I’ve been haunted by déjà-vu all summer. Too many days and nights spent in the nooks of my original Paris neighbourhood, where I’ll walk into a club, or the smoking room of a hotel bar, or a late-night bakery, and realise I’ve been there before. I keep expecting to pass my former self on the street, coming home late from a shoot or a shift. Brief flash of blonde hair as she disappears through a building door.
Even though it's been years, this tiny grid of streets has only recently stopped feeling like the raw skin under a scab, so potent were those early days of being twenty five and trying desperately to conjure happiness out of thin air. I wonder what she would think of me now, of the choices I made. With that heady combination of arrogance and ignorance and vulnerability that comes with your mid-twenties, I assumed I would be married by now, ensconced in some blissful tableau of domestic partnership. Instead, I live alone. I don’t own any furniture. The hot water has been broken for a month, leading to daily cold showers with a chorus of yelping. Instead, I built a life of infinite freedoms, unrestricted by any and all real commitments.
And then I woke up one sunny morning and suddenly wanted every single one of them, immediately.
As the season progressed I developed yet another crush at the coffee shop, this time on a regular customer. After multiple appearances, I found myself daydreaming of ways to translate the little glances and smiles and greetings between us into an actual conversation, until the day I arrived to find him sitting on a bench outside, smiling and talking with a woman. She is beautiful in that effortlessly French way, all clean skin and long limbs. The scene crystallises; his hand is on her knee, her foot tucked underneath his calf.
When they get up to leave he wraps an arm around her shoulders and kisses her tenderly on the forehead, and I watch them walk away and I think my god, imagine that, imagine that.
I suddenly feel foolish and ridiculous. I try to intellectualise the scenario into something funny, the bizarre scene of this couple gazing lovingly at each other while I sit opposite, proof-reading a paper about pauper burial. Destined to be alone among the dead, RIP me, ha ha ha. I send a series of messages to a friend who has been following the imaginary saga closely.
She’s a 10 and I’m a mouldy bit of melon peel that’s been in the bin for a week
She’s a 10 and I’m a ball of lint stuck in your iPhone charging socket
She’s a 10 and I’m a one-legged seagull trapped in an oil spill
She’s a 10 and I’m a dead basil plant
The last man I went on a date with told me that his ex-girlfriend secretly made a copy of his key then tried to commit suicide in his bed. He told me he’d recently had a breakdown which involved turning up to his boss’s apartment in the middle of the night, high, and attempting to jump out the window. He told me he’d recently got a dog and regretted it, and kept leaving it places in the hope that it would forget how to get home. These stories emerged, unprompted, during the course of a coffee and a walk. When we said our goodbyes he asked me if I wanted to see him again and I said, diplomatically, that he seemed lovely but I thought it might be more of a ‘friend thing’. He texted me later to say that he was happy I was honest about how I felt, but he wasn’t happy about how I felt. I didn’t reply. He’d seemed normal and nice and interesting on the internet.
The last man I went on a date with before that announced within the first thirty minutes that he was a broke unemployed alcoholic who had split up with his girlfriend the week before, and was scheduled for a vasectomy later in the month. He pulled up his shirt to show me a scar from when he was shot covering the war in Syria, drank two mezcal shots with his beer, then informed me that he didn’t have enough cash so I’d have to pay for them.
I try to keep the despair at bay by using these episodes as conversational fodder, recounting them in voice notes, in swimming pools, around dinner tables, at picnics, at parties. I’ve got endless stories. What flavour would you like? There’s funny stories, romantic stories, sad stories, ridiculous stories. The jazz musician I met on a plane, the tattoo artist who kissed me in the rain. I cling to my anecdotes like beads on a rosary, trying to justify all the things I’ve done, but mostly all the things I still haven’t managed to do.
Recently, during a relatively benign conversation about snogging with a group of married friends, one of them patted me on the arm and explained in a deeply condescending voice that, actually, things are different in a long-term relationship. It was so patronising I didn’t even know how to respond. That exclusivity, those closed ranks, the assumption that I couldn’t possibly understand the mysteries of co-habitation and co-dependency. My independence becomes immaturity; the hallmarks of clinging to a selfish life, refusing to compromise, being unable to grow up.
Do you not think I’ve tried? The world does not owe me anything and yet somehow I held tightly to the belief that if I kept trying, didn’t try too hard, remained positive, resisted naivety, put myself out there, stopped expecting it, went on the apps, deleted the apps, made friends with strangers, made friends with everyone, went to parties, went to therapy, analysed my relationship with my mother, straightened my teeth, split the bill, forgave too much, forgave too little, forgave just enough then it would happen for me too. But it didn’t, but it doesn’t. I’m still seven years old, waiting on the sidelines to be chosen for the school play. All advice lingers at either end of an unpalatable spectrum of total dedication or absolute denial. If there exists a neutral level of wanting, I am yet to find it.
And so I still don’t understand what particular alchemy has brought other people together, some vital ingredient that I seem to lack. In my more rational moments I argue that I had to become myself first, which is true, but I continue to wonder how other people seemed to manage perfectly well becoming themselves alongside each other. .
The night before Bastille Day, we go to one of the infamous firemen’s balls and accidentally drink so much champagne that none of us remember getting home. Paralysed in bed the next day with a brutal hangover, I find myself spending hours delving into the suggested Instagram of a twenty three year old American lifestyle influencer who married her high school boyfriend. She recently gave birth to their baby. He proposed at Disneyland. They say ‘babe’ incessantly and do challenges which involve activities such as her not reading a book for a month. They do sponsored content for skincare brands and their big house in Arizona looks to be entirely made of neutral-toned MDF.
I hate them. I inexplicably want to be them. I stand against the kitchen counter in my tiny sublet studio apartment and whisper ‘nothing stays the same, nothing stays the same’ to myself, shoving handfuls of peanuts into my mouth, flecks of salt sticking to my chin.
Isn’t it so much easier to say that it was all worth it, that you made the right choices, once you get what you want? At that point you can trace your steps backwards through the dark woods to create a narrative that means even all the wrong turns, the painful diversions - bad dates, bad jobs, bad decisions - led you here, to this vision of the future that you were always seeking. But what if you don’t get there? What if you can’t create a neat narrative, but instead are still fumbling about in the dark, wondering if you’ve somehow made the wrong choices all along? If you never find the right partner, or discover your purpose, or become objectively successful, or create the family you want, do you instead have to live with the tiny crack, or the cul-de-sac, where in hindsight you can see that you veered permanently off the path?
The traits I sought in men in my early twenties are not the traits I seek now; experience taught me that being tortured and creative and self-important becomes tiresome relatively quickly, something I probably shouldn’t have had to double-check so many times before finally accepting there was a pattern emerging. And so now with the majority of them, from those I loved with a painful intensity all the way to quiet, lingering crushes, I understand why we didn’t work. Why we never would have, time revealing the ways in the which our needs and wants and ideologies veered off in opposite directions. But with a select few I still wonder if we might have made each other very happy, had our circumstances or choices been different. All those lives we almost lived; exquisite melancholy of the nearly, the not-quite, the quick peek back over a shoulder as you continue walking away into another future.
Sometimes I tidy my apartment and put all my clothes away and fill the fridge with food and light the lamps then I lock the door behind me and walk around the block before coming home so I can almost pretend someone else has done it for me. This ritual makes me feel both smugly self-sufficient and excruciatingly lonely, in the same way that I sometimes hold my own hand while falling asleep.
Sometimes I want to give up. Sometimes I want to accept, finally, that perhaps certain things are not for me, that I traded companionship for freedom in a silent auction before I knew what either truly meant. Yet even at my lowest, even when I’m proclaiming total defeat, I’ve still got one one eye open, winking up at the universe. Fingers crossed behind my back as I swear I’ll never try again. Some bouyant optimism, some relentless faith, pulling me up as I fight to sulk at the bottom of the pool. How many lives have I lived in this city? How many more are there to go?
I made my choices. If I had the time again, would I make the same mistakes? Yes, yes, undoubtedly yes. I can never truly know what I might have lost. All I know is what I gained.
Optional soundtrack: Forever - Labrinth