let’s go to sleep in paris, wake up in

Went to the Chinese market in the ghetto, bought a motherfucking turkey.

wander

I took myself on a walk before work to the Jardin du Luxembourg, which is sort of near the Sorbonne. The things you find on a wander are often quite remarkable in scope — gigantic beautiful churches alongside a hospital with well-wishers outside next to a shop window with humidity stacked just right.

It is the uncertainty we long for, the moment at the edge, the possibility of infinity. It is not the held breath nor its release that we desire but rather what comes in between: the anticipation, the lightheadedness, the point at which we could deviate from the familiar, the tangible, the known. And when we fail, time and time again, to venture where we have not been before, we should not be surprised. We were not made to remember the way; we were not made to last. Living is a process of forgetting. And so it is only in dreams that we may recall, fleetingly, the treachery of being born, the heaviness of air, the grace of flight.

stuffed

I made thanksgiving and it was ridiculous. I made braised turkey and sweet potato maple gratin and warm savoy cabbage salad and two kinds of butter and merguez and cornbread stuffing with pine nuts and cilantro. DAMN it was good.

and then we put away 15 bottles of wine.

11.24.09

yesterday first oil touched hillary (the painting we are working on), a moment the territory has been building towards for a year and a half now. we celebrated accordingly. champagne and happiness in the studio! working for a painter is swell.

11.23.09

Woke up, sneezed in the garden, worked, went to a bilingual poetry reading, noticed the Notre Dame. Again.

this weekend

me too.

left and leaving

I have been lax about updating this. That I know. So I’ve made a resolution to put something up daily (I know! We’ll see how long this lasts), be it pictures or words or some combination of the two.

I’ve nothing to contribute from today, I am still recovering from my tryst with swine flu. I’ve been busy, but that’s what everyone says; instead of excuses, let’s start from the beginning. I snapped these photos immediately before I left for Paris. They contribute a nice mood of goodbye, I think, with some good food thrown in.

approximately

I have a scab that will not heal. It is in between my last two knuckles on my left hand, half-moon shaped, a raised bump that is unnoticed unless I am meaning to notice it. I could not tell you when it appeared or how long it has been there, but I imagine that once it is gone I will not be bothered until the day I turn my head and find the place empty.

I moved to Paris on September 8 of this year. Although, perhaps it would be more accurate to state that on September 7, I stepped onto an overnight flight, that sedated limbo passing over an ocean, over lakes and rivers and streams, over all of the places I have called home at any point in the last 21 years. It was a one-way.

In some respects this is the culmination of the same story I have always known: one that has lived inside of me, whispering, jeering, shouting, crying out for as long as I have felt a grain of self-awareness in my breast. There are qualities in myself that I have come to revere — my own aloofness, the bold seed — that must take their place next to the ones that I admire with less fervency. And, much like the scab, I could not tell you from where these traits arose, or how long I have known their tune, but it doesn’t matter: for the first time in my life I am singing along.

‘I also didn’t really understand why you left everything behind on a whim, and I don’t think I can,’ a friend of mine said to me recently, a flourish to end a mounted list of grievances. Please don’t misunderstand me here. I moved across an ocean to be harshly alone, yes. I moved here to live in an alley and do some ordinary things and some extraordinary ones. I moved here to get away from what I thought I knew previously, and consider the things I might have actually known.

But it runs deeper than that — through forests and fields, across skylines cluttered and empty, through New York and Missouri and Kansas and Virginia and The District of Columbia and Atlanta and Birmingham and stretching all the way to rural Siberia. I might trace this ache of mine with my fingers forever, just insofar that when it is finally gone, I will notice its exit before the day I turn my head and mark the absence, a faint little ring of scar in place of where it lived in me.

still totally incredulous about my new life. sometimes gambles really do pay off. update soon. i am still processing.