What haven't I told you about the time I spent in France? Arriving in Paris very jetlagged, meeting Zach and waiting alone in Gare du Nord for him, completely hazy and lost, not understanding a single word. Then the train ride like a hallucination, transferring at Dijon, and Zach hoisting my enormous bags onto the platform at Dole, hopping back onto the train, and waving, and me starting to cry, sweaty, exhausted, and lost, with no one at the station to meet me, and no French words to say how I felt or what I needed. And then the porter stepping across the tracks, taking my bags, and calling the school.
The first night alone in the convent where I lived and taught. The shallow hollows in the stone stairs. The smell of the head teacher's office. The shine on thebald head of her deputy. I felt lost, had no telephone, no email, no way to talk to my family or to Zach. I wanted to go home. I hated the language I couldn't make heads or tails of.
Until without really noticing it I began to know where I was--to recognise the gaps between words, the names of streets, the tone that meant someone was joking. I cried in front of everyone, including my students (who then softened and took care of me). I walked everywhere. Got to be friends with the other foreign English teachers, in the way that you will if you have to. Made a few good friends outside of the UK/US cohort. Moved into a tiny, dingy, dark apartment and made things there, and was lonely, and went walking, and broke up with my boyfriend, and went a little mad as you do, and got sick, and had intolerable crushes on French boys, and took the train back and forth to Belfort to see Zach, and visited England, and suddenly came to the end of my contract.
* * *
I think sometimes my life seems charmed. It is. I have lived so many places, seen so many things, been free to make art and write and travel and send postcards. But it's also days in places that are far away from my family, my landscape, my old friends, familiar sounds. It's feeling foreign. It's being listless and feeling guilty for that, because I'm lucky enough to live as I do. The side of France I didn't talk about so much was the difficult one, the one that taught me about being a stranger and not-belonging. Taught me a lot about patience and letting things go. But it wasn't all tiny white lights hanging in the streets of a provincial French town where the bakers know your name and the butcher sings opera while he works.
Today is Bastille Day and I wanted to write about France, which for me represents both a time of liberation--of taking a huge chance and learning so much about myself, what I want, how I want to be, and the world--and of great stress. The difficult things about the year I lived there don't make it any less important for me, but I think it's good to acknowledge (and make clear to you, too) that they were there.
Labels: My life
