This was written in May 2020.
Saturday night, 1.30am. Frank Ocean in my ears. I’ve been drinking all day, celebrating our small new freedoms. Mimosas at brunch, espresso martinis, wine and whisky at dinner. Yet somehow my head feels clear and sharp, now, bouyed by spring air. Concerns chip away at me as I walk home, as much as I try to quieten them. I haven’t heard from someone in weeks and I’ve become convinced, in that deep gut way, in these strange and dangerous times, that something bad has happened.
I’m surprised by how much it hurts to worry about him, how quickly it dissolves the sadness I’ve been carrying these past months, long stretches of silence that congealed inside me. I thought I’d found a way to stop caring, stop hoping, stop trying to hold on, but these things have a habit of sewing themselves into your lining. The possibility that I’ve just been forgotten seems unfathomable, or at least too painful to contemplate closely.
Freedom does’t feel like freedom until you lose it. Before that, it’s just your life. A year ago I was travelling alone in the Middle East, criss-crossing borders, tightly wound and ready for adventure. I walked through unfamiliar cities without a map, wandered into half-built housing districts, clambered over ancient ruins, slept in the desert, bribed security guards, danced until the sky turned pale, accepted lifts from strangers. Flexing my freedom like a muscle.
Now it’s a Saturday night in May and the city has tentatively begun to open again and I’m almost home, but there’s something gnawing at me still. A chafing, a refusal for this long night to end, to slip quietly away into clean sheets. Would it be different, if I came home to someone? If there was someone to nestle into, to tell me to stay? I live alone. Even my floor is empty, my neighbours gone or dead. There’s no one to mark my arrival and departure, even disapprovingly. So standing in the darkness of my apartment I put on a thick jumper and pull the hood up and head out again into the black night, pausing only to take a bike from the station.
I’ve no sense of direction but south is instinctual, like a migrating bird. I could map my way to the river with my eyes closed. The bike clicks softly as I race through the Marais, sound reverberating off old stone walls. A woman alone in the city at night. Nothing has ever felt more like freedom to me.
Standing on the roof one night in Tel Aviv, I made an offhand comment to the man next to me about wishing i could transform into a dog, or a large man, so I could go to the beach alone at night unafraid of the potential consequences. He said nothing but the next evening he gently urged a group of us to go and we did - I took off my shoes and splashed my feet in the surf at midnight, we climbed the steps to the park and watched the stars, ate falafel wraps on the way home. I dismissed it as coincidence then, but perhaps it was not. He was kind. I wish I had been kinder. I didn’t know how.
But that was a year ago and now it’s 2am and I’m back here again, for the fourth time this week, to the gates of the garden where the morgue once was. I don’t know when this became my centre point, the place where everything wobbles back into a semblance of balance. Perhaps it’s the inevitability of death, the echo of decades of pain, the feeling that my work could have a greater purpose beyond my own ambition. Or perhaps it’s just geographical, the ancient heart of the city drawing me in again and again, an island in the river holding court.
You’re a freak, he’d declared admiringly, over dumplings in a Belleville canteen back when it was still cold. I’d been insisting he explain an article he’d read on the legality of moving bodies in rural France. But you knew that before you met me, I countered back, before offering him the rest of my har gau. He ended things between us an hour later. A few days before, he’d agreed he only wanted me for my brain. I cried on a street corner as he cycled away in the dark. His words made me feel both ugly and safe.
I didn’t want this freedom. I wanted love to tether me to the ground, ropes on a balloon. But now it’s spring and he’s gone and I’m the one cycling these night streets alone, looking for something I don’t know how to name. Some freedom we want and some freedom we take and some freedom we are given. There is rarely a choice.
The city is empty now, only locals left. A lone guard paces outside Notre Dame. I curve around the edge of the construction site, picking up pace as I reach the river again. Back home across the cobbles of Rue des Archives, music whispering memories in my ears, from another May in Paris. Savoury crepes and burning daylight and arms so long they could water my highest plants with barely a stretch. Carried on tall shoulders, convinced I could see the whole of Paris from there. New Order, sunburnt legs, watermelons full of knives.
The day before I’d been rejected from my last funding application, a prestigious and wildly generous grant I’d spent weeks working on back in the time before the world shut down. The next few years began to dissolve before me. I wondered if I’d been making the wrong choices all along.
I tell myself lies I need to hear, that they would have restricted my freedom, that my creativity would have been at stake, that I’d be monitored as a representative. I tell myself I’m free now, beholden to no one. How can you put a price on freedom, after all?