I live in a jumbled up city, the third largest. And to be quite frank, I honestly do not care. In this city, I’ve kissed enough girls and stepped on enough sidewalk cracks to think that my adventures in this city are long over. I really am a quite studious person. It’s not shocking that I know the exact distance from here to a small-town in Canada or a bustling Metropolis in Southeast Russia. So that’s what I dream of. In class I was asked to write about what my idea of happiness is. And what I said was that happiness is loving everything so much you could disintegrate into it, that when you walk up the stairs you would willingly kiss every step just to show your gratitude for it being there. That’s happiness. In Paris, 4,130 miles away, lives a lady. She drinks her coffee black and wears chic, tight, form fitting clothing, she dresses high and above for each occasion. She lives in a white apartment with a view of the Seine, the French part, not the tourist one. She starts each day by walking, nearly strutting, to the small café down the street from her white apartment. There she orders a black coffee- ignoring the fact that she got a great sleep- and she always removes the lid so that the steam can enter through her breathing and warm her. On the days when she feels especially special, she also orders the smallest of croissants. It’s funny that her view is the French Seine. I found myself entering a café, quite normal inside, but by God, when I entered, the sweet smell of coffee hit me. To be honest, I don’t enjoy coffee. I ordered a coffee here, though; I mean I’m not going to order a hot chocolate. I did not take French in high school. I took Spanish and sí, yo hablo, but I’m not in Spain. I can say coffee in French, but the real problem was paying for it. Before I could become fourteen types of confused a tall, sleek woman came up behind me, supporting herself by placing her hand on the small of my back, and handed the barista the correct amount due. She looked down at me and smiled, handing me my coffee- that I really was going to struggle with- and led me to a small round, wooden table. Her black, heeled boots hit the tile floor. We stayed in the café for several hours. She spoke wonderful English, but never missed an excuse to make fun of my heavy American accent or my American culture. I truly appreciated that. After asking me why I hadn’t touched my coffee, we walked out of the café. Later on, I ended up staying at her apartment. Much like her, her apartment had tall walls or high ceilings and was sleek and modern. She told me to look out of the window and there was the Seine again. I asked why I had not seen that before and she said “Oh, that’s the French Seine.” She kissed me then. I carry a vile of water from the French Seine. In a small corner of Sicily lives a supposedly very average girl. She is almost 5,094 miles away and she loves the walls of her family’s restaurant. Her father is a strong, well-rounded man and his father’s father’s father built their restaurant and their livelihood with the will of his hands and the strength of his bones. Her mother is her mother and she left as soon as her very average daughter was born, the last of her brood. She loves the walls of her restaurant, where she does not work, but she eats each day there, but she loves the pebbles on the sidewalk near the water more so. Each day after rising in the apartment she bought for herself, she picks up her feet and leads herself to the sidewalk where all the tourists go. She walks down this sidewalk and it never leads her astray. She sings to herself and she is sure that nobody will ever notice. She leaves there and returns to her apartment by late morning. I find her washed ashore, sat atop of what was previously a sand castle, but now she is the Queen of it. She catches me taking a very cliché photo of the water and asks me in broken English- I didn’t know it was that obvious that I wasn’t Italian- if I would like her to take a picture of me by the sand. Instead I sit down next to her and ask her to tell me a story. She tells me the story of her father and how he wakes up each morning and kisses the doors to their restaurant and how as a little girl she would kiss her father’s graying face to show him her gratitude. She takes me to her restaurant, it’s aged and there are old men playing cards and drinking red wine in each corner. We eat a late lunch there and her father is not there today. He’s out in the market. I tell her I’ll meet her there again tomorrow morning. The next morning I join her on her walk, I’m not a walker, so we stop and sit on the sand again. And I lay my head on her lap and she begins singing to me in a language I don’t know- it’s Italian. We do this everyday until I have to leave and we tell each other we love the other. I carry a photo of her and the water in my wallet. I don’t mean to say these things with a total disregard for my own home. In my home, a concrete jungle, I have experienced a many things. My first kiss was here. My first lover’s quarrel was here. I’ve met the most concerning people here and I’ve kissed the girl with eyes reflective of the ocean she grew up next to. There may be that average girl in Sicily and there may be the ridiculously chic woman in France, but there will not be another Child of the Ocean anywhere else and there will not be a person as concerning anywhere else. I can experience firsts with others in other countries on new sidewalks and refreshing restaurants. Yet, none of these experiences can rewrite what has already happened. I cannot write over this past by simply whiting it out nor can I record over it like a VHS tape. I say this with the understanding that it’s very unlikely for me to find a woman so chic or a woman so fantastically average. It’s a nice thing to dream about- foreignizing myself to such an extent that hearing perfectly spoken English would become a blessing. Blessings come in different forms, the different shapes in each cobblestone along a road to a looming castle, the pin curve lips on her face, or the smell of fresh bread. That’s why I can disregard my own home because a true human experience involves leaving that home and finding your new castle, a new pair of lips, and a new bakery to steal smells from. Ibiza is 4,459 miles away. In Ibiza stays a girl who’s been so fortunately blessed. Her skin tans at the perfect rate and her teeth stay white past each shot she takes on a stranger’s, or a new friend’s, yacht. She stays in Ibiza simply to party. There’s no ulterior motive, no love, no sights to see, no history to sulk in. Ibiza Rocks is not just a festival to her; Ibiza really does rock. In her new circle of friends nobody knows the other’s “story.” If nobody had asked they would not know she was Summa Cum Laude at Brown. She wakes each morning, still a bit lost from the night before, and she allows the sun to once again kiss her previously pale skin. She wanders around the resort or the yacht or the beach house and waits for everyone else. When there’s the silence because each one of her new friends are still asleep, she awakens her tablet. There she reads classic and renowned novels to refresh her and to remind herself of her stature in the world of academia. When Sylvia Plath writes about her queer summer, she laughs and feels each pin drop sorrow she could ever share with Sylvia. When Ernest Hemmingway tells her about how he just couldn’t end up with her, she smiles because she knows it to be true. Night falls once again, as it does every night, the same pattern and the same idea. One drink between friends and casual dance advances to shots of vodka and imported tequila. Shots of tequila and shots of vodka and imported Swedish beer lead to more. This is every night, yet never is one night identical to the one before it or the one before that one. I meet her at Ibiza Rocks. She makes me learn that Ibiza really does rock. I stay with her each night in a different cabin in a different yacht and we lose each other each night. Every morning we find ourselves back together, tangled so tightly. Arms wrapped up, legs intertwined, dark hair no longer distinct to one person. I lose her when she sails off on another yacht. She leaves me a hardbound copy of The Bell Jar. It sits on my white shelf. In a city called Malmö in the South Sweden lives the most intense romance I could ever fathom. It’s 4,264 miles away, situated upon the waters of what may be the North Sea or what may be the Baltic. There lives a woman in her late thirties. She rises each morning to an empty home and prepares a single plate of scrambled eggs and always two cups of coffee. She drives herself to the small school where she teaches. She imposes great ideals of love and loyalty upon to her young students. They come up to her and tell her “Good morning teacher!” and without faltering, each day she says “Good morning, darling, enjoy who you are.” She returns home, never stopping for a drink with her colleagues because they’re never the same jolly people they are when at school while at the local bar. Instead each night she turns on her television and continues the bottle of white wine she had started the most recent Monday. She never wonders why she didn’t find a “true love,” but she never knew she had to look for one. Instead, she looked for herself and found pieces of herself in Rome, in Seoul, in Madrid, in New York City. Most of her life, with the exclusions of her childhood and adolescence, there was no “us,” there was only ever her. She long knew that a home did not necessarily mean a small squadron of children nor did it mean living in a modern oppression under husband or under wife. Her home was built from her adventures and her travels. Never did she make traditional food, it was always a curry from a small restaurant in India or it was noodles from Yokohama. She baked with such enthusiasm that you might think she was a professional in Paris. Her entire home was a view of the Baltic- or maybe the North Sea. I meet her in a supermarket isle in a grocery a few blocks down from her home. We’re both in the magical isle that is the wine isle and she’s looking tenderly upon each bottle. One eyebrow is furrowed due to her careful examination of each bottle of white she picks up. Immediately noticing her, I struggle to maintain my composure, senselessly dropping a bottle of red wine thereby startling her. She lets out a faint gasp and scolds me as if I were a small child and she my teacher. Quickly apologizing to her for the fright I had seemingly induced, I offer up the knowledge I had of wine from my adventures in French vineyards. Humoring me, she allows me to drone on about certain grapes and just how important soil is. Before fifteen minutes has passed, she invites me to dinner. At dinner, I somehow find the ability to stop speaking on behalf of grapes and wine barrels and I learn about her position as teacher at the local primary school (primary school- and I thought I was an American). I have two more days in Sweden. The next day, I appear at the school that she teaches as and I overhear her tell the students to enjoy who they are as they exit the building and waddle their way to their respective parents’ arms. We stop by the magic wine isle again and she’s careful not to be too picky and definitely not to let me hold the wine. When we return home I join her on her couch, which I hope is from Ikea (it’s not), and force-feed her an episode or four of Grey’s Anatomy. We tell each other the stories of our siblings and the stories of our first kisses or the story of how on a rainy day she ended up in my hometown and how I ended up in Malmö, Sweden. We stay together and I have one more day in Sweden. I tell her this and on my departure day, I get on my train, and shortly jump off it. Our days and nights are filled with soft humming because no words have to be spoken so that we can enjoy the other’s company. When the lights kisses the dials of her kitchen we’ve already been sat on the floor sharing a small homemade bowl of frosting, leaving dabs of it one noses on mouths and kitchen tile. I’m not quite sure where this is, but I can tell you it’s in a desert elsewhere. The sky is blue, reflective of the lake that dried up decades ago. Collectively, the ground is a scary, deep orange. Singularly, each particle is almost tan and insignificant. Along a long road there’s a small watering hole and outside of it, black motorcycles with long stories fueling them and tattered trucks await their owners. The air is sticky everywhere, in the desert, in the watering hole. Apparent commoners to the watering hole continue on their journeys not wavering to my new presence in the place where their skin has become one with the backings of leather armrests and old, sticky carpeting. There’s nobody there except muscled men who sit together sharing stories. In a corner next to the jukebox, which notably has quite modern vinyl on the turntables, stands a tall woman who was more obviously darkened by the sun that does not know when to go down. She puts a quarter into the jukebox and a quiet piano melody plays, a woman’s voice looms into the room and she salutes tattoos and black motorcycles and the idea of freedom. Consumed in air, her arms are draped on my shoulders and we follow each beat of the song, dancing at increasingly slow speeds. We don’t smile; it’s almost a glare. When the penultimate beat of the song comes on, she releases my body back into the smog and casually leaves the watering hole. From inside I can hear the engine of a motorcycle rev, and I swear that I can feel the ground vibrate, and each particle finds a new home within itself.
Posted on: Fri, 28 Nov 2014 12:03:07 +0000
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