Tuesday, November 14, 2006

How I feel about Paris today

I miss Paris so bad it HURTS!!!! Reading posts like this one KILL me. I want to live in Paris, I want to smugly describe my ridiculously typical Parisian Sunday afternoons spent in some of the most famous streets in the world. When my sister came to see me in Paris and we had made all of our bar rounds and were stumbling over to the Seine by Notre Dame to get a good look at the pretty water, in the middle of the night, when she exclaimed, “I understand why you like it so much here, this is kinda nice”. That moment sent me into hysterics and the mere memory of it still makes my heart skip a beat, my breath quicken, and tears well up at my eyelids threatening to spill out. I want Paris, I miss Paris! This is worse than a crush on a boy that I can’t quite shake. This is worse than a full blown affair with a guy that I can’t stop thinking about and wondering if I disrespected myself the night before by offering up my body on a platter to yet another man that will probably never call again, but that I don’t want to have to deal with anyways. This feeling, this particular longing, is worse than that. My shoulders tense and my stomach starts to do little flips in place and I become saturated with a look of quite desperation, feeling as though I am drowning in my overwhelming desire to walk down a street, enter a café (yes, I am being that cliché), spend money I shouldn’t be spending in a boutique, sit by the river and write sad poetry about missing America, my life and family here. I want all of that, everyday. I would rather be there missing here than here missing there! It hurts more to be here missing there. There missing here entails a certain knowledge and nostalgia that is safe in it’s familiarity and my overall understanding that I will always be from here, I will come back here and have family here for as long as I am alive. That makes it okay, but this…this missing, longing, slow disintegration of friendships and feelings is dreadful. I hate this missing. I have often compared Paris to a lover, a lover that I never get sick of for a very long time, a lover that I have fled only to return uselessly begging of forgiveness for my rashness of decision to ‘quit’ them. Paris is a woman, I am sure of that, and I love Paris so much that I am just fine with the concept of falling in love with someone because of who they are regardless of their gender. My enslavement to the emotional desires of Paris has effectually turned me into a lesbian vying for her attention. I love you Paris, you know this, it is not the first time I have exclaimed such folly, announced such obsession and desire to be with you, or to be me in you, for you to live, breath and perpetuate yourself in me forever. I love you and I am trying…so hard…to get back to you.

‘A husband said to his wife, “if one of us dies, I’m going to Paris”’ - Sigmund Froid

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