paper journal paper journal

some excerpts. a l'expédition francaise.

03/04/11 -- Paris, France

There is a strangeness to learning how to lose someone that you already missed. How do you deal with grief and loss when you've gotten so used to living with the absence of loved ones? Right up until N. cried in front of me for the first time, I didn't really believe that he was gone. It felt untrue, like a badly-told story, like an infinitely cruel joke. But he's gone. And I'm not confronted with the shock of that every day because I've already been practicing missing him for eight and a half months.

05/04/11 -- Paris, France

I didn't notice last time how many cats there are in Pere Lachaise. Feral little things the lot of them, but oddly charming. There's one black one in particular that's been following me around the place. I'm sitting next to Oscar's tomb right now, and he [the cat] keeps peering around graves to watch me, disappearing for a bit, and then checking in again. It's almost like he wants me to follow him.

06/04/11 -- Auvers-sur-Oise, France

The song might be about Paris, but it feels like spring for the first time here. Everything is golden and bright, and flowers are blooming everywhere. I got up early this morning and caught the train here, changing at Pontoise where I basked in the sun for half an hour, soaking the heat into myself like a cat. The train ride here was charming, in a carriage I shared with a raucous group of boys on their way to school. When I walked out of the station onto the main street, the bells of the Eglise were chiming 10 in the morning, and I knew instantly, the way you do, that this was the right place for me to come.

...

On the hill about the Musée Daubigny (where Van Gogh lived and died), there is a concave cliff. It is clay-coloured, but wreathed in the green of the surrounding forest, and dotted with the reds and yellows of wildflowers. In a shelf set into the cliff near the top, there is a small white statue of the Virgin Mary.

...

(written on the train back to Paris) The last place I visited was the grave of Vincent and Théo. It's in a graveyard just outside the town, past the Eglise. It is not a famous Parisian graveyard; there are no markers on how to find certain of its inhabitants, and despite being clear of weeds the graves themselves are mostly badly upkept. I was the only one there. I have visited a lot of dead people here, and I do so again tomorrow in the Catacombs, but none of them have moved me like this. The brothers' grave is on the edge of the graveyard, and the simplest but strangely beautiful thing: two white headstones, and a thick patch of green ivy rather than stone. Even in death, even as one of the most famous and important painters of all time, Vincent is modest and practically uncelebrated. I stood at the foot of it for a long, long time, and cried.

08/04/11 -- on the bus ride back to London, primarily the Chunnel

Last night I drunkenly wandered the streets of Montmartre at 2am, looking for crepes. Paris, Paris, you will always hold a piece of my heart. Maybe one day I will even live inside you. For now, though, it's London that's home.

paris in the springtime

(Paris: my métro entrance, a view from the Promenade Plantée, Notre Dame from the South Bank, Monet's Les Nymphéas at Le Musée de l'Orangerie, paintings for sale, lilac blooming on a typical café, and the best bookshop in the world.)

There is a secret garden in Paris. It, like most secrets, hides in plain sight, and offers itself up as a reward for those willing to look a little harder and in different directions. It is called le Promenade Plantée, and it's on top of a disused suburban commuter rail line. It's one of those things only Parisiens tend to know about; a boy I met in Edinburgh told me about it - he had lived here for five years. It was my first stop today, and as I wandered through part of it, it felt like I'd tumbled into a children's novel.

And then it was down onto street level, and back into the real world of Paris in the spring, which is not really the real world at all. One of the first sounds I heard when I arrived in the city was an accordian being played on the métro as I travelled to my hostel. The first thing anyone says to me without me approaching them first is "she has stolen my heart! What can I do, I have a hole in my chest. I will keep my tears there." This is from a young Frenchman working at my hostel (joking about his coworker, who he swoops in to kiss on the cheek as she laughs), while I wait in line to check in. He's small and bearded, with a nosering, and it takes me five minutes to fall in love.

Paris in the springtime. The air smells of lilac (sometimes, when it doesn't smell of bread or coffee or spices or piss). I have already grown a lightness here. I wrote two poems to day, and a whole skein's worth of diary entry. When I was thinking about Cities of the Dead yesterday, I forgot that Paris is also a city of emotions; London is not. I am beginning to carry my scars on my chest, instead of my back.

city of the dead

A few scenes from around my hostel on the Canal St-Martin, and the jazz band I just came upstairs from listening to.

Leaving London this morning, I felt a surge of pure, dumb fear. It grew as we travelled further and further away, until I was nauseous from nerves. I was scared; I wanted to go home. That was how I knew that taking this trip was the right decision to make. It confirms my suspicions that I was hiding really rather well in London, being numb.

On a hill above the English terminal of the Eurotunnel, there is an giant chalk horse. Later research will tell me it's a modern recreation of the ancient figures throughout the UK, but seeing it, I feel something in me loosen. I think of Rhiannon, forced to tell her tale over and over in penance even through her own sorrow. I take it as a further sign that I've done the right thing.

In West, Jim Perrin says something like "I have come to this place of the dead to be alone with my dead." I think there's a reason I've chosen Paris, one which goes deeper than its beauty and the nostalgia I have of a high school visit. I've come on this trip out of indulgence, yes, and where to go to allow myself to be hedonistic when I can't find a job and I"m sad but Paris? But I realize that I've also come somewhere that in my subconscious is a City of the Dead.

I am very good at running away. Both physically and emotionally, I am a master of distance when I can't cope with something. Motion soothes me, and any writer is able to pull away to observe. In London, in my haze, I was able to hide from the truth by staying busy jobhunting and distracting myself. That's fine, I needed some time of calm, but I can't continue like that forever, just because it's easier. At some point, I will fall to pieces.

(I'm thinking, now, that I was also protecting myself. That I love London, and I live there, and I want to live, there, and maybe I was subconsciously shielding myself from soiling it. I definitely know that I was being very English in my emotions, and maybe there's some culture adherence to it, too.)

When I booked my room in Paris, I was doing it for a week away from the daily grind of fruitless jobhunting, drinking wine and coffee, eating macarons, and looking at beauty. But this is also the first step in my consciously dealing with the loss of my father. In this city that most people associate with romance, but for me is most strongly haunted by the people in its history out of any place I've been, I've come to a place of the dead, to understand the truth about my own dead: that he is gone.

I didn't do it on purpose. But now that I've realised it, I will give in to that urge. This will be a week of indulgences and senses and giving in.

This afternoon, watching the ugly French countryside roll past under the even uglier grey sky, I thought about my dad and all I never got to say to him, all he'll never see me be. And I cried, for the first time since I left Victoria.