Unmoving

The ceiling fan is broken but if I lay on my bed with my head spinning, it doesn’t matter that the fan is broken because one of us is still running in place.  It is hot here on the second floor of my mother’s house, even hotter than the summer day that stretches out down Cedar Street and Elm Street and Main Street and Water Street, all the way out to the highway and the cornfields and the cheese factories.   The heat is oppressive, smothering itself like a pillow against the willful, screaming mouth of every interesting thing that has ever happened to me. 

I can lie here all day, in this room in this house in this town that I haven’t lived in since I was seventeen.  I can lie here all day and nothing will change but the hour – and even those repeat themselves. 

In living in France it seemed like I could live an entire year in a day, a lifetime in four months.  Life really happened every day.  One day I was holding hands with a boy while fireworks shot up into the night and fell into the Mediterranean Sea.  Then then I was kissing that boy in front of the Eiffel Tower.  And then I was dancing the polka in a beer hall in Munich.  And then I was swimming naked with my best friends in the Riviera sun.  And all the while it seemed that the confetti from the parade that I had joined and danced in at the very beginning of my time in France was still falling and the feel-good music was still playing and I was still smiling and believing that I had finally found it – a life that truly felt livable.

Here in my childhood home in Platteville, Wisconsin with no one but my family for company and nothing but my memories to live (or relive), I worry that both my memories and myself will grow stale and boring before anyone has even asked to hear the story of how when I swan in the sea for the first time I was in Cannes and it was February and I was in my underwear.  And the water was cold but from where I was deep within it, I could see islands and snow-covered mountaintops.  And I had refused to get out of the water and to return to the warmth of my dorm room because I had already learned the hard way that a first time only happens once.  Moreover, so many firsts in life are shared with another person: first kisses, first loves, firsts…  This one - my first time swimming in the sea - this was just for me.  It was mine to cherish and to do with what I wished and I would make it count.

Here in Platteville, a town which uses a Cold War era siren to announce when it is twelve o’clock every afternoon, it feels like nothing counts but my eyes when they look at the calendar.  I have been here for eighteen days.  I have thirty four more days to endure. 

As I’m counting days I find myself wondering things like: how many days does it take to fall in love?  How many to fall out of it?  And I think to myself that if I had someone here to discuss such things with I would say that perhaps love is an absence of time and that it is only when we want to prove that it happens that we try to pinpoint a precise moment in which it began.  And I would say that perhaps time seems most relevant when love is over and the days until it might happen once more seem endlessly numbered.  And so then time matters for, in life, time is never a guarantee and love is a comfort because it feels like forever.

Love and travel are much the same in that they highlight the ordinary to such a great extent that it seems extraordinary.  Both love and travel bring me away from myself, to strange beds and new ways of experiencing things.  Then, when I have left who I was at my boarding gate or in the moment before my heart grew to accommodate a new love and a new loved version of myself, I find that I have come all this way only to face who I always was.

When both love and travel have ended I feel stagnant and alone, unmoving and undocumented, uninspired to make the daily journal entries that say, “This is what happiness felt like today...”

When I was young and living with my family in this small town, all I did was contemplate meaning.  I wondered what life might truly mean and what love might mean and what it might mean for me if I ever found myself in the midst of living the two.  And in spending all those years contemplating meaning I became a writer and a traveler and a lover because those are the pursuits that give me an outlet for my heart’s constant queries; those are the pursuits that give me meaning.

Now my writing becomes a cry for help and for meaning – to mean something.  This essay becomes a desperate hope that the right person will read it and will understand and will say, “Tell me your best stories and I will tell you how to get through this.”    Because here in the smothering heat there are too many days and I have too little means with which to fill them.  In thirty four days I will move to New York but until then I stare at the broken ceiling fan, letting my racing, pacing thoughts be the only source of movement in the room.  And I long to run.  I long to run away or to run back to the silvery Chicago skyline, to the sea or to the moment when I pulled away from a kiss that could have meant something. 

I have never been very good at standing still. I am great at moving; great at making a move or taking a trip, great at moving my hips in a dance or in love.  And I need to move in forward motion or else my thoughts turn back in on themselves and run through the past while my body remains stuck in a place where the only time that moves is my memories and there is no love to make the world spin, only a broken ceiling fan.

Dear Reader

This is a blog entry.

I don’t normally treat my blog as a blog.  I treat it as a place to post rough drafts of literary essays that I’m working on.  Today, however, I shall treat it like a blog.  I will address the reader.  I will write like a person, not like a person who writes. 

I will say that I know that some of you who will read this have been reading my writing since I was seventeen years old (a couple of you, even longer).  I will say that I remember when I used to post my writing on Facebook as a Facebook note and you would comment on it or email me about it.  I will say that even getting just a couple responses from a couple people who I would never have expected to read my writing – much less engage me in a conversation about it – may have helped to change my life (for the better, for the best).

I will say that many of you, each in your own time and way, have told me that you like to live vicariously through my writing – through the bold moves I make in my life and through the literal moving I do as I wander the world from one country to the next.  And I would like to tell you that while you may live vicariously through my writing, you also live with me in each place I go – on my mind and in my heart.  I keep you packed in that – my heart – the heaviest carry-on item I ever travel with.

I would like to say that I remember each of our conversations on the nature of happiness and love and time.  I would like to say that they helped me and that I if you read closely, you can see the result of those conversations in my writing – in my life.  I would like you to know that I am living the question.[1] I would like you to know that sometimes, when I meet someone new and I am talking to them, telling them about myself or just telling them my thoughts on life, sometimes you are the subtext.  When I tell a story that illustrates the fact that I have grown up to find courage and faith within myself, the subtext of the story is that our interactions – yours and mine – were part of what helped me find it. 

And while I say this to you, I say this to myself as well.  I say it in attempt to remind myself that things are not quite as I wrote them as being in my last entry.  I may have left towns and friends and countries; I may have lost time and touch.  But I didn’t forget.  I never unpacked my suitcase heart.  And I am not as alone as I may characterize myself as being.  I’ve been with you -- in coffee shops and campgrounds, small town pizzerias and paths high up in the Alps.  And when I am not with you, you are with me – in an anecdote I tell to the boy I’m falling for as we sit at an Italian restaurant on the French Riviera or in my notebook as I ride the night train on my way back from Paris. 

And I say this now to comfort myself, to reassure myself that though partings hurt - and though sometimes the best memories can become the heaviest burdens to bear – that when the next round of partings comes to pass, as it inevitably will and as it inevitably always does, I will be okay.  I will not lose myself to nostalgia any more than I must as a self-reflective writer.  I will pack up my suitcase heart, expanding it evermore to make room for these new necessities that may very well become old friends and flames but will never mean any less than they do right now.  And I will count myself lucky because, as a writer, I have the ability to taste life twice – in the moment and in retrospect.[2]  I will see you again on the page.  I will see the look in your eyes that I never learned how to read.  I will see tan skin and black stubble, a smile that made me comfortably uncomfortable and a raised eyebrow that told me you knew what I was thinking and that you liked it.  We will talk again on the page.  You will tell me once again that travel becomes an anecdote that we slip into our lives and on the page – only on the page – I will tell you that you’re right.  And I will tell you, only on the page, precisely what I was thinking every time you asked me what I was thinking and I said “Nothing.” 

And now, as a close to this blog entry, let me thank you all for reading and for giving me something to write about.

---

[1] Rainer Maria Rilke

[2] Anais Nin

The Nomad

The night train rattles and whirs its way out of Paris and down through France.  I squat on the floor in the narrow hallway outside the closet sized room of bunk beds that I’m sharing with five strangers.  I suppose that at some distant point in the future this day will be a story I will proudly tell to someday.  Or perhaps I will write the story as a funny travel anecdote in my graduate nonfiction writing class this fall.  But for now, while I am in the story, I rather wish I wasn’t. 

This morning I woke up early in Salzburg in the hotel room I was sharing with my best friend, Andrea.  Together we took a train to Munich and together we stood in Terminal 1, facing each other and forcing sad smiles and saying goodbye.

“I’ll come visit you in New York,” Andrea reassured me as a final parting sentiment.

I just smiled and nodded.  She had visited me in Chicago twice in the four years I’d been living there.  And I had seen her on a mere handful of occasions on the ten or so trips I’d made to my family’s home in Platteville in the past four years.

Andrea and I had both been studying abroad in Europe this semester we had spent spring break traveling together.  This week with Andrea is the longest amount of time I’ve spent with a family member or friend (who doesn’t live in Chicago) since I left Platteville for college almost four years ago. 

I remember the last time I saw Andrea before I left for college.  She, her boyfriend Ben, and our friend David had come to my house early the morning of my departure.  The fog that hangs in the humid air of an early Southwestern Wisconsin August morning had yet to lift and the grass still sparkled with dew.  I had hugged them each goodbye.  I had hugged Andrea twice.  I had thanked them for being there to see me off.  They were my real family.  They had come together and taken care of me over that past year.  When my mother scared me and hurt me, they comforted and healed me.  When I searched for light in my darkness and a reason for the harshness of the world, they gave me compassion and understanding and they read my writing.  But we were young and what they could not give me was a safe place to stay so I left them for Chicago and an idealized idea of the safety of freedom – of being alone.

When I am not living abroad, I have been living in Chicago ever since that morning.  I am currently living and studying in Cannes, France.  Cannes is the final destination of my night train from Paris and will be the end of my long journey from Salzburg to Munich to Zurich to Paris and then – at long last – to Cannes.  I left Cannes alone over a week ago and spent a weekend alone looking at castles and cathedrals in the Loire Valley.  I also arrived, two months ago, alone in Cannes after a similarly long journey from Chicago to Paris to Cannes.  In Chicago I had gone alone to the airport, seen myself to the gate and wondered if there was something wrong with the way my life was turning out if – as it happened – I had no one there to bid me farewell as I left the country for four months. 

And today I wondered it again when I found myself alone in Paris, my wallet back in Munich.  I had no money, no phone, and no idea of who in my life might be willing to help me.  I felt terribly alone.  I was terribly alone.  This loneliness – this terrifying alone-ness – is the real price of my freedom, not degrading jobs or student loans.  This is the cost of having a safe place to stay: never staying anywhere for very long, having no one stay in my life, being a transient in apartments and countries and beds and bars and train cars.  Being a connoisseur of last looks.

My last night in Chicago I had stood on the corner of Balbo and Wabash outside a dingy 3am bar, watching my friend walk away.  Though I had promised to be back June fifth and made her promise to have a drink with me when I returned, I still found myself memorizing her black silhouette-like stature as she made her way from the South Loop bar off to the red line “L” station.  Her black leather jacket and her black leather rhinestone and spiked boots.  Her long black hair.  The wonderful feeling that I had when she was around – the feeling that nothing truly bad could ever hurt me.  She had helped me find an inner strength that I had almost forgotten to look for.  She had told me that I had helped her to be a better person.  And we had promised to not forget each other.  Whether I go back to Chicago or not, I will keep that promise.

When I finally disembark from this train I will be met at the station by a man who – I fear – two months from I will be looking at for the last time.  As an inevitable transient and thus a connoisseur of last looks I’ve recently found myself nostalgic for the present because I know how easily it becomes the past.  I know the frustration of waking up one day to find my most loved moments gone and myself alone with no way to ever get them back.  So I play the scene that I know will come in time. I picture myself months from now, silently reminiscing over the slide show memories of this man who held my hand as heart-shaped fireworks fell into the Mediterranean and kissed me in front of the Eiffel Tower and with whom I shared a fear of being average -- this man who picked me because I had subtext

The boy I left in Chicago had promised to see me once more before I left but even as he said the words my eyes had taken him in, burned his image into the black-coal bed of my heart.  His short brown curly hair. His red leather jacket.  His thin pink lips.  And the way his eyes looked at me as if they would love to keep that promise.

“I’ll see you again before you leave.  I promise,” he had said.  And my eyes had searched his and found no answer to the question that my heart begged me to ask.  I didn’t see him again.

And so it happened that our first kisses were also our last kisses.  My fingertip’s first timid touch of the silky fine stubble on his cheeks would also be my last feel of him. 

He called me right before my plane took off for Paris.  I told him I thought I could love him.  He said he thought he could love me too but that he didn’t know.  I said “okay” and I thanked him for calling and twenty hours later I was in Cannes.  We never spoke of love again.

In our hotel room in Salzburg I told Andrea that I hadn’t meant to leave for college that morning and never come back.  I told her that I was sorry for never really coming back, for leaving her behind, for – if not quite losing touch – misplacing it from time to time.  She told me that she had never expected me to come back.  Perhaps the boy who promised to see me again before I left Chicago and then didn’t keep his promise – the boy who said he thought he could love me but that he didn’t know – perhaps he never expected me to come back either.  Perhaps I never expected to come back.  Perhaps that’s why I wanted him to know that I thought I could love him – because I knew I could, but I didn’t expect to ever have the opportunity. 

The night train pushes on towards morning and as my knees grow sore from squatting on the floor in the narrow hallway so I can write while the five strangers I’m sharing a closet sized room with sleep, I think of a W.B. Yeats poem, “When You Are Old.”  I think of the part I know by heart; the part that says:

How many loved your moments of glad grace,

And loved your beauty with love false or true,

But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,

And loved the sorrows of your changing face.[1]

From time to time I wonder if I might someday find a man who will love me for my pilgrim soul.  And I wonder too what it is that I’m making these pilgrimages for, why I am so inclined to go from city to city, country to country.  I’m not looking for love – that’s not something you’ll ever see by looking.  Nor am I looking for myself.  The only answer that ever comes to me is that I am looking for a place to stay. 

***

Almost a month has passed since my night train pulled into morning and I disembarked in Cannes, to the smiling face of the man who had made the effort to read my subtext.   This Wednesday we made a trip to Antibes to find the twin of his favorite statue from his hometown in Des Moines, Iowa. This was now our third trip to Antibes and our second trip in search of this statue.  Finding the statue was of great importance to the man, after all it was the mirror image of his favorite statue from home. 

We found the statue on the coast of the town, overlooking the sea and the port. The statue was an almost two stories high shell of a person, made entirely out of white, steel letters.  The statue’s alphabet knees were drawn up to its chest as it faced the sea, seeming to ponder what to make of itself – what to write with the many letters that comprised its being.  I loved the statue instantly.

As the man photographed the statue I read the plaque on the ground beside it.  The statue was called The Nomad.  I stared up at The Nomad.  This was the man’s favorite statue.  This tall, pensive, larger than life, person.  This nomad constructed entirely of steel letters.    

The man finished taking pictures and came to stand beside me.  He put his arms around me and, cheek to cheek, we both turned to stare up at The Nomad. 

“You’re like the statue,” he told me.  “A nomad, taking nothing with you but your words.”

“I’m like your favorite statue?” I inquired, hoping to coax out a more specific sentiment.

“Yes.”

There, in that moment, my heart smiled and hurt at the very same time.  Though I was in the moment, I was already mourning the inevitable loss of it, for I knew that this moment was the kind that I would hold as both hope and proof of something presque[2] perfect, later when my pilgrim soul had brought me somewhere new and lonely and far from that port and the language of the day.

So I memorized the way rays of evening sunlight shot between the letters of the statue before we walked away.  But it won’t be the last look that I miss, it will be the feeling of the day.  That’s the thing with last looks: they’re really just a poor attempt to capture a feeling inside an image.

---

[1] “When You Are Old,” W.B. Yeats

[2] French word, meaning “almost.”

Contemplating Catharsis in Cannes

Three months ago I sat in a conference with my nonfiction writing professor. She said that there seemed to be a lot that I was not saying in my writing. I told her that I didn’t feel like there was much I could say because there was no longer very much I knew to be true. Good writers write with authority which was something that I was, at that moment, unable to do because I simply felt that I had none. I told her that while I had heard of people going through periods in their life in which they had trouble trusting others, I was having trouble trusting myself. And if I couldn’t trust myself, how could I write as if a reader should believe what I was saying?

I had lost the admittedly youthful conviction that I understood how the world works. I had lost all conviction whatsoever in my favorite part of the world and my favorite thing to write about: love. And, moreover, I had been stripped of the very writerly delusion that because I could put a feeling into words, the words alone would make it permanent. Just because I could write a scene and then write what it meant, didn’t mean that the meaning itself wasn’t – in fact and in real life – up for interpretation.

As much as I had enjoyed studying literature that used multiple points of view to tell a story and in which the conflict of the plot often lay not in the actions but in the misunderstanding that one character would have of another, I had never enjoyed – or even been able – to view life that way. Because I could write about my life, I seemed to think that that made my interpretation of it right. Thus, my trust in myself and my authority as a writer relied mainly on the fact that I believed myself to be right. However, the truth of the matter is that trusting oneself, or even writing with authority, is better done by admitting that one can’t possibly know for sure.

It’s like religion. Blind faith that relies solely on the naïve insistence that god is absolutely, without a doubt, there isn’t very good faith at all. A better faith to have is the kind that is resilient in the face of doubt, the kind that acknowledges room for error - or even the possibility of being all together wrong - but chooses to believe anyways.

However, I didn’t realize this then, when I sat in the conference with my professor. What I told her was, in short, that because I had believed in love and in a person, only to have been proven wrong, I didn’t feel that I could write about the subject with any bit of authority. And because I had trusted my own interpretation of almost four years worth of events in my life only to have had my interpretation proven inaccurate, I no longer viewed myself as trustworthy.

I couldn’t write well because I couldn’t live well. In my daily life I couldn’t trust myself to know what I wanted, what I thought, or who I was. So I tried out what I could tell others around me wanted, I listened to what my friends thought, and I acted like who everyone around me thought I might be. I made mindless small talk with strangers in bars and I did shots and I dated a man who my friends thought would be perfect for me. I thought I might like someone else – that I might even love that someone – but I left it alone for fear of being wrong. I smiled pretty and kissed men simply because I could tell they wanted to kiss me. And while I didn’t think I liked them, I didn’t trust myself enough to know for sure, so I assumed I might be wrong and that they might be right and I gave them a try.

Both myself and my writing suffered because of this. I tired of hearing my own voice coming up off the page, just as I tired of being around myself.

In the end, it was my writing that improved first.

I was in a bar being someone my friends liked me to be when I ran into a girl from my writing class. She was in the process of writing a bravely intimate true story about her life and I asked her how she did it. She told me that in her daily life she lied to most people but that because she respected the people in our writing class (myself included) she was forcing herself to write the truth. She said that she felt she owed it to us – her classmates and fellow writers – because we sat there every week, sharing our deepest truths, our realest selves. She told me that on the top of every page she wrote, “YOU RESPECT THESE PEOPLE; YOU OWE THEM THE TRUTH.”

I respected her for that. And, just like her, I respected our classmates. I too owed them the truth. So that night I went home and I wrote on the top of my notebook page, “YOU RESPECT THESE PEOPLE; YOU OWE THEM THE TRUTH.” And with that I wrote a story. The story was my way of telling them the only truth I knew: who I had been. I told them what had hurt me, what I had lived through, how I had broken and I how I had survived. I told them the moments of my life I was most ashamed of and I told them about the person I would be proud to be. I never told them what it all meant. I didn’t need to. I trusted them to understand. And they did.

They understood what it meant because they trusted me even when I was unable to trust myself. They trusted the person that came up off the pages, out from between the lines of typed black ink. They trusted what I had written, what I had said had happened to me, and what reading the story had made them feel.

They didn’t just trust me, they respected me.

And that’s how I began to learn to trust myself again.

In time I changed the phrase. “You respect these people; you owe them the truth” became “You respect yourself; you owe yourself the truth.” And in order to be able to tell myself the truth I had to be able to trust myself to know what it was.

I came to learn that being able to trust myself isn’t a matter of being able to correctly interpret a person, a moment, or a feeling. It’s a matter of respecting myself enough to have faith in what I believe to be right, even though I acknowledge it could be wrong.

I learned how to say “No” to men I didn’t like, even when they professed their love to me. I learned how to choose to spend a Saturday night with my pen and paper, even if my friends think that pretty girls like me should be out doing shots. I learned to ask for what I want, not because I can guarantee being given it but because I owe it to myself to try. I learned how to tell someone I could love them, not because I knew they’d say it back, but because I owed it to myself to say how I felt.

I learned how to like myself. And now I am what I put my faith in. There may not be much in this world that I can know for sure, but I will enjoy getting to know myself more and more with every passing day.