jean cocteau is covered in butter
the ghosts of cappucino and zaza hover
in the hallway where the devil and his lover
beg you for change on the slide
there’s nothing really like a french blues
blown by an unknown soldier in you
to all your regrets and you rouse
i’ll meet you down there when i try
and do you ever wonder where you go when you die?
emile’s vietnam in the sky
well i’d take better care of your heart
you’ll be opening a swiss bank account
let go, it’s over now, play your part
you’ll be swinging those milk clouds on high
and do you ever wonder where you go when you die?
emile’s vietnam in the sky
‘insomnia’ sort of has a negative connotation. call it what you will, i just haven’t seen the need to go to sleep before 3am as of late.
my parents think it’s a bit overboard - too sentimental or deep or what have you - but one of the foremost things that paris has allowed me, thus far, is to try to understand myself better. overwraught as it may be, and just damned typical, i can’t help but think it’s true. i’ve stripped down virtually every part of my existance, save for a bag of loafers, two books, three boxes of chocolate, my camera, and a notebook. i had known no one, save for few familiar faces i’ve yet to spend much time with. armed with a mouthful of phrases, i hadn’t any idea what would happen. i just knew that it had to. and it seems sort of haphazard to write about it now, but what the hell not.
every time i call home, i say the same thing. every email has the same optimism, the same self-critiques, the same hopes, the same uncertainties and excitement. and yet i call, and write, under the impression that these doubts assure themselves and everything finds its own place.
and i read the writings of my fellow ex-pats, of hopeful romantics in every sense, and i find this beautifully strange congruence among them all, among us all. we all have a year, a semester, a few months - whatever it might be - in this cobblestoned home to crows and heroes long-dead. this gorgeous optimism, this feeling that every morsel of french-ness that we worshipped for so long can now be savored at alarming convenience, this notion that whatever life had been before, before now in some place other than here, it will never be the same. great words were written here! lives we lived down to the bone. artists and lovers and the poor - they all flourished, they all lived like kings in their unique squalor.
we all want love in perhaps its worthiest city, yet within scenarios that make it seem - at least now - disappointingly out of reach. we all strive for completeness, or some semblance of self-assurance and normalcy, in a time when everything we’ve come to be familiar with has been stripped from us for, instead, a dusty old city whose uneven streets have been worn over by the soles and souls of millions and millions. yet amid these reluctances, i can’t help but count myself as one of them, one of the dreamers in a damp city. damp as it may be, it’s beautiful beyond words.
it’s strange to speak and think for someone else, but i’ve realize that’s the sole possibility when we find ourselves at rickety cafe tables and spread across a litte park, unfamiliar little things assembled out of chance and little else. i’ve found that these assumptions make way for an acute understanding of people. i feel as though my mind has kicked the shit out of itself every time i interact with someone new. i can’t help but try to wrap my brain around every moment that led this person to here, to being in front of me. why the fuck can’t right now just be right now? i fall in love with everything i encounter. i think that i’m the only one who thinks the way i do. i really hope that others do too, that others share that naïve admiration. and i know they do, yet something holds me back from admitting it.
yet this all isn’t what i was trying to get at (i’m not editing as i go and trying as best i can not to stop), though i feel fine distracting myself. it’s just that i find myself now surrounded by nothing that establishes my sense of self quite in the way that new york did, or home did, or any of the twenty-some roofs that’ve encased some segment of my existance. i’m a living ghost in a city that i’ve known before, albeit in spurts, hoping to have more than just a mirror’s reflection to establish my likeness within.
there’s a part of me, if but a shell, still waiting under the eiffel tower for a girl, as it was three years ago, some fraction of myself i look back upon appreciatingly. another part of me is wide-eyed on the patio of some apartment somewhere, playing records with french kids that resembled gods at the time, to a kid just out of grammar school. part of me has a damp towel on my forehead in a rented apartment with three of the best friends i could ask for, smirking like a jerk as i sober up, so to speak, and welcome myself back to world as i had known it. and one day, a part of me will be bounded downthese streets in a dented red fiat, as i am now, on the way to pick one of the kids up from somewhere.
it’s not enough for me - memory isn’t - or at least those aren’t. they’re among the best i have, yet i know that it can’t be all there is. four weeks’ worth of a resident of another giant city of criss-crossed existence, i’m overwhelmed once again to be one of those lives, clumsily ricochetting from person to person, from thing to thing. mom and dad should know that i’m alright. i’m a mess, but i’m alright.
