Write the truest thing you know. October 2008

Well, it's been almost a year since I up and moved all my shit to Paris. I don't know what I was thinking exactly. I suppose part of me felt moving here would release something inside of me. This inspiration I've always known was hiding out just beneath the surface. I've been protecting it for a while. It seems to me a writer has to live two lives. One where he lives and one where he writes about living. I have always gone through phases like this in my life, and as my best friends know, I am an extremist, in the most liberal sense of the word. I get an idea and I go for it. Maximal force. Full of confidence. If I'm feeling cold, I crank the heat until I'm sweating. Hungry to full, dead to alive; that's just me.

I suppose it's been almost two years of living now, living without much reflection. Maybe more. I've barely written a worthwhile thing since Josh and I split up. I don't blame him for that, in fact, he has given me a lot of inspiration too. I think after what we went through, I needed some time to re-adjust to the idea of living a life without him. For so long, I had a vision of what our life could be together and when all of that up and changes, when you're divorced and childless and alone at the age of 28, only then do you look at what you've been through with enough clairvoyance to see the 'bigger' picture. You can't make yourself be happy with someone, it's not possible even if you want it more than anything. Your teachers were lying. Anything is not possible and you won't make all your dreams come true. That I've learned. It is possible that one of them morph itself into reality. That you feel an eerie connection with the universe when you meet someone who appears to you in a deep unconscious state. It is possible to have a European psychic tell you your future and for her to be at least a little right. It's possible to see beauty, real beauty and witness some kind of magic that you will never make sense of.

This picture is of a scope I can barely comprehend sometimes. I guess I would say that about 5 years ago, I thought I had life all figured out. That is not to say I was a know-it-all, or an 'egoiste', just that I was confident about what mattered, the difference between good and evil, the way I wanted my adult life to look. I had picked a man, a home and a job and even a car. I was thinking about children and how I would raise them.

No more. Instead, here I find myself, dumped (and I mean this figuratively, even though it applies in both fashions) in the middle of Paris. My life is half English, half French, half misunderstood. I work in a French restaurant during the day, I read Henry Miller at night and smoke more pot than I ought to in the evenings. I am alone but I don't feel lonely. I don't see children in my near future or maybe in my future at all. Some days I'm not even sure that I see a man in my life. Every time I think there might be a chance, that I too am capable of having a normal relationship, something goes horribly awry. So far, there has only been one person that felt really right the whole way through and even that didn't seem to work out.

Anyway, getting out of it all, getting out into the world on my own again, I have realized that it's time to tell the stories. Showtime is done. I've given quite the performance. I've been the bitch and the whore, the mistress and the abstinent. I have been quiet and loud. An addict and a good samaritan. I have smiled and meant it and smiled because I ought to. If the mirror has two faces, I'm more like a mirror that has broken into a million pieces and shattered all over the floor. Little by little, the pieces are being picked up and reassembled. They are gluing together some bits of myself, a little out of order perhaps, but Humpty Dumpty's almost good to go. Seems to me, for a while, there may have been some pieces lost. I've been missing parts of myself I had forgotten existed: like how much I loved to play sports, how good taking a deep breath felt, that I am strong and independent when I'm not so caught up with what this man or that man thinks of me. I hate that about love: how suddenly someone else's opinion over you matters more than your own. Suddenly, you're feeble, you feel like you could never be enough, or as my dear friend Jay would say, uncomfortable if someone actually feels like you're worth their while. Seems wrong. "I'd never belong to any club that would have me as a member." Brilliant. With your confidence shot, you won't likely keep a partner interested too long. There is after all, nothing more annoying than someone who idolizes you. It makes people uncomfortable, makes them question themselves too much. Love is fucked. It really is.

All I'm hoping for is to find some kind of balance between my imaginary world and the real one I live and barely breathe in. Some days I think it's impossible and I consider throwing myself into the Seine, at full force with ankle weights made of iron and chains to keep me from coming back up. Other days, I think maybe, just maybe it might be possible. Maybe I could be a writer and a human being and that will be enough to keep me happy. Maybe I could obsess less about possibility and get what it's about a little more often. Doubtful, but for now, I'm trying. And I'm also trying to keep my head up, my eyes open and my heart and soul closed to everyone but me. If anyone's going to break my heart again, it's gonna be me - the Lost Boys are barred for now. At least until I'm absolutely certain I've picked up every broken piece of glass off the floor and pieced it back together in a way that doesn't terrify me from facing who I am. I'm tired of turning to stone every time I look in the mirror.