413. France, how I remember it and am remembering it (the first tiny part of something that has infinite, changing parts)
October 21st, 2011 § 14 Comments
One year and three weeks ago, I arrived at Gare de Lyon in Paris and I took this photo. I honestly don’t even remember how I got from the airport to the train station. But somehow, I was there. In stretchy leggings that have yellow stains on the knees because I once cleaned the floors in my Iowa City apartment with this horrible cleaning solution that had a ton of bleach in it, and when I knelt down on the ground to clean, the floor bleached my black leggings yellow, and then when Michael came home, I showed him my pants, and he told me it was no big deal, but two days later, I cried and told him it was a big deal. That was a long long long ago then, and this picture of Gare de Lyon was just the then that was a little bit long ago.
I remember feeling like I was on the verge of something and also on the verge of nothing at all, and I remember thinking: I will always be about to do something really significant and it will always turn out to be nothing at all, or I will be doing nothing at all, and maybe something significant will happen to me. I was thinking of the ending of “At the Tolstoy Museum” by Barthleme that always makes me so sad, and always makes my students scratch their heads and say, “So was this dude just trying to be weird by writing this story?” And there’s a huge gap that I cannot bridge, like why for me, does this story move me so much, but for others, it’s just some smart-ass trying to be a weirdo?
This is the Paris that I first saw when I turned away from Gare de Lyon to look out onto the street. This is the way I walked in the four hours I had to kill between when I arrived at the train station and when my train was leaving for Avignon, and this what I looked out onto eight years ago, when I was living in Paris for the first time, and falling in love with a Scottish boy who worked at Shakespeare & Company. We were both in love with other people who were not living in Paris and also with each other, and we took a trip together at the end of my summer in Paris and his three years in Paris. We went to Nice and then Monte Carlo, where I climbed up a tree to watch an open-air French dubbed version of The Terminator 3, and I had an urinary tract infection so I peed in the tree and drank cranberry juice and laid my head on the shoulder of the boy I was so in love with and had so little time with, and a few years later we met again in Beijing and then never again, which is okay, because just remembering these things makes me feel lucky enough, especially during these times of profound loneliness, when I think I might not have a lot else to comfort me except little stories about things that have already happened, and during these times of profound loneliness, I can’t help but pity myself for not creating new stories to remember, but I have to remember that ever since I was alive, I have always felt as if I am not creating new stories to remember years later, and then years later, there are always things to remember.
One year ago, when I was walking through the streets of Paris for the first time in eight years, I was so hungry that I couldn’t push open the door to a little Vietnamese restaurant that was owned by a Chinese family who asked me if I was a student, and I said no, and then asked me if had a husband in France, and I said no, and then they said, Well aren’t you brave coming all alone to France at a time like this, and all of this was in Chinese, which is not a language I speak confidently, and I remember feeling lonely and scared and hungry and tired and homesick and excited.
This is the inside of Gare de Lyon. This is what it looked like last year, when I saw it for the first time in eight years, and then over the course of nine months, I saw it twenty more times, and each time I walked out of the train or walked onto the platform, I remember thinking, Something is happening to me. Something is happening right now. I am a part of this.
This was the view outside the window of my first apartment in Avignon. I don’t know if I talked about it on this blog, but I was living with a woman who began to have a disturbed relationship with me and my other roommate. There were nights when I didn’t want to sleep until 5 AM, because I knew if I stayed up, then I would wake up in the afternoon, and the woman whose house I was living in would be gone for the day. I had a roommate across the hall, who I loved and loved, and cooking pasta with her and cooking tom yum soup for her were the tiny parts of the day that made the big parts of my day bearable. Walking around Avignon with Martin and holding on to his shoulder when I felt dizzy from too many glasses of rosé were the big parts of the night that made the interminable stretch of day bearable.
This was the gate to the outside world. When le Mistral came into town, I had to push on the gate with both hands to get it to open, and trash cans would fly against this gate and wake me up in the middle of the night, except I probably wasn’t sleeping anyway, so I was already awake and pretending to be woken up as if I were really sleeping. Sometimes, when no one was home, I would lean against this gate and feel the sun on me. Have you ever felt the sun in the South of France? It is the warmest sun I have ever felt in my life.
This is how I felt the first week I was in Avignon, living in that house with the woman who wanted to make me her daughter and who was also cheating me out of a lot of money and who watched me like I was a creature she had never seen before. I felt blurred, inchoate. There were afternoons when I felt so lonely I swore I didn’t exist at all.
This was a night when I walked home from the centre-ville. It was a night when some of the language assistants were having a potluck, and somehow I was invited, and I remember wearing this sheer leopard print dress and a long sweater over it, and walking down Avenue Saint-Ruf and being followed by men on the street and men in cars and men on bicycles. They were saying things to me that I didn’t understand at the time, or maybe I understood a few words and I understood that they wanted me to stop and talk to them, but I walked with my eyes on the ground, and that was why I didn’t see much of Avignon in the first few days I live there because I was constantly looking down to avoid the men who followed me and asked me why I was shy, and did I speak English or what?
At the potluck, I wore red lipstick and brought cheese and crackers just like everyone else who brought cheese and crackers, and at some point in the night, I was talking to some girls and they said that they were amazed by “the spread” and I thought, “What spread? It’s just bread and cheese and a huge platter of potato gratin.” You know when you talk to someone and you just know–you just know–that person will never become someone that you will want to share your secrets with, or even worse, that person might not ever be someone who will crack the kind of jokes that make you laugh or be the kind of person who laughs at the jokes you crack, and maybe one night you will stumble out of a strange French club together and maybe on another night or the same night, that person will run across a highway divider and pee in the bushes on the other side of the road and then run back with his zipper unzipped and flowers in his hands for you, and maybe you will feel so old and so strange about it all that you just start walking home by yourself, and the next day, you hear a story about how he gave those flowers to some other girl, and you will think, That makes so much more sense.
I want to explain how strange I felt walking home that night. How I kept wondering, Is this my life? Are these the people who I will grow close to one day? And somehow, it didn’t feel right. Honest to goodness, they were really lovely people. It was nice to split a bottle of wine with them. It was nice to eat cookies with them. It was nice to run into them in the street. But you know when some people seem so many planets and moons away from who you are and how you have been, that it only makes you feel even more conspicuously alone before, during, and after spending time with them? Like, What a fucking weirdo I am. Why do I have to be so fucking strange all the fucking time. And I cringe writing these words because I probably wrote these exact words in my teenage diary, and here I am, far from being a teenager, and feeling no different from how I felt twelve years ago, when I thought maybe I was just too fucking strange to be liked and loved by people who weren’t related to me by blood.
That’s how I felt that night, walking home to an apartment where I was living with a woman who wanted to be a part of my life in a way that I didn’t want, and I sat on the curb and listened to the same five embarrassing songs I listened to on repeat during my first month in Avignon, and a man drove past me on the street and asked me to go home with him, and then asked me to give him a cigarette, and then asked me to at least keep him company, and I wanted to say in French, “Please, will you leave me alone, I was just about to have a poignant moment alone, but now you’ve spoiled my cry,” but I was too shy and too bad at French at the time. I remember the next day, I woke up to the warmest sun that I have ever felt, and a few days after that, maybe a day or two later, I met the person who would later become my best friend.
A few weeks later, we moved in together and spent so many afternoons feeling small and vast on our balcony. We spent so many evenings feeling negligible and profoundly important on our balcony, in our shadowless living room. We drank hot toddies and clung to each other. I went to Paris and Edinburgh by myself and when I came back, I wondered if we were falling in love. We were. I went to Nice. I went to New York. We went to Paris together. I took the train to Paris with someone I loved. I went to Morocco with my friends. I went to Marseille to visit Laura. I went to Marseille to visit Marianne. I went to Paris to see my mom. I took my mom to Nice. I went to La Ciotat to visit Laura. I went to Tarascon to sleep at Claire’s house. I went to Les Angles to play games at Bruno’s. I went to the other side of Avignon to watch the Jersey Shore at Rémy’s. I went to Villeneuve to eat lunch at Cécile’s. I went through Arles to eat beef at Veronique’s, and we walked along the Rhône on a day that was windy as fuck. I went to Nîmes to have Thanksgiving dinner with Hervé. It was an amazing dinner. I went to Paris so many times. I was in love the whole time. And I was scared and scared and happy and not happy.
It’s hard and it’s easy to think about these things. Like what do I do with the part of me that wants to go on adventures abroad because I have always chased and am still chasing after the kind of loneliness that has always accompanied that first phase of displacement? Like my first month in France, when I lived inside my head, but everyone else only ever saw my Chinese face, my visibly femme body. And then comes that period of utter, inconsolable, unrelenting fear, when you think, What if this isn’t a phase? What if my life will always be like this here? And those were my late October days, when Avignon was on strike, and no matter how brilliantly warm the sun felt on my back, I swore I was going to collapse from wanting so much and existing so crudely, and then–to quote the brilliant Junot Diaz–”the nictitating membrane obscuring the world suddenly lifts,” and then–then what?
I live in Williamsburg now. Now what? What now?
Love,
Jenny
Jenny,
I read this post twice, and then I cried.
I graduated from college this year and decided that I wanted to leave my home for my homeland. For the first time in 18 years, I’m back in China, teaching English at a university and living by myself.
These are my people and yet, I have never felt more out of place. The looks I get when I say that I am American, it says so on my passport. I say this in Chinese but then I have to explain that no, I can’t read what you’ve just put in front of me. I feel out of place with the other “foreign” teachers, too, none of whom are of the zealous-cultural-exchange stock that you sometimes see in those teaching abroad. For them, the strange customs and foods are just another thing to gawk at, to misunderstand. And I sit there during meals wondering, well is this what people always thought when they saw me in the states too?
I go on walks for hours at a time and my parents fret over me constantly, asking if I’ve made any friends. My answer is always no. Acquaintances, maybe, but the truth is, I am not looking for friendship here. But maybe part of me believes that the more I resist it, the more I am bound to stumble upon a true friend. I’m still waiting, but at least I know now that I can wake up every morning and look at the mountains and not be the only one who is thinking the things I am thinking. Thank you.
Hi Ming,
It sounds like you are going through a pretty intense time. I’m twenty-seven, and there’s a big part of me that wants to spend a year or two in China, but I’m scared I’ll get there and feeling lonely and alienated from everyone. There’s something about living abroad that is particularly stunning in its loneliness, and when you throw in the idea of a homecoming to a country that you left before you were even old enough to have very many memories, well… I don’t know even know what to say about that because there’s so much to say!
The way you describe China, and the weird place we find ourselves–not quite an expat who has the privilege of total ignorance of total newness (like it’s hard for me to laugh at poorly translated signs in “Chinglish” because it feels dangerously close to laughing at my own mother’s way of speaking English) and not quite a native Chinese person either–is something I can really relate to.
I wish you luck in China, Ming! I hope you find adventure and sweetness and order. <3
I can totally empathize with your experience of meeting people who will never become anything important in your life. I suppose I met these people while I was in college, but they became more glaringly obvious when I graduate and mingled with people who had absolutely no life experiences in common with mine. At least in college, you both attend the same university so you could at least find one person in common or a professor you both had. Complete strangers are so much harder to understand.
I have a knack for befriending people who just don’t “get” me and maybe I don’t “get” them either. It leads to a lot of frustration and situations where I’m surrounded by friends but feel utterly alone. Ah! The clichéd troubles of my life…
I am so lucky to know you, and to have you inspire me, time after time, and to tell me things about my heart that even I did not know.
Love
Love you <3
Some people are haunted from childhood by the little grey ghost of loneliness. I’m one of them, and I write for them – at a far far remove, of course,
I’m one of them, too! Seems like I can’t get through a few weeks without feeling profoundly alone. I remember thinking when I was younger that loneliness was a phase that only children experienced. How wrong I was!
This is so great.
Dude, you’re so great! <3
I read this when you posted it but I couldn’t think of a worthy comment, and I still can’t but I can’t let time go by without telling you that this really struck a chord, some parts are painfully recognisable, some aren’t but that makes it only more captivating and interesting and I guess kind of informative in a very special and personal way. And it kind of means a lot to me, and it means a lot too that you keep writing despite your many doubts <3
Thanks, Eline! You are the greatest, and your comments make me happier than I can really express sometimes. <3
Oh my god.. what a stunning piece, reads with a desperate tragic urgency. I have felt that loneliness too, and in France, and in many places including here in NYC. But it’s never just simple loneliness; it always a multi-dimensional loss, longing, almost uncontrollable feeling, and not completely devoid of pleasure. Do you understand that? I think you do.
Your blog is gorgeous. After trawling for hours trying to find a more writerly blog and being bogged down by style blog after style blog I found yours under a perfect title – Fashion For Writers. This entry in particular really caught me. I am so inspired for my own blog now, and I’ll definitely be checking back on a regular basis.