I’ve been in motion so long I’ve forgotten how to stand still. Where is home? I thought I saw a glimpse of it once or twice but then the siren call started, as it always did. I grew restless. I felt suffocated. I called for peace but it never came and if I couldn’t have that small slice, I wanted the whole world instead.
So once again, I cut every cord tying me to the ground. I wanted to be free, I wanted to be weightless, I wanted to be stateless. I criss-crossed continents and I blamed this transitory life on my research but in truth I was looking for something I didn’t know how to name. And then, when everything broke, I went back to Paris, because I always went back to Paris. The centre point came into focus, another kind of siren call.
It’s been seven years since that first day I stepped off the train, desperate for new beginning. I left so many times and even now I’m not sure why I stayed, or why I kept coming back. The myth of the city can’t sustain you but somehow it was only when I left - every time I left, every time I said I was gone for good - that I realised we were, in fact, impossibly moulded to each other now. Even when I wasn’t living there my existence always felt relative to Paris, a version of myself left behind in scraps and dust and boxes stored underground in strangers’ storage units across the city.
All these years I kept waiting for something big and obvious that might force me to stay, like a job, or an apartment, or a man, but in the end the door remained open, and the city was telling me I could stay as long as I want, and I could always come back, and I was forced to reckon with the fact that it was a choice, and it would always be a choice, and I would have to choose it and choose it and choose it over and over again.
So once again, I did.
For almost two months I trail my meagre belongings across the city, moving between friends’ apartments as I search relentlessly for somewhere to live. The weight of it all feels crushing, a constant pressure that won’t let up, and it quickly becomes apparent that this is about much more than just four walls and a place to sleep. I need to find a home, some cocoon of stability, somewhere to exist out loud with no fear of repercussions.
I visit a soulless box above a nightclub. I visit a maisonette in a medieval alleyway. And then, finally, I visit a top floor apartment on a cobbled street in the oldest corner of the city. The shutters are broken and the fridge is mouldy and the cupboards are blackened with grime but from the window I can see all the way across the south of Paris, and when the morning light hits the fresh white walls the whole place begins to glow. I think about the poem about the good bones. This place could be beautiful, I could make this place beautiful.
Three weeks later I move in. For three days I scrub and I clean and I bleach, and for three nights I crawl into bed in the small hours and try to imagine a new life into existence.
I fly to Scotland for Christmas, childhood hills rising through the mist as the plane dips over the firth. I felt very lonely in a way that perhaps everyone feels around their family, that loneliness of hoping to be known and understood in some deep, genetic, transcendent way but instead being met with the mundanity of humanity. Someone is watching TV, someone is fretting over whipped cream, someone is reading the paper, everyone is mostly ignoring each other. Someone asks what’s wrong and you just say ‘I’m tired’, because it’s the code word for absolutely everything. I feel like a brat in the way I always feel like a brat at home, in the way I can’t help swiping at things like a cat pushing cutlery off the table. I go up to my room and lie on my bed and stare at the ceiling. I get my old diaries out of a box and read scrawled lines from Decembers past. I find a Melissa Broder essay about trying to move on from a love gone wrong. She writes to him:
It is very easy to tell me you love me when it is over.
Could you love me at your front door?
I don’t think you could.
Loneliness in Paris is a choice but loneliness at home is an inheritance, childhood legacy I can’t quite shake off even if I can see the edges of it now. Earlier that day I’d gone for a long walk with my father and we talked about things in our family that usually go unsaid. I asked him if he felt like he knew me and he said that he wasn’t sure if anyone really knew me, because I was so private and unknowable. I replied that perhaps he hadn’t been asking the right questions.
Hasn’t it always been this way? I drew you a map and you still couldn’t follow it, just saw yourself in the gaps between the lines instead. I still dream of being deeply known but I’m no longer sure if it’s possible. There’s a singular ache in my chest, an empty hole of longing, and if I stare into the centre of it all I can see is a fragmented reflection of myself, alone, repeating into infinity.
In the films the ones who break your heart come to get you; in reality they stay away. Just you and the city, now. We hold each other close. My therapist tells me I’ve made Paris a maternal object. If I think about this too closely I’ll crumble, so I don’t.
Everything still hurts but it hurts less when I’m here, healing knit in clean linen sheets and the cords of sunshine that pour in through the windows, bleaching uneven stripes on my wooden floors. All I wanted was my own little space in the sky and here it is. I take afternoon baths and buy myself flowers. I dance in my tiny kitchen to Leonard Cohen, that low voice scraping gravel as he tells me I want it darker, darker, darker. I go to see a film about cannibals and I wonder if it’s really so abnormal to love people so much you want to eat them. I try to remember that I’m still just another animal, feeling my way through the world.
But I don’t know if I’m strong enough to be soft, anymore. I don’t know if I can keep standing here with my hands open. Autumn cracked a chasm in me and I’m afraid I left my last scrap of hope behind on a dark London street in the middle of the night. I lay down my sword, I lay down my armour. I made my aloneness the best it could be but its still aloneness. I made myself a home but I’m still so full of hunger.
All those years I spent trying to build a home in other people just left me standing in the rubble, safe spaces gone to ruin. How many times must I rebuild this place? How many times must I watch it burn?
But I’m trying to let the light in. I’m trying to clear out the ghosts. I don’t know how to be anything other than a haunted house but perhaps even a haunted house can be home, if I learn how to love it. Slowly, slowly, I’ll remember how to live again.
Optional soundtrack: Lover You Should’ve Come Over - Jeff Buckley