The End, Or Rather The Beginning Once Again

I’m back home.

It’s strange how much I feel reintegrated into life already. I’ve had a few cultural shock moments of re-assimilation: I forgot how to lock my cell phone’s keypad after turning it on for the first time in months today, and, while on JetBlue’s flight today, I marveled at the size of the cans of soda—they seemed impossibly generous—until I realized that they were standard size and France’s size were the smaller ones. Nevertheless, I’ve reintegrated: one of the first things I did upon coming back was to go to the gym, which I haven’t done for months. But there I was in the regiments of exercisers on my regimen.

Home is instantly familiar, and once I felt the sting of cold on my cheeks, I knew that I was home, if only temporarily, and if only one of them (one of the great things about college is the acquisition of multiple homes, so that you can experience that wonderful feeling of return, the feeling that everything has an order and you’re part of it, several times a year). But being home meant I was gone from Paris, which for me rests as a kind of waystation, a convalescence home or something—it’s tough to think of it either as a home or a vacation spot, what with the time that I’ve spent on it and vice versa.

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My trip to get here ended up being mercifully easy, but I must say that I was worried about it. I had decided to go to the airport on the 6:00 AM RER train at the latest, but to shoot for the 5:45 AM train as an ambitious goal.

My worries were these: besides the normal anxieties of flight and travel, I also did not have an alarm clock, which, given the fact that I’d missed a finals and had to pull a Blanche du Bois (you know, depending on the kindness of others), haunted me. So when I woke up at 2:33 AM in the morning with pains and chills, I was unable to go back to sleep, with these two conflicts pressuring my mind: how badly am I sick, and will I make my flight? Everything was answered well, and it seems silly now—I certainly feel silly remembering my earnest attempts to self-diagnose—but I was wracking myself with worry; I felt as if I were a desperate searcher pushing through my mind searching for some lost article.

As I left Paris, dark still hanging on, all that turned to melancholy, the full reality which I had been anticipating for a week at least, that I was leaving and that it would be a while before I could come back. I immediately set to plotting my return—how? when? for what ostensible reason (because the real reason would always be to reclaim what I was relinquishing: to have no task but enjoying myself for months on end)?—and rejecting it as a unique moment in my life and in the historical moment.

The fortune that I had, in coming at this moment in the first year of Sarkozy’s term, is immeasurable. The turbulence that jostles France is a change in the winds. People are uncertain about their direction, and some want to orient towards the US—look at the number of students who want to work in the US after all—and all this is at the same moment that I saw myself orienting more towards the French direction, of less work and more enjoyment of life.

Hell, you can even see it in their airports. Charles de Gaulle’s security was laid-back, which after the British and American editions, seems impossibly contradictory. I didn’t take off my shoes for their metal detector. I didn’t see that giant transparent barrel, that trophy, that displays all the confiscated contraband, as if too-large toothpaste containers are going to destroy the West.

In my doldrums in the airports—isn’t it ironic that no matter how much of the circus they bring in for their captive audience, the captives can’t help but be bored?—I ended up reflecting on all the things I had seen and done, and a procession of images marched through my mind: pastries from patisseries, a child begging her mom for candy then eating it before they even leave the store, two children leaning out over the quai watching for the oncoming train goaded on by their dad who leaned with them only to dash back as a joke confusing his children, the saliva that floods the mouth at the mere sight of a dessert crepe, walking through the city late in the night when no one but myself walks with a serene cathedral silence, the vivid orange streaks of clouds as the sun sets, but also the bad things too, the strikes, the homeless reposing in each and every metro station, the disenfranchised youth, the indifferent bureaucracy, and on and on and on until it all blurs together into some impression, part concrete image but mostly a feeling of contentment. And that was when I knew that that was the end of all that, and that another part of my life was set to begin. My first decade ended and my second one has begun, which I guess makes me almost some sort of adult or something like that (not to be wishy-washy about my characterizations).

So thanks everyone for reading during this trip, I hope you’ve enjoyed it.