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.

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.

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.

     

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.

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.