Today, talking with a friend, I said, “I don’t know who I am right now.” I’ve been thinking a lot about the time I spent abroad--it’s been six months that I’ve been home, and realizing it aches. It hurts. I’m glad to be with people who matter to me. I’m glad to be at school. I’m glad to be where I am, in intense bursts. I’m glad I’ve met who I’ve met. I’ve been reintroduced to beauty, to goodness, to just enough reality to paralyze me out of choosing. Where will you go? I don’t know. What will you do? I don’t know. What will you write? ... I don’t know.
When I was in Paris, it was near Christmas, and walking down the Champs-Elysees in cold, wet shoes, after having gotten rained on heavily, mercilessly, after having gotten lost for two hours in the city looking for the Eiffel Tower, I felt like the light reflecting off water caught in gutters after the downpour. I loved the smell of wine in the air, warm, earthy, spiced for the season. I felt like things could grow out of the air, drop from the sky. Appear out of stars. Things could rearrange around me, air could be a cocoon for me. I felt comfortable; myself. I felt as though, walking the old streets, naive and moon-faced, I could slouch my way to heaven. There is a contentedness that beats deep in the heart, and for one night in Paris, it was mine.
Sometimes I am suffocated by the force of my own want, what will not stop. That every small thing I do on purpose might be done to be known more. I returned home from school after having a poem workshopped the other day, and exited the car, stood in the middle of the street. I couldn’t tell if I was disappointed in myself or my writing. If I was confused in myself or my writing. Have I lost hope in myself, or in my writing? Do I not see myself going anywhere, or do I not see my writing going anywhere? I don’t know. But I know I’m willing to stare into darkness. Something is always emerging in it, of it, folding it into something, someone is always good to show me what’s in it. The secret to islands, I wrote while in England, is that there’s an ocean floor.
I think I am the one who feels too much, who admires aimlessly, selfishly, who revisits and revisits life after it has happened out of some need to rearrange, to steep, to arrive at an undeserved peace.
I’m sorry I haven’t written in so long. I’m revisiting London in stories. I graduate in a year. A year to cure my skin, so I can do something new, so I can take real steps to a real place and maybe become somebody, if only to myself. It’s been six months since I was abroad but I am abroad every day. I think I’m going to be abroad forever, at least a little bit.
