Suzanne says, “You know, I kept no souvenirs. I did not want to be a tourist in my own life”. Widow Basquait, Jennifer Clement.
At the end of August, I return to Paris.
I go earlier than planned, fresh hurt pushing me onto the next train I could find. Summer had fractured into pieces, sharp edges glinting like glass on the wet ground. I felt the fall coming for weeks but ignored the signs, ploughed on through as if constant movement could quell the voices, make the tide retreat back into the ocean but it never works that way.
I step off the train and it smells of hot summer and croissants and piss. My shoulders begin to drop, soothed by something instinctual. Back at the apartment I smoke a cigarette on the balcony then I cycle around the city and sit in a garden square south of the river with the sun on my face and remember another late August afternoon, four years earlier, when I sat in this square and wondered what it might be like to have the life I have now.
I did not know until I got here that I’d spent a year wondering where I’d gone. That isn’t entirely true; I knew it somewhere, felt it when I found scraps of the person I used to be hidden in desk drawers or in the muscle memory of riding a bike through dark streets after midnight. But in the end, it’s easier to bury these things than to sink under the endless weight of what you’ve left behind.
And so I lost sight of the person I was, the person I wanted to be. I chalked up my unhappiness to the inevitability of growing up. All around me people seemed to be settling into adulthood, announcing marriages and house purchases, deliberate in their decisions, radiating a certainty in a future I could not begin to imagine. The longer I stayed, the more I began to wonder if resistance was futile. We were all growing older but perhaps I was still clinging to adolescence, refusing to let the party end.
There has never been a clear model that makes sense to me, no breadcrumb trail through the woods. As a child, I could never picture my life past the age of twenty. For a while I was convinced this was a premonition, that the vast emptiness of my future meant an inevitable early death. In the end I kept on living but the dark, unknowable sense of how my life would turn out never went away. It took me a long time to understand that this was because it didn’t exist yet.
During my masters I took a class on exiles and outsiders in French literature, both enforced and self-inflicted. The professor was a scholar of Jean Genet and we all fell a little in love with him, and her too, as she painted scenes in words from the epic life of this enfant terrible. We talked about Samuel Beckett, and Ivan Bunin, and Anne Garretta, and Marina Tsvetaeva, and the way in which you could exile yourself from your motherland and the numbness of familiarity that came with it. In the space between languages, in self-alienation, we found a hidden spot; a void where anything was possible, where the only constraints were those you forced upon yourself.
Almost everyone I know in this city left something good in search of something greater. Fear and courage and blind optimism, the ties that bind us. I was looking for something that might love me back. In the end, that turned out to be a place rather than a person.
It takes a week for me to start recognising myself in the mirror. In early September we travel to the south for a long weekend of hiking to hidden coves, retracing the steps of another summer. One day we rent a boat and spend an afternoon swimming up to beaches and basking on the rocks, shrieking as we pull off our tops and clamber into the gentle sea. In a turquoise cave I sit and stare up at the sky through a hole in the roof and feel reborn, suddenly, hearing the echo of a life I’d once had that I thought was lost forever.
A few days later I’m in Marseille, eating slices of oily pizza sitting on the floor in the open square, all of life happening around us in the warm night air. The bars that line the edges are full of people, tucked under trees and twinkling lights, while skinny young skateboarders race past and children clamber over wooden climbing frames and man walks around selling shots of homemade rum. We finish our beers and make our way to the jazz bar, where someone I met on a plane two years ago is playing in a jam session.
In a curious twist of fate, he’d walked past us as we dried off on the beach that afternoon, just moments after we’d swum back from the underwater museum. I hadn’t seen him in nearly two years. We met on a night flight from Paris to New York, an encounter so romantic I was’t sure I hadn’t dreamt it the next morning. We had coffee in New York before he left to go west, then drinks in Paris, then lost touch. It turned out he’d met someone and moved to Marseille and was now working full time as a jazz musician. I skip my evening train to watch him play, then spend the night on a deflated air mattress on my friend’s floor.
In the morning I walk through quiet streets to the train station, battered rucksack pressing patterns into my bare shoulders. For a brief moment, my mind is quiet. I‘m not afraid of anything. I don’t regret my choices, even though it was often hard and frequently lonely. I remember, then, that as soon as you unpick the tapestry of your life so you can see where the threads of what everyone else wants end and what you want begin, the world unfurls in front of you with all the colours in full bloom. The secret is that we all knew this once, and some people still remember. The secret is that I surround my life with as many of them as possible, people who are braver and bolder and kinder and more adventurous than I am.
I watch the fields blur by through the window and try desperately to cling onto that feeling, knowing it will slip though me as quickly as it arrived. The fear will return, the sheer terror that comes with reaching out to try and create something extraordinary and quite possibly, almost certainly, failing pathetically. Sometimes I wish I hadn’t been built to always want so much; hadn’t been ruined when I was younger by that glimpse through the low door into a secret garden, into the possibility of another life, and had to exist haunted and on the hunt forevermore. I can’t even tell you what I’m looking for. I don’t have the words for it.
By October my skin fits better, more close to the bone. I cycle home at night and the moon is a stark pallor above and I breathe in the night air, fill my lungs with it, and follow the route home on nothing more than instinct along these streets I know so intimately. The relief that my real life hasn’t been lost, that it was just waiting for me to return, is indescribable. I’d been living an approximate of it; a reduced, minimised version, trying to be a person who wanted less. In the end, I just wanted more than ever.