Wide-Eyed and Silent

10/27 Jardin de Luxembourg 

I think I have come to desire an amount of solitude that seems so contradictory to what I thought I would be. I wanted before a rich social life – which I have to a great extent almost more than I could dream – and an overpowering love that takes over your being. But I realize, as I ignore the attentions of both friends and male pursuers, that maybe the desires I had were this fake sense of a future security that really doesn’t show my own heart.

I’m grasping this language and this culture and the essence of this place more and more each day. There are old men carrying baguettes, old women with pulled shopping bags and maroon hats, and teenagers jumping over blockades and drunks selling cocaine and those that will not hesitate to say “I love you, Je t’aime” and those in cabby hats and those that frown too easily on the subway or who don’t take a moment to return the smile of a child. There are too many emotions for a place like this. It is as if I am constantly hopelessly trying to swallow.

Perhaps it would be wise to take pieces of the world and encase them in a phosphorescent glass. To let artificial frays catch the light as they soar down from the top of the dome. To create the illusion and resolution of space within. Protect, do not erase. Do not let one piece sink too low. Let no memory fade.

(Eiffel Tower moments)

The moonlight was forbidden, the covers were drawn. An everlasting search for unity denied, perhaps between the two figures fumbling in the dark. Hands jumbled, mouths muffled, warmth shared and warmth taken away and warmth trapped between pleas and apologies, searching for a heart’s upper left curve to borrow into.

Where was her artificial light? Her cool sense of apathetic safety that allures the masses and buries within them a false twinkle of their own? Where were her monstrous curves, voluptuously teasing the banks of antiquity with her nouvelle allure? Where had her peak gone, with Babylon or Olympus? Or had the falseness so disgusted her that she barely watched with an upturned nose?

Seule. Amidst the jumble and cold plastic and ungrateful ground and the shadow of a lover’s hands smothering her conscious. The ache of hollow playfulness, of complicated spontaneity. Of words on her lips halting and ending because the mind is too animalistic for tense and agreement. The harrowing glimpses of past hopeful grazes that were too tempting for innocence and its ignorance within the empty upper left corner in her heart; they came in lamenting waves. Come back, she begs, to her and to him. Come back to mistreated goodness and use her again.

Moping, aching moment. Cozied in my scarf and pen.

10/31 Jardin de Luxembourg, avant mes cours

The most solemn beautiful day. I sat by a younger man who seems so content, relaxed, ease with himself and his plan for the day. While I remain restless and sad, sometimes. I just long for eternal sunlight and my nana’s embrace.

Yesterday. The man who sells candy outside the metro Odeon, unloading his sugary sweet white van with a frown, stacking things just right as they have been just right every morning of every day. He sells to giddy children and old women with no remaining hard candies and couples from all over the world who will share the goodies on the banks of the Seine or in between shops with a feeling of infant excitement, of jumping back to the time when we ran everywhere because there was no need to take Time, but to hasten to it with open arms and gasping lungs.

 11/13 Chez moi

I am drunk off the beauty and wonder of this paradise. Who else gets to be this damn lucky? Too many things to keep straight. Too much that is too beautiful.

I have butterflies again.

The magic of this place is this: every stone speaks. 

Every wave of the Seine carries a story. Art is alive here, music is alive, the language breathes sensuality and vitality. She is alive.

11/19 Barcelona Airport

Something about the homelessness of travel is appealing. Of being bedraggled and exhausted with only a backpack for company. Of feeling a longing for every place you’ve been and every place you want o be in one whirlwind moment as you walk the echoing marble halls of the airport. Always hungry, always thirsty, always a little sick and a little tired and a little anxious for reunions and homecomings against anxiety for the new place, the new tour, the new adventure. Mouth dry and mind drier. People looking distant, solitary and isolated even when with families. Everyone who takes a journey takes it for one’s own.

Muslims praying in Beauvais Airport

Something awkwardly beautiful about the cafes and fast food and stores selling duty-free tablecloths to the apathetic but succeeding traveler. Everything feels like it’s needed. You’re on a leg, not a last leg, but you stand with precaution, searching for utility.

I think some people don’t see the world without the fog of thinking of rest and nourishment.

I will be so judgmental when I go home. Or I will think people don’t know how to live the right way and be disgusted at their life choices. Maybe I’m better with lots of books to occupy this growing mind.

How easy we sleep.