Montmartre, Mon Amour, Here I Come!
Dear Diary. Just kidding.
Let’s
rephrase: dear friend. The time is quickly approaching, that magical time of the
year, when I dive into that fabled rabbit hole and hopefully come back out, yet
once more, a changed woman. This will be my fourth trip to Paris in as many
years. Only now, the biggest difference to all those previous wonderful excursions
into the heartland of my damn writer’s soul, if you’ll excuse the cliché, or,
Clichy, as we say in French haha, is that this time the fact that I won’t be
able to bring along my huge ancient dinosaur of a laptop is possibly going to
create a huge problem.
Taking
into consideration, that this piece of writing will mark my seventy-second entry on the site in a little over eight months, I really should have no
problem at all leaving my computer behind for two weeks and just enjoy the
time, the atmosphere, the excruciating heat, the greengrocers’ stands, and
walking those gorgeous old streets with my man. The only thing is, I haven’t
taken two weeks off since I started this, and there is a small part of me who
is freaking out over the fact.
My man has
been marveling at my writing speed this past winter and summer. I, too, had no
idea just how overwhelmingly much I would love doing this, how many extremely important things I would have to say, how
many stories I would have to tell, and how intoxicating the writing life has become,
although I should have had some inkling, being a lifetime diarist and an
amateur short story writer. I have had some days that the story has been a
difficult one, or I have had to write and rewrite to be happy with the piece.
But, honestly, most of the stories have more or less gushed out of me. As if
finally I have found my outlet, after many a year trying to find the right way,
my way, to write, and the medium, or
portal, that suits my style and my narrative voice and my skill and passion and
my desire for the kind of stories I write.
This is
it, friends. This is it. And that’s why taking two weeks off seems scary. What
if I finally lose my marbles when all I have is my long-hand and my journal?
Lord knows those were few and far between as it was. Then again, writing my
journal has really been left on the back burner all this time. I have made a
special effort to keep it going, since for so many years that was all I got,
but in the end, one has to leave some stuff behind, for a while at least. There
just isn’t time for everything, not enough hours in a day, even with my
sleeping, or PAS DU TOUT -sleeping, like we say in French ha ha.
Insomnia
is a bitch, and I have been worrying, in addition to not being able to bring
along my magic device for typing and losing myself in the music the moment and
the flow of writing, that trying to enjoy Paris half-dead will be a lot more
stress than for example last year, when I was still on my meds like a good
girl. I don’t know, we’ll just have to see how it goes.
Somehow I
think the second I step on French soil, though, I won’t bother one bit about
not sleeping, but only about getting jazzed on the aroma of holiday and freedom,
excellent croissants and wine, seeing and visiting my neighborhood bookstore again,
and my coffee shop, and the park we like to go to on days when there is no
definite plan, just to hang out and watch the lunch crowd eat their salads and
baguettes, the nannies with babies, runners circling the outer skirts of the
park, old men reading their newspaper and enjoying a game of pétanque. Even my
doctor used to tell me she would go to Paris twice a year, to breathe, was her
own word it. She retired this spring, so who knows, maybe she’s there right
now, eating cherries and mille-feuilles and drinking café-crèmes at Café Deux
Moulins, with Amélie.
Just
writing about it now makes my stomach start rumbling over the delicious belle
aromes and pains-au-chocolat and plums the size of apples and different colored
tomatoes that we just don’t have in Finland, lest some supermarket gets a
special batch and sells it five euros for four pieces, robbing us food lovers
blind, but still I have no other option than to buy.
Speaking
of high prices, I overheard a piece of discussion on a bus the other day in
Tampere. A young pair of friends sat right behind me, a man and a woman, and
they were marveling at the price of strawberries this year. The man told the
woman he had been eyeing the berries at a produce stand at the market place,
and reading the price tag, saying they were seven euros a box, the man said: “I
was totally shocked: seven euros, are you kidding me? I was like ‘Dude, where’s
my blowjob?’”
And on a
different note, another short interaction, in the town near where my parents
live:
We were
doing some last minute shopping, father and I, at a store specializing in
spices and condiments and hot sauces and rice and sushi paraphernalia and candy et
cetera; it is one of the few special stores I still feel it is worth the
trouble of riding into town for in the otherwise rude and closed-off town I had
grown to hate as a young adult. I always buy my Himalayan pink crystal salt, my
vanilla sugar, my baking soda, and my black peppers, everything of which they
sell in bulk, there, and always feel happy and excited and like a true food lover
after having shopped in the small and crowded place where you have to move
carefully in the small space between the stacks of rice, the soy sauce cases,
the boxes of Kouvola liquorice waist high, the bags of different colored
sprinkles, every type of pepper, chia seeds, pine seeds, raisins, dried
papayas, dried pineapples, dried what-have-you, packs of noodles, endless
varieties of different sorts of dried herbs and spices – it really is a
treasure chest, and one of the best kept secrets in town.
I had just
ventured inside with father, and was aiming for the liquorice stacks, because
we were going to the movies. It was three to five, so we were cutting it a bit
close, but the kind proprietor told us not to worry, she wouldn’t kick us out.
I took one of the liquorice bags in hand for closer inspection, when in came a
young man in his early twenties in an obvious rush, with sagging jeans and
white headphones resting not on his ears but on his forehead.
“I’m
looking for the blueberry flavored – are you the vendor?” he said to me.
I raised
both my hands up in a no skin off my back -gesture and gave him a wide berth as
he rushed along the aisles to find whatever it was that he wanted.
And by the
way, the movie? It was The Dark Tower. I’m still mulling over as to what to say
about it, but perhaps this will suffice for now: Alas, Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Never Came.
Those of
you in the know will know what I mean.
But back
to Paris. Yes, this is good-bye for now. But not for long, and I will be back,
hopefully well-rested, rejuvenated, refreshed, re-fallen in love with life and
eating and those lovely parks and long walks and myself the way I seem to be
every time I return home. The city herself will need no re-falling, nor will my
man, but of course being in The City of Lights with a great love makes both her,
and them, seem even more beautiful, alluring, sexy, eternal, and special.
On the
left, and below this piece, one can find links to the most popular stories on
the site. I love all those stories, but in case there are some readers who have
already read all of those, and haven’t been along for the whole ride, here are
some of my own favorites from the archives:
On pasta, and eating:
Delicious Demon
On aging,
and getting with the program: New Year: The Letter
On the
hardships of falling in love, and into sickness: Thank You Naivety, For Failing Me Again
On
families, clothes, and sisterly love: Mimou’s Jackets: Emotional Personification
On
Florence + The Machine: Cartwheels in Your Honor
On
childhood, dreaming, and being a daughter: Watercolor Moment
On Alice
Hoffman, and magical realism: How to Make an Influential Pancake
On having
period: Cycle of the Werewolf
Among
others, but maybe those will do for now.
I love
you. See you soon.
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