Well I am back in DC, technically Maryland, but well you get the point. I meant to write some during vacation but that, along with a slough of other things, didn't happen. This Christmas will certainly be remembered, but for all the wrong reasons.
Thomas Wofle was right, you can't go home again. The vestiges of your former self, which live in foggy memories and haunt the walls of your childhood home are phantoms, reaching out to you with a hope they cannot fulfill. They leave you lost, lonely, and mean; searching dusty tomes for an artifact to reassure you in your future or stabilize the foundation from which you grew. Ultimately you are left unfulfilled, having unearthed more weaknesses then you care to acknowledge. And still it pulls on you calling for you to stay, to hold onto that fuzzy version of your past self that never really existed.
I thought about running away, frequently, over the break. Getting in a car or on a plane and leaving it behind, the debt, the responsibility. It is a silly dream I know, leaving would make things infinitely more complicated. It is the spirit of American wanderlust in me, I guess, but I know it isn't a viable option. (Just as much as I know the price of the cheapest one way ticket from IAD to De Gaulle on most days.) If I were living in a Russian novel Paris would be my Moscow. I love stories about the post-war expat community in the city about artists and poets and the family they formed there. I have been to modern Paris and I know that Montmartre doesn't look like it did fifty years ago. That the place I imagine doesn't exist and probably never did, it is probably the musings of the romantic in me I have been trying, unsuccessfully, to kill for far to long. I still love the city though, every time I am there I understand why it is the French have such an aversion to work. It would be a lovely life, sitting by the Seine writing, painting, drinking wine and eating cheese. The piece of me that loves Pacific avenue and local bands and feels guilty for not becoming the type of lawyer that defends indigenousness peoples from huge multinational corporations and the ill will of their government wants to run away, to live that life. I am not that person, I don't wander, I plan. I will have my Juris Doctorate mere months after my twenty-fifth birthday. At least here I know what my role is. Law school is terribly isolating, piercingly difficult and at times painful in the myriad of ways it makes me feel like an idiot but I know who I am and what I am supposed to do. I know I am capable, and that I have the wonderful support I need to do it. Just because you can't go home again doesn't mean it's not there waiting, changed, rough around the edges but there none the less.
Brilliant! So true and we know you are meant to follow your dreams... You go girl!
ReplyDeleteI met a woman the other day who is exactly what you would have been like had you grown up in a previous era. Her Paris, the way she talked about it, is your Paris. It did exist, don't stop dreaming.
ReplyDeleteIf you ever do give into your desire to run away, you know you always have a place with me. Even if I will just help you talk yourself into doing the responsible thing and going back. Planners never stop being planners.