It is so easy to become complacent - or even just to bitch and moan rather than to have to actually do something about it - but we are creatures of our environments. We shape our world and our world shapes us. The nature of the beast is to evolve, and to that end we can be a slave to our circumstances or we can contribute to our world and to our personal happiness. “The important thing,” in the words of French naturalist Charles DuBois, “is to be able at any moment to sacrifice what we are for what we could become.” And what I am to become has been coming down the pike for some time. I have fought it in my head at 2am, wrestled with it at my dayjob, and dulled the prospect of it by distracting myself with the internet, other people, occasionally too much wine at dinner and (currently) a state of disorganization and clutter in my living space that would best be solved with a match. But it is still there - who I am and what I am capable of, loud and clear, even under the veil of white vellum that I had previously tried to hide behind (and unsuccessfully, at that).
The veil was safe. I didn’t break anybody’s heart behind it. It toned me down: my drive, my desires, my sensibilities and capabilities – basically, all the things I loved about myself as an individual which, in turn, kept me from being “a good partner” and was ultimately responsible for the death of my last long-term relationship. You would think that I would have chalked up the relationship as just having been bad (and clearly not a good fit for either of us, our priorities being as different as they were), but instead I took it as a deep and personal failure. My veil went on at the end, falling somewhere between an act of mourning and an act of contrition. All that said, it was not me. Lightly-tacked, this piece of paper over my personality for the last four years was not unlike the shade that Blanche DuBois attempted to cover a bare light bulb with in Streetcar Named Desire, trying to GE-soft light her age and all that she was, all she was capable of, had done and had seen. In my case, though, I wasn’t trying to cover up my past from other people. I was hiding from myself, because I knew once I got a good look at myself again, who I really was and am, what I really could do, I was going to have to do something. And maybe that something would hurt or disappoint other people and what they wanted for me, what they expected from me, but I knew that when that day came, coasting wasn’t going to cut it anymore.
This little veneer of mine - which served its purpose and has saved me from the discomforting prospect of any real and lasting change - has been in the process of coming loose for months. It finally fell off in the presence of people I did not know (and nobody except me would have even noticed, anyway), at a moment that was no different than any other, except where one might have sat their ass down on a footbridge in Paris. I had never visited Paris before but somehow felt like I had always known the city and loved it, its streets almost as familiar to me as the paths on my palms (with the exception of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, but I'm getting ahead of myself). There was an odd sensation of coming home in Paris. And in just sitting by myself on the Pont des Arts, pleased as I could be, listening to the bilingual chatter around me from pedestrians and picnickers, the veil – invisible to the average bear – dropped down into my hands like a large and long-worn scab that had finally come free. Regarding it for about half a second with an equal measure of fascination and disgust, I tossed it without ceremony into the Seine. As it floated under the worn boards of the bridge, I walked newly-naked (and now, apparently guilty of psychic littering) through the unforgiving light of sunset into Saint-Germain-des-Prés. And then I got lost. But that is another story entirely.
Really, my time in Paris is another story entirely. I am still trying to figure out how to tell people about the trip beyond I really had a great time, because somehow that signifies that the journey is over and I’m not entirely sure that it is. My time out of a comfortable and familiar place illuminated a lot of dark corners in my mind, not unlike when that shade falls off of a brilliant and sometimes unflattering source of light. Which reminds me, Paris at noon is a blinding city. With its white stone buildings that top out at 6 stories, an abundance of sunlight that comes with that open sky and all the sand in the parks (who knew there was so much sand in Paris? nobody warned me about dust devils at the Louvre), every ounce of sunlight gets reflected right back at you. Even in sunglasses, I was unmasked in full-wattage. There was no hiding from anything here, least of all myself.
So what to tell you? I could tell you about falling in love with Parisian radio and its bizarre mix on a single station of American and British alternative, classic rock, French jazz and some classical programming thrown in for good measure. I could tell you about bubble baths every day in the tub that I found shorter and deeper than the typical tub in the States, how the shower head was in a completely unusable place and there was no shower curtain anyway (I hear that’s pretty standard in France). I could tell you about throwing the windows and external shutters of the windows open to the garden every day - no screens, of course - with the occasional huge fly flying in one window and out the other (and also the occasional neighbor's head popping in - Bonjour, mademoiselle! - sort of like they were checking in on l'americanne like a marmoset at the zoo). I could mention the pigeons that are more ballsy than any air fowl I’ve encountered in New York, how the streets of Paris are impossibly clean for a large city, and how everyone’s running around with Nicorette patches on their arms now that restaurants are cutting down smoking sections.
I could tell you how you can hardly find a payphone or an internet café in the city since the whole world has gone wireless. Maybe you’d want to hear about how Paris has signs on the métro in not only French and English, but also Spanish and Italian, and the Italian translations are always punctuated with exclamation points whereas all the other language translations simply have periods, and this makes me laugh. I could show you my little métro Carte Orange and billet for the week that I slapped my happy photo on, just like a resident, and wrote my address as being on the Avenue des Ternes.
I could tell you about Malik, the older gentleman who lived in the building where I rented an apartment for the week. I held entire conversations with Malik, him in French and me in English, and my landlord told me to call Malik if I needed anything because Malik can fix anything, eh, he opens the oysters at the café next door because, eh, he can do whatever with his hands, eh, he is like MacGyver. I could tell you about fashion industry ex-patriates dealing with broken hearts and broken homes; couples who meet up in Paris for vacation while one runs a software company in Seattle and the other writes her Ph.D. dissertation on the state of public health care for pregnant women in India; publishers and founders of world-famous theatre festivals; the Portuguese waiter who slipped me his phone number on l’addition. Oh, and the guy who followed me from a park clear onto the grounds of L’Invalides, tried to put his arm around me repeatedly and just would not take the hint until I finally snapped at him. I could tell you about the experience of seeing Monet’s house and garden in Giverny - the actual landscape that fueled his waterlily paintings - and then going to see the actual paintings that same day at L’Orangerie. I could tell you how the gardens of Paris in April smell of the flowers blooming: roses and lilacs and fresh cut grass and violets everywhere.
I could recommend where to get a great little bottle of boutique wine for about $4 and how you can drink it just about wherever you want without anybody giving you a hard time about it. I could tell you about waiting five minutes for the baguettes to come out of the oven at the boulangerie, and they come out of the oven too hot to hold, and finally you just can't wait anymore and burn your fingers ripping off the end. Even the end of the baguette – something I’ve traditionally found to be as tough and inedible as a shoehorn – is soft, crunchy, perfect homemade bread goodness with nice big air holes, and you end up eating half the loaf as you walk down the cobblestone street before you can even get back to your apartment, no butter or jam or honey or anything. Or I could tell you about the strawberries, the large grain mustard, verveine tea, the most amazing French yogurt with fruit on the bottom, chocolate pots du crème (consistency falling somewhere between pudding and flan), green olives stuffed with blanched almonds, the cheese, or the blood orange juice you can find at the supermarket. I could tell you about the macarons at Laduree. I can tell you how anybody who doesn’t think the food in France is that great needs to Stop. Ordering. Hamburgers.
I could tell you about the little song I made up to keep myself from freaking out as I walked down the narrow spiraling staircase from the tippy top of one of Notre Dame’s towers, and how my calves and hamstrings screamed at me the next morning after having climbed not only Notre Dame that day, but also the Arc de Trimophe and Saint Chapelle. I could explain how my jaw dropped when first confronted with the insane beauty of L’Invalides on one side of the Seine, the Grand Palais on the other and Pont Alexandre III connecting it all, but the truth is you’d just really have to be there. I could tell you about the scent of french laundry, like soap and lavender and sunlight, and how that magnificent smell (and the feather duvet and the 6 most amazing pillows on the planet) made it real hard to get out of bed in the morning. I could tell you about my French being horrible, but not as horrible as it could have been. I could tell you about watching the sunset from the Île de la Cité or the Eiffel Tower or the Sacre Coeur, or just about walking around at night looking at the lights and the lovers and the reflection of all it in that same Seine that carried away that vestige of my former self. It’s amazing how something transparent like a cocoon can weigh as much as a sarcophagus and then float downstream like it’s nothing. I can tell you I sent myself a postcard. I did.
Mostly, I can tell you about what happened when I came back. Customs was a nightmare at JFK. There was a single sign – one – that was multilingual, and French wasn't even on there. Everyone was treated like a cross between cattle and a potential terrorist. The streets of New York City were lined with garbage as my cab made its way back to my apartment, and I was reminded of the Canadian tourist I met at Notre Dame who asked me if New York was still dirty. I really don’t understand how one big city can be so clean and another can look like the Department of Sanitation is perpetually on strike. Part of it may be funding, but I think the larger part of it is people in one town just take more pride in the culture, beauty and identity of their city than the other (and really, do I need people like that in my life? It's just a thought).
I can also tell you how I woke up the next morning in my apartment on the first floor alley and could not see the sun. After I had a cup of coffee and checked my e-mail that consisted of about 300 junk mails, maybe ten notes from people I care about (about three of those being joke forwards) and zero declarations from romantic prospects (to be fair, I didn't give my stalker at L'Invalides my e-mail address), I realized that I was going to have to go back to my dayjob the next day...you know, the one that leaves me unchallenged and unfulfilled but there’s been no reason to upgrade when none of this paper-pushing nonsense is what I want to do with my life anyway. I sat back and gazed out my living room window at the wee bit of fire escape I can actually see, and it occurred to me that I had no reason, cause or call to keep living in this apartment, in this state of unfulfilled dreams, in this state of being. I also had to acknowledge that I have no strings or person of particular consequence to keep me in this city. My lease is up in a year.
I am tired of days that are interchangeable and being unable to discern one week from the next. I am exhausted by a job that does not make any use of what I have to offer as a performing, writing, visual creative being (which reminds me, I took some pictures – click the photo if you’re interested – I recommend the slideshow). In a nutshell: I'm kinda bored, and as I have said to someone in the past, If you're bored in New York City, there's something wrong with you. I realize my boredom likely has nothing to do with New York itself, though my relationship with the city has not always been easy and I have been here for 10 years. It has to do with my current experience here and some of the choices I've made. This leads me to a fairly grand conclusion, and I have hesitated to write what I’m going to say for a while now, because to give words a voice – to say them aloud – gives them power. To sing them, they become a hymn. To write them, words become a treatise and then a battle cry and battle cries require action. I have a feeling that over the course of the next few months, I will be living a much different life than I am living now. Coasting isn’t cutting it anymore.
I’m not going to pretend I’ve got this all figured out right now, because I don’t. I will tell you that I need sunlight. I need space for things to bloom and grow (including myself), even if that space is just a well-appointed windowsill. I do not know exactly what I will be doing in a year, or where I will be living. I may wake up in a northern Manhattan neighborhood (perhaps, even, the one where I live now). I may wind up in a land where English is not the first language. Wherever I find myself in a year, though, whatever I find myself doing and whomever I may find myself with, you can bet I’ll be throwing open the windows.
You can go for the ride or you can look forward to the postcard.
In my case, I got both.
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