Dublin

So, I do this thing. I think many (most? all?) writers do it, which is that I consistently sacrifice my work on the altar of perfectionism. Not to play the tired, worn, obnoxious gifted kid card, but I think this really can be particularly difficult and pervasive for people who have been told from a young age that they are good at something. I will be uncharacteristically immodest for a brief moment and say that I am a good writer.

This perfectionism is not even necessarily just about crafting a perfect blog post, or a perfect short story for submission. It extends as well to things like the URL of my blog, or the theme I’m using. I’ve always had the most success when I can just say “ok, screw it, I’m going with what I have.” Which brings me to this post, on this blog.

Because seriously, ‘suitebergamasque’? What was I thinking? I was a pretentious sixteen year-old who loved Debussy, and did not give a second thought to whether anyone in my English-speaking audience could actually spell that URL. And so, at times when I’ve thought about resurrecting the idea of a personal blog, I have always thought, “ugh, but I’ll have to do something about the URL”.

Well, I didn’t do something about the URL. Yet here I am, posting 7 and some years after the last time I touched this blog.

This was always, fundamentally, a blog about living abroad. Not a travel blog, per se. The two times I’ve been most active on this blog have been when I was living in a country other than the one where I was born and raised. First it was France, then it was the UK. A sprinkling of Iceland in there, which I still count because I was living and learning during my time there, rather than vacationing, touring, and sightseeing.

So this felt like a very natural time to return to this blog, with its horrifically un-spellable (at least to Anglophones) URL. Because I am once again moving abroad. This spring, I accepted a job offer in Dublin, Ireland. I’ll be moving in August. Things are very different, this time. I won’t be a student on a student visa, with a fixed(ish) departure date. I’ll be a working professional. I’ll be living alone, not with a host family or a group of flatmates, at least while I wait for my partner’s permit to be vetted and approved.

On the topic of host families, there is no good place in this post to put this: Martine died last year after a very short and sudden illness. I did not make it to Rennes in time to say goodbye. There is a weird little hole in my heart, and it will never be filled, because that’s how death and grief work.

Martine and I kept in touch with a frequency that I have come to understand was somewhat unusual. Many SYA students do not keep in touch with their host parents at all, or correspond irregularly even if they do. Right up until her death last spring, we kept a regular email correspondence, totaling hundreds of messages. I last visited her in late 2023, and talking to her over coffee and on long walks felt just as natural as it had ten years earlier. My partner got to meet her, and I will always be so glad that we made that happen. When big things like this move happen in my life, I still think to myself, I should tell Martine. And then I remember.

There’s not much else to say about this.

As I’m preparing for this move, many things feel as if they’ve come full circle. I am applying for a long-term stay visa (this time, technically a permit) for the third time in my life. I am going through old clothes, some of which I wore in Rennes, and deciding what to give away. I am going through old books, including copies of books I fell in love with in Rennes (French Lessons, Frankenstein, The Picture of Dorian Gray) and deciding what will come with me and what I will donate, or put into storage.

Of course, in leaving my partner behind, I am leaving behind a piece of myself (three pieces, actually—we have two adorable pet rabbits who will also be joining me when Kat joins me).

So, I’m hoping to resurrect this blog. I can’t make any promises about regularity, but I think I’ll have a lot more to say about the themes I’ve explored in this blog.

this town is dead, my darling

What changes in five years? Tastes change, I guess. I’m twenty-one now and my tastes are different from when I was sixteen. I took things like the movies I watched and the books I read a little too seriously. I don’t mean seriously as in I cared about them too much. If I ever stop caring a little too much about the things I love I think I’ll have lost the best part of myself. What I mean by too seriously is that I thought everything I loved had to be a serious intellectual pursuit or else…or else what? Or else I was silly, or else I was setting myself up for failure somehow by watching and enjoying Iron Man 3?

It’s part of untangling the little knots of habits that form inside myself, meaningless standards and rules and needs that, if they go unquestioned for too long, start to kind of gnaw away at me. I’ve been suffering from hip and back pain for months now, because of little movement habits I’ve built up over years, that are now coming back to bite me.

I say this because even if you’re brought together by loving something, like a book or a movie or a television series, it doesn’t really matter when your tastes change or when creators let you down. It doesn’t matter if the story goes somewhere you don’t want it to, or maybe you go somewhere the story can’t follow.

It also doesn’t matter if, brought together by your slightly daring nature at the age of sixteen, you’re then forced back to your hometown, alone, without your friends from France. You can never go back, not really, just like you can never go back to reading Harry Potter for the first time as a first grader. Even if a specific feeling, or time, or place, can never come back, the friends you made still matter a whole lot.

Then again, maybe they change, maybe you drift apart. What stays the same? Even if nothing does, even if three years later you can’t go back to Rennes, you can sit on a porch on a sweaty New York night and talk about all the things that have happened to you since you last saw each other in Charles de Gaulle airport. I guess my point is that progress happens, that you can never go back. That everything changes, even values.

I can be defined by my moments: something nasty I said to my sister the other day, crying in a bathroom over a grade, chasing down a woman who dropped a piece of paper on 53rd St., telling someone “I love you”. I can be defined by kind and not-so-kind and completely neutral things I’ve done, or by growth, by the ways that every time I get kicked down by a bad grade on an exam or essay, it stings a little less, I spend less time before rebounding. I pick myself up so much faster than I did six months ago, a year ago, four years ago. That’s another habit I’m undoing, just like the way I stand and sit and type.

I can’t be sure that I learned something from spending ten weeks with a jam-packed schedule that barely left me time to sleep or see my girlfriend. I think I did though. Because in truth that’s all I’ve been doing the past several months: producing, directing, acting (briefly) in a play, while taking classes and TA-ing another class. I haven’t gone on any adventures, unless you count trips to the North Side. I haven’t done much that’s noteworthy, I didn’t take that many pictures. I just practiced picking myself up.

að læra íslensku

I’m sorry for disappearing. To be fair, I did that for like a year last year, and to be fair, I did that for two months four years ago as well, when I was busy living my last two months in Rennes. I disappear a lot, and I should probably try to get into a posting rhythm. It’s hard, though. I’ve spent eight weeks seeing my friends for the last time, going to London Pride, Stratford-Upon-Avon, Bletchley Park, and making memories I’ll cherish forever.

I had one last night in London; I took National Rail into the city from Clio’s, where I stayed on that last night and I walked from Waterloo up to Covent Garden, trying to soak up the last of the metropolis before going to one of the most remote places in Europe.

Now I’m in Iceland, learning Icelandic thanks to a generous grant from the University of Chicago. I’m in Ísafjörður, a tiny town of 2,000 residents barely south of the arctic circle. I’m so far north that the sun only barely sets in the evening. As I write this, it’s a quarter past ten and the northern twilight is still bright and blue.

I’m trying to push myself so hard into learning Icelandic. Now, what I have more than I’ve had the past nine months, is time. I spend all day learning Icelandic, in class learning Icelandic, listening to Icelandic music, watching dubs of movies in Icelandic, telling the doctor I have bronchitis in Icelandic. Now, I think I remember what made French easy. It was how oblivious I was, how much I had to let go and allow myself to make mistakes. Once I was a five-foot four sixteen year-old who couldn’t say her r’s or u’s and made four conjugation mistakes per sentence, and in order to become a twenty-one year-old in a hostel in Iceland getting asked “et toi, tu es de quelle région?”* she had to stumble over her words and forget things and screw up her tenses. She had to use flashcards.

*what region [of France] are you from?

Icelandic was something I wanted to learn for years. I don’t know what drew me to it. Maybe, because I listened to Sigur Rós sometimes I was drawn towards the country that had inspired this kind of haunting, ethereal and melancholy music. What could it possibly be like? When I was fifteen and first applied to study abroad, I named Iceland as a destination, and the sponsor laughed. I chose France because I spoke French and because it was realistic. Because of UChicago’s FLAG grant, this, too, became realistic. I had already been to Iceland, because I stopped over here for a few days both two summers ago on my way to visit Martine and on my way to London last year. The first time I spoke not a word of Icelandic, and the second time I had studied a little on Icelandic Online. After a year of auditing Basic Modern Icelandic I really just wanted more. Without taking the class for a grade, with four other classes to worry about, I didn’t learn as much as I would have liked.

In Ísafjörður, I walk through the tiny town along the harbor to class every day. There are fjords on both sides, and on some days they’re ringed with clouds and look like the came from Tolkien novels. Other days, clear days, they don’t look that different from the Rockies where I was born. Every few days, I pop into the bakery and order a kleina, which I almost always decline wrong. Here, the summer is winding down, the days are getting colder and windier, but they’re still used to tourists. They start in English, and I try to insist on Icelandic until I hit a word I don’t know and can’t dig up from the back of my memory. I pronounce things wrong all the time.

Here I am, stumbling over my words, learning yet another way to say ‘r’.

 

squat toilets in the magic forest and other adventures from the last two months

It’s been a little while. Two months and three days, if I’m being precise. Here’s what’s happened:

• Almost all my professors went on strike because of pension cuts. Some of them didn’t, and still expected me to cross the picket line. This was pretty annoying.
• I went to Budapest with my grandmother. We saw some cool things, including but not limited to: the Hungarian parliament, the banks of the Danube, the Hungarian national museum, the Dohany St synagogue, and basically the entire city of Bratislava. English tours of the Hungarian parliament were all full up, so we took the French tour. My grandma doesn’t speak a word of French.
• I went to Spain and met up with my dad. We went to Madrid and visited the Prado and Museo Reina Sophia, which are comparable to the Louvre/Orsay and Centre Pompidou, respectively. If we’re making analogies.
• This is where my diary gets much more uninteresting, filled with notes of “email x”, “reply to y”, “submit z”.
• I campaigned for Labour in Wandsworth. They came so close, but didn’t win.
• I watched Eurovision, and was very sad that Finland, my personal favorite, didn’t win. I also really liked the French submission. The UK submission was the subject of a stage invasion, so that was fun.
• I took my Mandarin exam.
• I went to Rennes. I visited the FRAC, the contemporary art museum in Rennes, which is something I’ve meant to do for ages and ages, for four years. It was everything I hoped. Which is to say, super weird.
• Also in Bretagne: Martine and her boyfriend took me to the Forêt de Brocéliande, which is where the legend of King Arthur is said to have taken place. In the midst of this magic, the only public restroom happily had squat toilets.
• We went to Cancale for a carnival, which was tacky. I loved it anyway.
• I went to visit my friend Nora in her village, about twenty minutes’ drive from Rennes.
• I met Melanie of croissant blog fame. Finally. After FIVE YEARS of emailing, I met Melanie!
• I came back to a scorching city, with a little over a month left.

architecture lessons

For some inexplicable reason, the Gherkin always sort of represented London for me. I have no idea why. I don’t know why fourteen year-old me didn’t pick something more conventionally London, like Tower Bridge, or Big Ben, or Hyde Park. Nah. I really loved that enormous Fosterian phallus blighting the London skyline. To me it meant London. If I could see the Gherkin, that would mean I’d achieved that goal that was so important to me. It would mean I was in London. That’s where I made my beeline in March 2014.

In March 2014, when I visited, the Gherkin sort of looked like it was standing alone. There were other tall buildings in the City of London, sure. (As a side note: the city and the City are two different things. The City, with a capital C, is the most central part of London, where the main financial district is. It’s only a square mile.) But those other tall buildings were far enough away that you could still see the Gherkin from a way’s off. And if they were taller, they weren’t THAT much taller.

Now, from almost every angle, it’s like the Gherkin is fenced in by other skyscrapers. There’s something to be said about what that symbolises to me, this previously important landmark being almost invisible from other parts of London. I remember when the Shard looked enormous to me. It was the tallest building I had ever seen. Then I moved to Chicago and looked almost every day at Sears Tower from the lakefront. Suddenly, my perspective had changed.

What do I mean to say here? I suppose a couple of things. My view on what’s important has changed. I used to dream about glass skyscrapers. When I was sixteen, I figured out that if I lived somewhere with skyscrapers, that would mean I’d gotten what I’d wanted, my whole life, which was to live somewhere bigger and better than my hometown. That’s still what I want, but the moment I moved to Chicago I achieved it, and I didn’t want to just stay in one place, satisfied by having reached that one goal. And I’ve realised that to some degree those glass skyscrapers get a little derivative and boring. Some of them are pretty, sure. Some of them have provoked enormous aesthetic debates. Some of them are just plain ugly. JP, for example, hates the Gherkin.

You remember JP, right? He taught me and the rest of SYA France everything there was to know about aesthetics in painting, sculpture, photography, and architecture. He made us question what art is, and what makes art good.

theatre of the absurd

The first time I stepped onstage was in the first grade, when I played Sarah Josepha Hale in the Thanksgiving play. Not really a breakout role. I loved it, though, and dreamed of doing it again. The opportunity never really came along until the ninth grade, when I played a neck-breaking five (minor) roles in Number the Stars: The Musical. A massive mistake for my ego and basic human decency in general.

Never again, I swore.

Then college rolled around, and I thought I might do it again. I auditioned for Medea and wasn’t cast, but after running into the director and giving her freshman puppy eyes, she cast me in a role that someone else had already turned down. Corinthian Woman 2. My theater career at UChicago had begun.

From there, Autumn quarter of freshman year, I participated in a couple of twenty-four hour festivals as an actor. Just barely out to myself, I made out with another woman onstage. I wasn’t sure what that meant for me or for my identity, but I liked it. I wasn’t me. I was a character, and more specifically, a caricature.

Next quarter I was a satanic grandmother, resurrected from her bloody death. Other than that role, chosen by lottery, I wasn’t cast in anything, so I cried, picked myself up, and volunteered for a position as an assistant set designer. I painted the bog in By The Bog of Cats. I rolled on the texture to make it look appropriately mystical. I textured the rocks leading up to Hester Swane’s caravan.

Next quarter, I was cast as a chorus member in The Bacchae, and then promoted to Agave. I wailed as I realised that in a fit I had killed my own son. Someone approached me and asked me to be the lead set designer for a play the following winter, and I pretended like I knew what I was doing. I asked to direct textual excerpts from Dorian Gray as a play the next fall. The committee said yes. I did it.

The winter rolled around, and I was a set designer. I made bold decisions like I had an idea what the set should look like. I told people what to order online, what I wanted the bed and the bedspread in Geography of a Horse Dreamer to look like. I told people what dimensions I wanted them to build a platform in, and it materialised. I wondered if I’d made a mistake or if I’d been overconfident. I put on Carly Rae Jepsen and jammed out while I textured the platform like a carpet, and it looked amazing. The whole set, under the lights, looked amazing. I was proud.

I was cast as Flavius in Timon of Athens. I performed the whole play in drag. It was the best role I’d ever been in.

I crossed the ocean. I auditioned for As You Like It. I wasn’t cast. I auditioned for a couple other plays. I wasn’t cast. I stopped for a little while, but when UCL was putting on twenty-four hour plays, just like I had done already a half-dozen times, I put my name in. Exhausted, I narrated a Scandinavian fairy tale on twelve hours of rehearsal and six of sleep. It was exhilarating to be onstage again.

I interviewed to direct a monologue in a language I don’t speak. I felt like I was twisting knobs, flicking switches, making tiny adjustments to perfect something I didn’t fully understand.

Then, the federated university of London did a twenty-four hour theater festival, and I filled out the google form. I wasn’t even scared, not this time. Getting handed a script that next morning felt like going home, in a way, and when the one-person play I had directed came together later that evening, it felt like perfect harmony.

I can’t describe what happened with Medea, or how perfect it felt, how exhilarating being on stage is. For every character whose shoes I’ve stepped into, I’ve taken on a new energy, felt something new, and I always audition in pursuit of that. In that way, I’m a little like an addict, a benign one. I feel like I’m constantly chasing that feeling, reaching the pinnacle of satisfaction when I lose myself completely. And there’s the other side of that, watching a million pieces slot together as a director, remembering the choices you made and watching as they all fit together to create something beautiful.

unmoored/trusting myself

I’ve started learning how to find my own way home.

I’m not going to go on some diatribe about the evils of the digital age. Google maps has done me far more good than it has harm. When I was sixteen, I wandered around this city with an A-Z in hand and got so hopelessly lost all the time. I was always asking directions, checking street signs. I looked like a tourist. I was a tourist. Back then I didn’t have a data plan here, just good old fashioned minutes and SMS. Pay-as-you-go.

Now, I’m glued to Citymapper when I need to go somewhere new. But Covent Garden, Clerkenwell, Farringdon, Soho, and Bloomsbury aren’t ‘somewhere new’. They’re my neighborhood. I should know my way around by now. So sometimes, often at the worst of times, when it’s pouring rain, I pocket my phone and challenge myself: find your way home from Covent Garden station, from the river, from LSE, from King’s College, from the Apple Store. Find your way back. Trust yourself like you trusted yourself when you were sixteen, blundering around the city with a street atlas. Only now you’re not blundering. Then, find your way back.

This became less of a challenge and more of a practical exercise when I had to take my phone screen to get replaced on Wednesday. They don’t give you a temporary phone if the repair will take less than 24 hours, so I was unmoored. Untethered, without a navigator, and forced to rely, as I once did, on the numerous and helpful street signs around London. Or, if I wanted to play on hard mode, forced to rely on my own mental map, without peeking. Like conjugating Icelandic verbs without a dictionary this morning. Trust yourself. Cover the tables. Don’t stop to look at the map.

Right on Tottenham Court Road. Ég er. Right on New Oxford Street. Þú ert. Slight left on Theobalds road. Hann er. Left on Lamb’s Conduit. Við erum. Turn right on the street I don’t remember the name of. Það eruð. Right on Farringdon Road, so close. Þeir eru. You’re home.

It’s hard, when you have that friendly little helper in your pocket, to trust yourself to go the right way, particularly when you can check. But that last turn past the park, when I can see my building, is so much more satisfying when I don’t. I know my way. I made it.

 

(version française)

French was so easy. I don’t remember how I did it. Maybe it was easier because my brain was younger, not as plastic as a four-year-old’s, of course. But still flexible. I feel like I breathed in French, in-out and that it just came to me, long before I ever set foot in a Francophone country. In-out. I went online, I talked to French teenagers about television shows and I made a thousand gender mistakes, a thousand conjugation mistakes, a million word-order mistakes. I tried so hard, so earnestly. Maybe what I had back then, more than I have now, was just time.

Sometimes I have a hard time fitting my mouth around French. That’s true. /r/ doesn’t quite come out of my mouth right, or I use /u/ when I should use /y/.

Je trouve que tu as même pas d’accent, said Mme Frelaut when, one night in Rennes, a few weeks ago, she took me back home at almost midnight. Me? I trouve that I have an accent. I hear it roll off my tongue all the time, particularly when I’m tired I hear myself, I hear my intonation and I’m ashamed of it, sometimes. There’s no reason to be.

Tu parles bien le français vous parlez bien le français ton français est incroyable tu parles si bien. But then when I say la chauffage instead of le chauffage the mistake echoes around in my head, because I’m so dumb, how could I have made a mistake like that when it comes so easily to native speakers to know the gender of heating? I hear it when I pass someone on the street and say pardon, and I wonder if they hear the strangled way I pronounce /r/ or the half-hearted way I nasalise the last vowel.

When I was sixteen it just fed into my sense of never belonging, being mocked when the oars kept hitting me full-bore in the chest as I rowed with a crew of boys for the first time. Sitting down at a table at Jean-Macé and having the girls who were already sitting there move away. Trying to laugh it off when I go right for a bisou and the other person goes left.

And yet despite my accent, French feels like it’s in my bones, like it’s calcified inside of me.

“Do you ever feel like you get stuck in French?” Rachel asked me the other day.

Absolutely. French has written itself into the way that I think, injecting itself into my native language. However fake it sounds, sometimes when recalling conversations with people I know speak both, I have trouble remembering if they took place in French or English. When Madeline told me the directions to her dorm did she say it in French or English? I can see us so vividly crossing the street, chatting, I remember the time of day and the way the light was hitting the pavement at dawn but I can’t remember which language we were talking in.

I’m a late bilingual, with all the glitches that come from that. But I am a bilingual. But that’s all I am.

---

I tried to replicate the easiness of French. I tried to reverse-engineer the way that I learned it. Everyone said, you have such a gift for languages and I believed them. That’s not why I decided to study linguistics, but when I had to take a third language in order to finally become a linguist, I thought it would be no problem.

I was so hilariously wrong. Every step I took in Hebrew was painful. It felt like dragging myself through mud. I never had to study for French: I looked at a conjugation table, and it stuck. I learned a tense, it stuck. The only thing that didn’t stick was the gender of words. Everything else was like glue, permanently written down somewhere in my brain, where words are stored so that even though it might have been six years since I learned the word for pear I can still throw it out. It’s there.

Nothing stuck in Hebrew. Vocabulary left my head as soon as it entered, I forgot words that I had studied the day before. I worked through flash cards again and again and again and missed words again and again and again. I spelled things wrong. I stumbled in conversation. I got Bs and Cs on quizzes, when I had used to get 99 percent on French tests, so ingrained was the grammar and vocabulary in my head. I went to my professor’s office once, sure I would make a fool of myself but hoping to get some help. Afterwards, she said “you speak so well, but I’m not sure why that’s not reflected on your quizzes”.

What happened to that “gift” from before?

Sometimes, in the margins of my notes at UCL, I’ll scribble:

אני לא מדברת עברית

            I don’t speak Hebrew.

אני למדתי עברית

            I studied Hebrew.

Compared to French, Hebrew hurt. It was hard, it was painful.

---

Hebrew didn’t fit with my schedule at UCL. Instead, I’m taking Mandarin, and Icelandic. As different as two languages could be, basically. One is Sinitic, the other is Indo-European. One has no declension or agreement of any kind. The other has a declension system from hell. One is written in characters, the other is written in Latin script.

I don’t know why the third was the hardest. Maybe because, while I was learning Hebrew, I ached for French, the language that I had already nearly mastered. Maybe because, contrary to my own perception, French wasn’t actually that easy. Maybe Hebrew was so hard because, unlike French, I expected it to be easy. I wasn’t prepared for learning a third language to be just as hard as learning the second. I expected it to come easier, because I’d done it once. I thought I was so wise and sage and that everything I had learned from French would transfer over, and I was so wrong.

Either way, despite the tone system, despite the characters that haunt my dreams and the daily alerts I have on my phone, reminding me to study Mandarin characters, it’s come easier.

Icelandic has been harder, but I have it less often. I’ve been learning it less methodically, putting in less effort because I’m only auditing the class, not taking it for a grade. But Icelandic is number five, and I think that what I learned from number three and to a certain extent number four has made number five easier. Don’t get me wrong, my Icelandic still sucks. But I’m getting there.

spring / sun / winter / dread

I love watching the seasons turn in London. I arrived in late summer, from Iceland, where autumn was already starting to creep in, or maybe it hadn’t ever really left. I had arrived in Iceland from muggy, wet Chicago, which is so hot it’s suffocating, and so humid it’s like being smothered.

London summer was bright and uncomfortably warm, but not scorching like Albuquerque summers or muggy like Chicago summers. It was green, green filling every space and every corner, so green I had no idea where it could all possibly come from.

Then that green started taking on a yellow tinge, going a bit brown and a bit droopy. It didn’t start like it does in Albuquerque, with chilly nights to mirror the warm days. It started with more rain, cold rain instead of summer showers. It started with more cloudy days, none of that famous fog but instead rain and overcast skies. The miz du, like they say in Bretagne, just a quick jaunt across the channel from here.

When I came back from Denmark, that’s when autumn had truly settled in. I stopped leaving the flat without a coat, started being careful about leaving without an umbrella. Denmark had been foggy and chilly in the way that ripples along your skin. London had, magically, over the weekend, taken its cues from Copenhagen.

That’s when the winter celebrations started: Winter Wonderland in Hyde Park, Christmas markets in every neighbourhood, mulled wine, huddling together for warmth. Red and dripping noses, apple cider, hot chocolate, the kitschy winter aesthetic. More than that, fogged-up windows, feet on the heater, flannel pyjamas. It was still autumn though. You could still see green in some places, the leaves were still falling and people were still cleaning them up. Chicago saw its first snow of the season.

I missed the beginning of winter because I was in Rennes. There, it was wet and cold and windy. It is Brittany, of course it was wet and cold and windy. I sort of assume the same for Great Britain. Now that I’m back, and have been for two weeks, the chill has stopped being the kind that runs along your skin and started being the kind that settles inside of you. The trees are clear of leaves other than the last few, shrivelled, crunchy brown ones that refuse to drop. I love it. I love winter.

après tout je me fous de l’angleterre

I used to say I would never use song lyrics for my blog post titles. I used to promise myself a lot of things, pretentious things. I made up fake rules for myself, tried to cultivate an image of myself that wasn’t who I am. My whole life I’ve listened to music. I spend my time surrounded by it. Spotify says that I spent 42 solid days listening to music last year. Alluding to what I’m listening to, making it part of my writing, can be who I am.

I used to say I wouldn’t use emojis because they were juvenile. You know what? I love emojis. I love emoticons. 🙂

I used to try not to smile on public transport because I wanted locals to think I was one of them. These days I giggle on the tube when Jenna tries to speak in her terrible fake English accent.

I was so weird when I was sixteen. Arthur Rimbaud wrote that on n’est pas sérieu[se], quand on a dix-sept ans. Martine says that I was too serious. Everyone says that I was too serious. I’ve already talked about that.

When I was sixteen I was obsessed with the TV show Sherlock, making people think I was an intellectual, and getting perfect grades. I wanted to be a lawyer or a politician. I didn’t think I would ever fall in love.

I’ve changed. How am I so different?

–

Photos souvenirs is an old-ish song by William Sheller, but I know it because Christine and the Queens covered it in 2013, the year I left for France. I listened to it for the first time while walking through St Andrew’s Gardens the day before I left for Paris, five weeks ago. It’s about remembering an old love and the vacations you spent together in England on one of your birthdays. It’s about forgetting, about moving on. Après tout je me fous de l’Angleterre, et j’aurai bien d’autres anniversaires. Je vis la vie que je voulais mener, à quoi bon tout changer pour te retrouver, et te chercher partout? 

After all, I don’t care about England, and I’ll have other birthdays. I’m living the life I wanted to live, what would be the point of changing it all just to find you again, of looking for you everywhere? 

It’s a love song. It’s a fizzled-out-love song, more specifically.

Unlike some songs, it’s not the perfect song to describe my life. There is someone from France I care deeply about who is reflected, to some extent, in these lyrics, but not really to a tee. Mostly, I love the song because of the conviction in the singer’s (cover-er’s) voice when she says je vis la vie que je voulais mener (I’m living the life i wanted to live). It’s true. Sixteen year-old Abi would die if she knew where twenty year-old Abi is: living the life that she wanted so badly, that she thought would never come.

When I was sixteen, I wrote this poem.

Central Line

So with two months unfolding at their tips
Accordion-like
I am long from London now
And the sensations that wrack me now
Will sooner or later dull to washed-out watercolors
Because all these minor cities are nothing
Compared to the reality of the blue book
That reads “Passport”
Compared to the stamped date of return.
They are drifting away on fingertips
And they are slipping from my grip.

Oyster: please reuse your card
A promise, a guarantee written in glittering dust
Blue-yellow-red whirlwinds
Spinning their way below the surface
Human shifting
Displacement
But the tube trains are less frequent by the minute
Leaving me in the white-tiled tunnels without a ride
As the service hours draw to a close.
“Please reuse your card”
It is getting harder every moment
To spend the credit left before I’m gone
30 St Mary Axe has already vanished
The Shard following
As they collapse from my mindscape
Replaced by Compass Bank
The gleaming dream structures toppled by
Structural reality
My foundations are cracking
Struts bending and breaking—snap

(I wasn’t the best poet when I was sixteen).

I was so scared that I would never get what I wanted, that after I left France I’d be grounded forever in New Mexico, and I hated that idea. But I wasn’t. I moved to Chicago a year and a half later. I moved to London two years after that. I’m moving back to Chicago in the summer but that doesn’t make me sad. Just because France ended didn’t mean my life was boring or depressing, although for a while it was really hard.

Maybe sixteen year-old me would be sad that she’d abandoned her “image”. That she posts emotionally on her blog now instead of remaining aloof and sanitized and never sharing her true thoughts about things. Perhaps she’d be mortified that I’m sharing her poems where the world can see them. Maybe she’d be sad that she doesn’t get compared to emotionally constipated television characters anymore. Maybe she’d be angry that I use emojis and still have an accent in French, but I don’t think so. I think she’d be glad to know how happy I am. I think.