus that I do not surrender to the fear of the unknown and the void of anxiety.
I ordered another glass of Sancerre after I broke my first and drank it thick and viscous beneath my lips. I felt a pleasant buzz come over my mind when College Friend and I parted ways.
Minutes later, my phone rang. It was Frenchman.
I reminded him hours before, a mere four or five, infact, that I'd be leaving for two months the following morning, and that if he wanted to see me one last time that night before we left for the summer (he's traveling too...), to call me. And he did.
So I joined him 45 minutes later, on the rue de Rennes, for a movie. We held hands and cuddled and it felt perfect and I felt so sad to leave the next morning.
I didn't want to tell him about the broken glass, about how I wished it were a good omen about him. I wanted to keep it my little secret for later on, if we work out, a secret for a rainy day to share with him and smile.
But I couldn't help it, so I told him about the glass. Only the glass.
I didn't tell him I wished the glass was a good sign about him. Part of me really wanted to.
"Hey, the waiter broke the glass on Friday too....you must be bad luck there!," he laughed.
"Really now?" I smiled. He held me around the waist. It was time for us to part. The film was over. My red lipstick was fading. He smelled so good and I wanted to linger his his embrace for just a moment longer, and another minute, and another minute...
He leaned in and kissed me and we both reluctantly curled our way out of one another's arms. As I left him, I turned and looked over my shoulder. His gaze hit mine. I felt my stomach tighten and my heart drop.
God please let me keep breaking wine glasses unintentionally.
I arrived at Cafe Mabillon in the Saint-Germain des Pres neighborhood ten minutes past our scheduled rendez-vous at seven in the evening, a casual and chic Parisian sense of fashionably late perma-glued to my mental rendering of time's passage, and spotted him on the corner. He was as thin as ever, but he'd grown a long beard and his skin was radiant in the soothing ever-so-French summer sunset. He told me about his hostel and the hot pack of foreign women staying there.
I parked it and joined him on his conquest of the wine menu, ordering a cold glass of Sancerre (j'adore) to his red. And we started shooting the shit. Shooting the shit with an old college friend you haven't seen in a few years is a head fuck, and even more so when you conveniently expatriated three months after college graduation and haven't gone back since. Chatting with this gentlemen was like an insta-time warp back to a place--and dare I say it, a Lindsay--which I now struggle somewhat to recognize. Catch-ups of this sort also serve as good reign checks, the kind of checkpoints that stop and make you reflect and say "hot damn i'm doing even better than i wanted to be doing at this point in my life, in the lovely fantasy i have concocted should I ever need to sell my biography for film rights" OR they make you say "well. shit."
Luckily, I fall into the hot damn category of this sort of reflection. I'm loving my life and feel like it's more than I ever could've hoped for. My only conundrum at the moment is the ambivalence I feel for my two countries of residence: do I ultimately stay in France, get my dual citizenship, and most likely forgo a PhD and pursue other enriching projects? Or do I sacrifice myself on the altar of academia, repatriate to America where universities are more rigorous and better for an academic career, and sell my soul Faustian style for another 4-6 years to earn a shiny piece of paper and a tam? It's a tough decision for me, one I have not yet decided upon...one that I don't have to decide upon just yet, a decision that hangs agonizingly in the balance, the sorts of decisions I hate the most. The kind of decision that makes you wish you were a child again and didn't have to deal with these sorts of conundrums. But alas....
College Friend and I are both doing well in our own ways: we talked jobs, relocation (he moved from California to New Orleans), and then, we dropped the bomb. Somehow, wine loosened us and made us pounce somehow on the subject of The Love Life.
The Love Life is a sticky subject, and one that is even sticker for me than the aforementioned PhD conundrum. This is mostly due to the fact that I am a hard fit. Not because I have super demanding standards...though I do have standards. More due to the fact that I'm an odd creature, through and through, and I need an equal: someone intellectual, smart, creative. Someone who can hold their own against me. Blah blah blah. I refuse to mutter on and on about this. Point is: The Love Life has been a rocky road. It is getting rockier, what with all these friends getting married and serious and me approaching my mid-twenties. When you hit mid-twenties, the mentality of freedom and liberty, of "well hey, you're fun for NOW but i'm too young to get married, I'm probably not going to marry you, let's just sleep together" starts to disappear. The mid-twenties are the period of scary realization that "shit's getting real" and you are not far off from marrying age. Don't read me wrong: i am in no rush to get married. I would rather have none than the wrong one. But this does not stop me from the realization that in a few years, should I meet the right person, I could settle down. Yet another scary decision the child wants to run from hanging in the air....waiting for me one day.
The Love Life discussion College Friend and I were having inevitably (and admittedly, excitedly!) led me to describe my most recent (and continuing) Love Interest. He's a Frenchman...an engineer a bit older than I am. Holy cow if I was not turned on by the fact that the first time we grabbed drinks, he was reading an article on engineering IN ENGLISH on his portable tablet computer. God, I'm intellectually promiscuous. Nerds turn me on. He's also athletic, a good photography, funny, and thoughful. Now damn if I am not screwed.
When I left for France, I was jokingly told I would be swept off my feet and never come home. I swore it wouldn't happen. It has not happened for two years. Repatriation is on the one year horizon. This has been my plan since day one. My plans make me feel safe, secure, keep me from dreaded anxiety, fuel my perfectionism for excellence....but I am starting to realize they also trap me into not-living. Into the dead state where I wake up realizing I have perfectly executed, but I have not fully experienced.
I do not know if I want to keep living like this.
So I kept gushing to College Friend about Frenchman. I was so damn excited and so caught up in my girly grinning-ear-to-ear gush fest that in one single gesture I swooped my half-full wine glass so that all my Sancerre cascaded deftly in 5 seconds flat onto my dress and paraded in a silky string, tugged by gravity, to the pavement, where the wine glass shattered with a small but sharp shriek. I was tipsy. I wasnt, however, too tipsy to worry about smelling like Sancerre, or about the broken glass, which I felt guilty for murdering.College Friend grabbed extra napkins and the server mentioned I could dry my dress in the bathroom if I'd like to with the hand dryer. Non, merci.
It was at this point that an elderly gentlemen, tucked behind the small table behind us, caught my eye and said to me in broken English, "We call this...this broken glass, in France, we say it is a...a...a..," he struggled to translate his words, "a porte-bonheur. A sign of good things to come. Good things must be coming your way."
I looked at College Friend. A porte-bonheur, roughly translated, means "good luck charm," something that literally "wears" or "brings" happiness.
"Well, it must be good, since you were just gushing about Frenchman!"
Did I mention that two days prior to this breaking of glass on a Friday evening when Frenchman and I got drinks the waiter took my drink glass and it too, after he took it, fell off the serving plateau and proceeded to smash itself with the force of an Indy 500 race car into the cobblestone behind the Pub Saint-Germain?
I smiled. Please please please please please please.
The Broken Glass is my reminder that sometimes, I cannot be rigid. I can no longer fix plans and things and people. I must take life in measure, as it comes, imbibe it in sips and cherish it even when it ends up smashed on the pavement and is no longer drinkable. My life is a broken glass, hanging in the balance, between countries and decisions and two different lives and two different Lindsays.Two Lindsays who want different and similar things all at once.
I did not come to France to find a Frenchman. I came to France to train myself in French literature and language.
I did not come to get swept off my feet and break glasses and hope that they mean good things for my relationship with this Frenchman.
This Frenchman thing is scary, because what if we could be really (like I'm starting to suspect) good together?
I hear voices in my heads of all the foreign women whose relationships with Frenchmen have imploded and left them bitter and estranged in their adoptive homeland. I hear Maria, the Spanish woman whom I met last summer, telling me again like she did on the beach in the twilight that long-term, I should marry within my culture because I will never know if the fighting is because of "cultural differences or your personalities." Her ex-husband was French. I hear all the cliches and stereotypes about how philandering French husbands are.
I don't know who to believe. I want to believe in the fairy tale, but I can't do it fully. But this one is wonderful, I like him, I like him more than just liking him, I'm starting to wonder if we have long-term potential....who. the. fuck. knows. Either way, he's working his charm and I'm going to fall very, very hard at this rate. Frenchman is making it even harder to make up my mind about what I am knighting the "PhD, Country, Citizenship, and Future Plans Mega-Conundrum," which is really just the looming threat of a quarter-life crisis if you ask me. A huge hinge on which my life is swinging in two directions.
The very thing I came here NOT to do seems to be happening, and it has me questioning all it is I have ever planned for, hoping that I will continue to fortuitously break wine glasses, literal and metaphoric, all over Paris, it makes me want to buy the most expensive ones I can in the fanciest wine shops in the city and pummel them into the gates of the Luxembourg gardens and the banks of the Seine and pray to sweet Krishna, Buddha, and Jesus that I do not surrender to the fear of the unknown and the void of anxiety.
I ordered another glass of Sancerre after I broke my first and drank it thick and viscous beneath my lips. I felt a pleasant buzz come over my mind when College Friend and I parted ways.
Minutes later, my phone rang. It was Frenchman.
I reminded him hours before, a mere four or five, infact, that I'd be leaving for two months the following morning, and that if he wanted to see me one last time that night before we left for the summer (he's traveling too...), to call me. And he did.
So I joined him 45 minutes later, on the rue de Rennes, for a movie. We held hands and cuddled and it felt perfect and I felt so sad to leave the next morning.
I didn't want to tell him about the broken glass, about how I wished it were a good omen about him. I wanted to keep it my little secret for later on, if we work out, a secret for a rainy day to share with him and smile.
But I couldn't help it, so I told him about the glass. Only the glass.
I didn't tell him I wished the glass was a good sign about him. Part of me really wanted to.
"Hey, the waiter broke the glass on Friday too....you must be bad luck there!," he laughed.
"Really now?" I smiled. He held me around the waist. It was time for us to part. The film was over. My red lipstick was fading. He smelled so good and I wanted to linger his his embrace for just a moment longer, and another minute, and another minute...
He leaned in and kissed me and we both reluctantly curled our way out of one another's arms. As I left him, I turned and looked over my shoulder. His gaze hit mine. I felt my stomach tighten and my heart drop.
God please let me keep breaking wine glasses unintentionally.
Sunday, July 8, 2012
The Plot Thickens
I am a writer by nature. It is only natural that I conceive of my life as a story, a series of twists and turns that when strung along somehow will form a coherent adventure.
When I left the states nearly two years ago, I had a plot in mind, and it went a bit like this:
American girl goes to France, where she teaches English to kids for a year. American girl considers staying to do her Masters in French Literature at Parisian universities. American stays another two years to do said Master, which will help catapult her into prestigious American universities for her doctoral degree. American girl repatriates and goes to said doctoral program, where she meets the love of her life and four to six years later, gets her tam. A brilliant career in academia along with a happy family life ensues.
This is the plot the Lindsay who left America in 2010 dreamed up, and the Lindsay writing this post is the Lindsay living in France in 2012 shaking her head. Both Lindsays are at the part where she is near finished with said Masters degree...
But now the part after the Masters degree isn't so sure anymore.
I dream up plots because they are soothing, because knowing what's coming next in the story somehow relieves the anxiety of the ¨what could happen?¨ open-ended-question of this crazy ride we call life...but i do not pretend to know the answers anymore. I stand before the void of what's next humbled.
A girl can dream of smooth simplicity, can't she? After all....it is fiction.
When I left the states nearly two years ago, I had a plot in mind, and it went a bit like this:
American girl goes to France, where she teaches English to kids for a year. American girl considers staying to do her Masters in French Literature at Parisian universities. American stays another two years to do said Master, which will help catapult her into prestigious American universities for her doctoral degree. American girl repatriates and goes to said doctoral program, where she meets the love of her life and four to six years later, gets her tam. A brilliant career in academia along with a happy family life ensues.
This is the plot the Lindsay who left America in 2010 dreamed up, and the Lindsay writing this post is the Lindsay living in France in 2012 shaking her head. Both Lindsays are at the part where she is near finished with said Masters degree...
But now the part after the Masters degree isn't so sure anymore.
I dream up plots because they are soothing, because knowing what's coming next in the story somehow relieves the anxiety of the ¨what could happen?¨ open-ended-question of this crazy ride we call life...but i do not pretend to know the answers anymore. I stand before the void of what's next humbled.
A girl can dream of smooth simplicity, can't she? After all....it is fiction.
Working to Live or Living to Work
I am in a constant state of confusion these days
about just how so much of the souls on this planet can give themselves to what seems like
mind numbing
work.
At least to me.
There are two types of people it appears, those for whom work is but an ends to a mean,
a way to buy the groceries
and pay the bills
and forget the numbness of meaningless
existence.
Then there is the other (half? third? five percent? what useless these things are we call numbers, that quantify instead of
qualifying).
Those lucky few for whom work is not work at all
but a calling.
A love, not a labor;
so it is with equal mind numbing that i search
these posts on virtual pages
with titles all bizarre
that
link
me
in
to
these product managers, these financiers
these engineers, these personal assistants.
i do not want to work to live
i want to live to work
to give birth to something of
sig
nif
i
cance.
but the masses have stopped
lis
ten
ing
to the artists and the writers, lost
in the never ending rhythm of
work
work
work
work.
about just how so much of the souls on this planet can give themselves to what seems like
mind numbing
work.
At least to me.
There are two types of people it appears, those for whom work is but an ends to a mean,
a way to buy the groceries
and pay the bills
and forget the numbness of meaningless
existence.
Then there is the other (half? third? five percent? what useless these things are we call numbers, that quantify instead of
qualifying).
Those lucky few for whom work is not work at all
but a calling.
A love, not a labor;
so it is with equal mind numbing that i search
these posts on virtual pages
with titles all bizarre
that
link
me
in
to
these product managers, these financiers
these engineers, these personal assistants.
i do not want to work to live
i want to live to work
to give birth to something of
sig
nif
i
cance.
but the masses have stopped
lis
ten
ing
to the artists and the writers, lost
in the never ending rhythm of
work
work
work
work.
Wednesday, June 27, 2012
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?
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?
Tuesday, June 26, 2012
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.
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.
Friday, August 19, 2011
The Edge of Desire
Last night I sat on the terrace with you at a cheap plastic table overlooking the moon dimpled waters of the plage St. Jean. The tides slushed in and out along the sand as the sea exhaled its hot breath on our faces and we ate the pasta you'd made with the remainders of a near barren fridge.
There is something mysterious about you, the way you coif your surf soaked hair into a low, tiny bun at the nape of your neck and puff your Marlboros into ephemeral gray clouds while you pace the shore, the deck, the kitchen. Sometimes you smell of musk and salt, of sweat and laughter.
There is something mysterious about you, the way you coif your surf soaked hair into a low, tiny bun at the nape of your neck and puff your Marlboros into ephemeral gray clouds while you pace the shore, the deck, the kitchen. Sometimes you smell of musk and salt, of sweat and laughter.
* * *
I'd been reading on the couch, curled under a blanket of humidity when you opened the front door and I'd heard your shuffling feet. I shot upward. You asked me if I was hungry, if I'd already eaten. I had no appetite, but you said you were making pasta, so I agreed to eat a little bit. My spine stiffened and I refused to glance at you while I heard you gently open the cabinets and wash the colander and boil the water. You didn't want to wake the children with noise, but to me, the silence was a welcome wall. My throat tightened.
My relationship to you exists in the confines of a kitchen, in the spaces between an oven, a fridge, and a sink. Two weeks ago you stood next to me making espresso shots while I did the dishes. You referenced an obscure writing of Picasso's, a passage about how washing the dishes is a way of showing appreciation for their functionality, of the things dishes do for us. A small remerciement. I was charmed.
You'd charmed me before that, charmed me one afternoon while I did the dishes and you sat at a table, glued to your Macbook. You asked if I had a boyfriend. No. I'm too timid, I explained, rationalizing the way I attempt to rationalize everything. I'm too focused, once I have a goal, it's too tough to pull me away, it's a weakness. My eternal excuse, my security.
Our twenty minute pasta interlude ended more quickly than it had begun. You were a gentleman and took my plate and I thanked you for it, despite my consumption of a mere three or four forkfuls. I lost count talking to you.
You went back to your work, slipping out the front door as you whispered a gentle goodnight and I contorted myself back onto the couch, plunging back into my reading.
As if nothing had ever happened.
I'd been reading on the couch, curled under a blanket of humidity when you opened the front door and I'd heard your shuffling feet. I shot upward. You asked me if I was hungry, if I'd already eaten. I had no appetite, but you said you were making pasta, so I agreed to eat a little bit. My spine stiffened and I refused to glance at you while I heard you gently open the cabinets and wash the colander and boil the water. You didn't want to wake the children with noise, but to me, the silence was a welcome wall. My throat tightened.
* * *
You'd charmed me before that, charmed me one afternoon while I did the dishes and you sat at a table, glued to your Macbook. You asked if I had a boyfriend. No. I'm too timid, I explained, rationalizing the way I attempt to rationalize everything. I'm too focused, once I have a goal, it's too tough to pull me away, it's a weakness. My eternal excuse, my security.
* * *
Twenty minutes later, you handed me a fuming mountain of pasta and apologized for the impending horrible taste, said it reminded you of your days as a student. I went to get the salt. " Are you going to eat inside?," you inquired with a surprised grimace when I set the plate down on the inside table. I could've said yes. I could've kept my distance. I could've left you alone on the terrace. I could've told you I was in no way hungry, not one bit, and refused the pasta in the first place. But I didn't.
The way we talked at that plastic table, in the middle of the night, almost furtively, while the children slept, made it feel forbidden. You just ended it with your flame haired girlfriend of I-don't-know-how-many-years, and I sopped up guilt like I were a culprit, like I were responsible, though I know I'm not. Was I crossing the line, by agreeing to eat with you? I joked about you even having enough time to eat considering you've been busting your ass nonstop for the past three days on your Macbook, staring vacantly into the screen with Chopin humming in the speakers. I joked because I didn't know what else to do with myself, like I usually do.
Maybe I joked because what you don't know is that yesterday morning I had to enter the room to get a towel, and that I didn't see you sleeping on the white bed until I about faced to exit. What you don't know is that for a solitary moment, I paused and watched you sleep, a king of grace in the dim light of the bedroom, and wondered what it would be like to curl up alongside you.
The way we talked at that plastic table, in the middle of the night, almost furtively, while the children slept, made it feel forbidden. You just ended it with your flame haired girlfriend of I-don't-know-how-many-years, and I sopped up guilt like I were a culprit, like I were responsible, though I know I'm not. Was I crossing the line, by agreeing to eat with you? I joked about you even having enough time to eat considering you've been busting your ass nonstop for the past three days on your Macbook, staring vacantly into the screen with Chopin humming in the speakers. I joked because I didn't know what else to do with myself, like I usually do.
Maybe I joked because what you don't know is that yesterday morning I had to enter the room to get a towel, and that I didn't see you sleeping on the white bed until I about faced to exit. What you don't know is that for a solitary moment, I paused and watched you sleep, a king of grace in the dim light of the bedroom, and wondered what it would be like to curl up alongside you.
* * *
Our twenty minute pasta interlude ended more quickly than it had begun. You were a gentleman and took my plate and I thanked you for it, despite my consumption of a mere three or four forkfuls. I lost count talking to you.
You went back to your work, slipping out the front door as you whispered a gentle goodnight and I contorted myself back onto the couch, plunging back into my reading.
As if nothing had ever happened.
Saturday, August 13, 2011
The Hero With a Thousand Faces
I entered young adulthood with a pen and composition notebook in hand. As an adolescent in junior high, I used this pen and notebook to entertain myself in class after I'd finished all assigned work for the day, a way of coping with life turbulence. The pen and notebook followed me into summer vacation, where I exercised my imagination. Eventually, one day, I'd written a novella.
At fourteen, I dared to share the manuscript of this novella with my 8th grade English teacher. On a summer morning, my mother deposited me at Plantation Coffee House, manila envelope in hand. I gazed through the windows and saw him perched at a table. His head hung low to the table in concentration and his papers, pens, and books formed a chateau fort which protected him from distraction. As I entered, the bitter aroma of coffee rolled around me and into my nose. I approached slowly. I was nervous.
I do not remember the first thing I said nor what I wore. I remember only a few seminal details. A stack of those papers encapsulating him were recorded dreams. I explained at one point that I couldn't have coffee because of the caffeine that would affect a congenital heart condition, to which he replied that I perhaps exercised my heart in other ways. He recommended I read some key books, one of which was Joseph Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces.
Ten years after our meeting at Plantation Coffee House, this teacher is now a friend of mine, and we once again got coffee while I was back home in the states. On a bright July morning, we sipped coffee and he slid a copy of Joe's book across the table as a gift. Somehow I managed to make it through another decade and three different schools without reading Joe's book.
Life is a joker and a trickster, and what I've learned is that she will (almost) always foreshadow what she has in store for you if you pay attention to the clues. And so it is that ten years later the very friend that mentioned the book to me has given it to me.
I packed Joe's book into one of the three suitcases I hauled across the Atlantic and peeled it open two weeks ago. With 60 pages to go until the end and it sitting by my side as I write this, I am saddened. I am rarely sad to finish a book. I am normally neutral, unattached, and analytically distant as I contemplate structure, theme, and tropes. Yet this book has no characters; it is a wonderful guided tour by none other than Joe himself through the land of myth and human experience. Just when I thought my own horizon was wide, this book has suddenly stretched that horizon panoramic and breathed into my mind another universe.
I have a lot of world to see, and a lot of studying to do. I have a lot to learn about life, and a lot to learn about writing. But I have to thank my friend and Joe for showing me that the story is in all of us, and my job is to draw the story out.
I, too, am a hero with a thousand faces.
At fourteen, I dared to share the manuscript of this novella with my 8th grade English teacher. On a summer morning, my mother deposited me at Plantation Coffee House, manila envelope in hand. I gazed through the windows and saw him perched at a table. His head hung low to the table in concentration and his papers, pens, and books formed a chateau fort which protected him from distraction. As I entered, the bitter aroma of coffee rolled around me and into my nose. I approached slowly. I was nervous.
I do not remember the first thing I said nor what I wore. I remember only a few seminal details. A stack of those papers encapsulating him were recorded dreams. I explained at one point that I couldn't have coffee because of the caffeine that would affect a congenital heart condition, to which he replied that I perhaps exercised my heart in other ways. He recommended I read some key books, one of which was Joseph Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces.
Ten years after our meeting at Plantation Coffee House, this teacher is now a friend of mine, and we once again got coffee while I was back home in the states. On a bright July morning, we sipped coffee and he slid a copy of Joe's book across the table as a gift. Somehow I managed to make it through another decade and three different schools without reading Joe's book.
Life is a joker and a trickster, and what I've learned is that she will (almost) always foreshadow what she has in store for you if you pay attention to the clues. And so it is that ten years later the very friend that mentioned the book to me has given it to me.
I packed Joe's book into one of the three suitcases I hauled across the Atlantic and peeled it open two weeks ago. With 60 pages to go until the end and it sitting by my side as I write this, I am saddened. I am rarely sad to finish a book. I am normally neutral, unattached, and analytically distant as I contemplate structure, theme, and tropes. Yet this book has no characters; it is a wonderful guided tour by none other than Joe himself through the land of myth and human experience. Just when I thought my own horizon was wide, this book has suddenly stretched that horizon panoramic and breathed into my mind another universe.
I have a lot of world to see, and a lot of studying to do. I have a lot to learn about life, and a lot to learn about writing. But I have to thank my friend and Joe for showing me that the story is in all of us, and my job is to draw the story out.
I, too, am a hero with a thousand faces.
Monday, July 25, 2011
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?
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 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.
If he is, I hope he knows he's forgiven.
Saturday, July 23, 2011
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.
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.
Friday, July 22, 2011
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.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 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.
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.
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.
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.
Sunday, July 17, 2011
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.
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