This was written in winter 2016, a year after I moved to Paris.
In late September my mother comes to visit. I decamp from my Pigalle apartment for three days and cross the river. She’s booked a little hotel in St Germain and on the first night we sit at Cafe de Flore, drinking cold glasses of Sancerre, mirroring each other’s movements.
There’s a group of American girls behind us, clutching paper bags from Shakespeare & Co. They shriek and chatter, talking over each other. The decibel rises. A old woman in fur makes noises of disapproval, but they take no notice; ‘…and when I took off my dress, he literally said ‘oh la la’…’ ‘…grabbed my wrist and tied a piece of red string on it, I tried to say arretez s’il vous plait…’‘…the kids were running around the park screaming, but what was I supposed to do…’
The city is full of lonely girls looking after other people’s children. The eighteen year old, straight out of rural Holland, cries every time she passes a tulip at the flower market. Within six months she will fall in love online with someone no one believes to be real, and move to Antwerp. We never hear from her again.
If I climb onto my roof I could see the Sacré-Coeur but I never do, even when I see the couple late one night sitting on the cold tiles, six stories up, her light laughter ringing in the darkness. I dreamt of jumping off the balcony once so it feels too prophetic. I also dreamt of swimming out, back when the city flooded and the water came all the way up, lapping at my door. Stepped onto it like a saviour and drifted away.
There’s a dirty sock nestled in the gutter, left by a boy who stayed the summer and left as soon as the nights threatened to draw in. We would cycle down the boulevard at midnight after work, whooping and hollering old songs until my lungs hurt from the heavy night air. C’est trop lourd, c’est trop lourd, I can’t think in this heat. We slept with the doors open. We never slept. We stared at each other until dawn. He crawls into bed beside me as I read The Handmaid’s Tale. The fan whirrs all night. After he’s gone, I make wishes on his tight curls as if they were eyelashes. He goes back to the seaside and I stop smoking so many joints, go to bed early, call home more.
It’s midnight. I drum my fingers on the coffee table, waiting for you to call. I lock myself in the bathroom at a party, drumming my fingers against the door, wishing you were there. You say I’m your mentor, but you’re my muse. When I can’t sleep I dream worlds where we are together. You laugh at my jokes. We tussle for dominance. Sometimes it’s exhausting. Sometimes I just want you to be gentle, to ask what I’m afraid of, to kiss me where it hurts. Instead we play this game. Perhaps it’s my fault, as I won’t ask you to stop. I can’t back down. A man once told me I was too vulnerable and while he languishes in distant memory I can’t forget it being thrown as an insult, as a warning. I have to be tough now, iron-tough, stone-tough, diamond-rough.
So we challenge each other and we challenge ourselves, striving for another sharp phrase, another witticism and all the while I’m wondering what the undercurrent means, why you turn back every time I go until I’m out of sight, why I stop breathing when you look into my eyes. When you call late at night, I feel cool granite fingers on my spine across the airwaves. I start to need you as well as want you. It terrifies me. I crawl into bed in the afternoon, like the old days, the dark days, and cry myself back to sleep.
I feel the old ghosts soaking into my skin. A cold wind barrels down the avenue, stealing inside my coat and biting my wrists. The days get shorter. I stare at the sky but even on blue days the light is getting harder, losing that gentle summer softness. In London I’m solid, feet rooted to the ground but here I’m just a shadow. If I stand still long enough perhaps roots will form but I don’t and I won’t, picking up my feet in a quickstep as I walk down Rue des Martyrs, afraid that if I’m too slow cords will pour out of the gutter and wind themselves around my ankles and I’ll never be able to leave. It hurts to leave and it hurts to stay, it’s been months since it felt like escaping.
Some days ‘if I had stayed’ is a constant refrain in my head, as much as I try to quieten it. I grieve lost lives; the invisible lives, the ones I didn’t stay long enough to see. The ones where I continued on my path, with friends who were more like siblings and romances which could have become relationships, perhaps, if I had stayed. A thin golden thread, running parallel to the life I did choose.
Winter sets in. I go to a party in Montmartre, I go to a party in the Marais. I drink too much. At home I smoke on the balcony, wrapped in blankets trailing on the ground. Frost nibbles my ears. There are snowdrops lying on my eyelashes, so heavy I can barely open them. I wake up to a world in white.
I start a list of things I would miss. It starts with butter. I can’t tell what this means. I can’t see inside my own head anymore, I’m a mystery to myself. I become more erratic, eat the same thing for weeks then never again, cast tarot cards late into the night, wish spells on melting candles. The walls are lined with reminders for things I’ll never write. I buy oranges by the kilo and devour them greedily, trying to eat sunshine. Some tell me it’s genetic, a sadness learned in the blood from harsh winters and hard lives and a melancholy disposition. I’m descended from Vikings, healers, sailors and missionaries, harvesting souls for God. Others say chemical or seasonal or situational, the options are endless, the choice is mine.
I tried all the ways I could to fix it. I read, I slept, I prayed. I lay on the kitchen floor at midnight and cut ribbons into my arms. I went to a psychologist with a seventh floor office, and told him that I saw the clock tower burning every night and there had been an aching hole inside of me for as long as I could remember. He said he had no idea what was wrong with me, and I never went back. So in the end I took those daily pills, the ones that make you a bad drunk and render the world colourless, and spent two years falling in love and falling down stairs. Then I abandoned my life and went to Paris because I’d healed in France once and I had nothing left to lose. For a while, it worked. I was so distracted by this new life I thought I’d truly managed to leave them behind, forlorn shadows on a St Pancras platform, and I was meeting dazzling strangers and working hard and the world appeared in vibrant technicolour now that I’d poured the last of my pills down the toilet.
But wherever you go, there you are. My ghosts slip in through the blinds after dark and lie beside me, comfort and conflict. I am alive I am alive I am alive, still. I know nothing else.
Optional soundtrack: Never Never - SBTRKT