The Ephemeral Immateriality of Living

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


           does she know how infinitely ephemeral and immaterial she is?

           

My Love-Hate Relationship With Writing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

          we are, it seems, soulmates.
       

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.

* * *

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.

* * *

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.

* * *

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.

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.

Dreams

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

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

* * *

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

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

* * *

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

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

Writing Hungry

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

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

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

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

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

Secrets

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

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

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

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

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

And I know where it comes from.

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

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

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

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

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