One-Hour Commute to France

9.6.08

I had a dream last night that I was at Lise and J’s apartment, helping put Lise to bed.  In the dream I realized that I had been doing these for several days, commuting to their apartment in the evening to spend a little time with her and to make sure she got to bed safely.  She must have been a little younger in the dream than she is in real life because in real life I never actually had to put her to bed (though I did have to nag her to turn her light off and to actually get some sleep).  In the dream I was happy to be there with her and thinking about how I didn’t mind stopping by every evening even though I no longer lived there and was not paid for it.  Then I started to think about how it took me an hour to get there and to worry that maybe it wasn’t sustainable because of the price of gas.  Now I am awake and thinking about how wonderful it would be if Paris were only an hour’s commute from here.  I would definitely spend the money to go all the time.

I am sure the reason this dream constructed itself last night is because I e-mailed both Lise and J two days ago to say hi and to give them a brief update on my life.  I have e-mailed with Lise a few times since being back in the States but it was the first e-mail I sent to J.  I seem to have a bad case of the “people hate me” complex and have convinced myself on some level that J didn’t really like me and kind of just put up with having me in her house for the year.  She wrote back yesterday morning and said “nous sommes ravies d’avoir tes nouvelles,” which means that they were delighted to hear from me.  Stupid complex, of course she doesn’t hate me.  She sent a nice little note about their summer adventures and it was so clearly J that it made me smile.  I heard back from Lise this morning.  She’s starting high school this year and she told me all about it.  Strange to think that one year ago I didn’t even know them.  Also strange to think that I lived with them for a year and then one day just went home.  I mean, the day was planned and all (duh), but I could so easily just disappear from their lives never to be heard from again.

I have gotten quite good at the disappearing act recently it seems.  I guess growing up in the same town does not quite give you the opportunity to attempt it or to need it or to play around with it at all, and when I left for college I was still so attached to my past that I was terrified to let go of it and to lose it.  These days I find a different kind of comfort in coming and going, losing touch, watching invisibly, forgetting, neglecting and erasing myself from places I’ve been and people I’ve known.  Sometimes when I lose touch with someone for a while I fear that they are going to be upset with me, and so the longer I am out of touch, the scarier it is to try to reconnect.  There are other people who don’t intimidate me that way and it’s always fun to send or receive a random e-mail reminding me that there are people all over this world with whom I’ve shared experiences and moments of my life.  I am generally up front these days with people about the fact that I can be rather out of sight out of mind about relationships.  It sounds awful when I put it down on paper like this.  To give myself a little slack here, I will admit that it partly has to do with the fact that I am much better about living my life in the present these days rather than clinging to the comfort of moments already lived and therefore safe and understandable.

Sometimes I wonder if my newfound ability to disappear is indicative of an inability to connect, to trust, to truly open myself to other people.  This thought sounds depressing and the fact that I can just as easily slip out of touch with my family and my best friends when I am not living in close proximity to them makes me think that I’m not entirely incapable of emotional relationships.  I did realize the other day that it is easier for me to have love affairs with places than with people.  It seems like a paradox for me because when I think of this past year in Paris, one of the big waves of thoughts that washes over me is, “Oh man I loved my third year students – they were just so awesome!  Oh and my little tiny Thursday afternoon class . . . they were so much fun and so adorable and so great to work with!  Well, all of my first year classes were adorable really!  Damn and those second year kids I had second semester . . .”  This line of thinking, of course, refers to groups of people and to students with whom I had a very particular relationship.  I was a certain version of myself and I knew them in a very specific way.  Granted I pushed and blurred the teacher-student line a bit and ended up hanging out with many of them outside of the classroom once I was done being their teacher.  Even so, it was . . . particular.  

Maybe what I love about places is that you can love them without worrying about whether or not they will love you back.  Hell you don’t even have to worry about whether or not they will like you back.  They just are.  They are there and I can do with them whatever I want.  It is up to me to figure them out; it is up to me to find my place inside of them or to pass through them.  When I leave they won’t get mad if I don’t stay in touch and I can always go back without wondering if they want me back.  Sure they will change over time, just like me, but I can still go back looking for the familiar.  Places don’t move and I don’t have to keep track of where they are headed off to this year.  Falling in love with a place allows me to be as much or as little of an egomaniac as I want.  It allows me to be as much of an observer as I want and to choose my level of participation.  The people who make up a place fascinate me, and being able to connect with them on whatever level I can certainly adds to the way I experience a place.  But it’s not necessarily establishing long-lasting relationships with the people that makes the place what it means to me.  In fact, sometimes it is the fleeting, brief interactions that get stored away as small pieces of what Paris or Dijon or Strasbourg or Santa Fe or Worcester is that are so precious to me.

In some ways I think that this theory is complete bullshit.  It came into my head the other day and I’ve been teasing it out a bit.  I love people too, but I guess maybe I am more guarded with people in general and that’s the difference.  Cities don’t judge, cities can only break my heart as much as I let them, cities don’t care to know my secrets or stories but let me create more of them thanks to our relationships.  Relationships with people are satisfying and one of my favorite activities is spending a long, leisurely, late night swapping stories and dreams and fantasies and ideas and secrets with another human being in the safety of the night.  Relationships with places are easier to manage and simultaneously so much more and so much less about me.  I remember that on the very first day of my “Paris in Arts and Lit” class my sophomore year in college the professor began simply by asking us to discuss what a big city means and what it feels like to be in a city.  At the time my city experience was rather limited and I was stuck in the mindset of “have to impress professor, have to be smart, have to understand the material and get good grades,” so I was a little confused by the vagueness and openness of his question.  I didn’t have much to say but I do remember how excited he got as he and some of the other students talked about feeling tiny and insignificant, feeling awed and dwarfed, feeling lost and found all at the same time.  In some ways it seems a shame that I took that class before living in Paris, but actually I think it was a really great way to introduce me to the city and to get me primed for my then unknown to me rendez-vous with Paris.  Huh, I went to Paris, the city of love and romance, and did indeed fall head over heels in love.  My love affair was just with the city itself.