To break the monotony and intimidating abstractness of verse, I’ve decided to resort to a bit of non-poetry to post on my blog. This is something I have otherwise refrained from doing (both my blogs only contain poetry), but I figured, why not make it a little easier for all those who complain about not understanding poetry? And well, let’s face it, I really need to get back to writing again. Can’t keep using the same old “writer’s block” excuse for years on end, can I?
So coming to what I actually wanted to say: I’ll soon be shifting from my little studio in the beautiful suburb of Fontenay-aux-Roses, only about 15 minutes by train from Paris. I’ve lived in many houses in my almost-two years in Paris, each special in its own way, but I haven’t lived in any of them for as long as I have in this one (September 2012- June 2013).
First of all, the studio is not just a studio, it’s actually part of a lovely bungalow inhabited by a big French family. It’s not like any of the houses you find in Paris, more like one of those in the south of France (as a friend recently pointed out). It’s made of stone, and therefore, the inside of it feels like a newly out-of-service refrigerator (which is great when it’s summer and it’s hot, but since there hasn’t been a summer this year, the low temperature has actually kept my friends from coming to visit me.) The family live on top, and I have a separate and private room below, facing the garden. And the garden, oh it’s absolutely gorgeous! It has daffodils, bamboos, a kiwi tree, tulips, about a million different shades of roses and a beautiful white cherry blossom (well, these are the ones I can identify, it’s actually full of many, many anonymous weeds, blossoms, blades and bushes!) There’s even a cat that comes and visits me occasionally. I suspect it’s made the little area around the outside ledge of my window in to its private toilet, and being a cat, of course, it expects me to be very grateful that it has deigned to choose my window ledge to relieve itself; and I, the privileged onlooker, must respect its privacy and not look as it gets down to business. Typical cat behaviour. And yet I persist in trying to befriend it. But I digress.
So why is this house so special to me? Because I have had some of my best and worst moments in it. In no other house that I occupied in Paris have I oscillated so dramatically between complete, uninhibited joy on the one hand, and total, insane depression on the other. There was a time when I disliked being here so much, that I lived with friends in the city for almost a week. But over time, among the yellow-wallpaper covered walls of this out of order fridge, I learned to be alone and independent again. And though it sounds like the end of some second-rate cliched hollywood movie, I found myself again. Why is the colour of the wallpaper so important, you ask me? Because I worked on ‘The Yellow Wallpaper‘ by Charlotte Perkin Gilman for a paper this semester, and it occurred to me that I too, was trapped in a yellow-wallpapered room and was too terrified to properly look at my walls ever again. Especially at night. (Rough summary: The story is about a married woman who gets obsessed with the ugly yellow wallpaper on the walls of her room and eventually goes mad and crawls about like a snake.) So yes, the colour of the wallpaper disturbed me. Gravely. But unlike the woman in the story, I did not go mad. I think. Luckily.
I remember my first night here. I had only about a quarter of my bags with me, no food, no utensils, no warm clothes, nothing. Not even toilet paper I think. The rest of it all had been stored in different locations in distant corners of the city. Everything around me was unfamiliar. There were a hundred million spiders around me. Some, it seemed to me, were of a whole new species, because I was sure I saw wings in lieu of limbs. I spent most of the night jumping about in sheer panic, chaotically dismantling cobwebs with newspaper and was made to calm down. Then there was the painfully tiny bed with its pink, embroidered cover. It had a virginal air about it and looked like it had been brought in from a convent. The stern message it gave out was clear- it had to be slept on by only one person. No shenanigans, young lady. The no-nonsense church bells to which I woke up the next day were the icing on the cake. And yet, the posters put up in the neighbourhood said, ‘Je suis communiste, et ça fait du bien.’ And there I lived, between a church and PCF posters, on my convent bed, surrounded by spiders. Oh nostalgia!
So it was in this house that I had some great moments, after I moved in for my second year in Paris and life was easy. And in this house that I was left to grapple alone with the uncertainties of a menacing future and deal with some overwhelming self-doubt at the end of my masters. But it’s also in this house that I spent time thinking about Life and Its Meaning over solitary smokes in the garden, cooked with my friends and befriended a warm family that were kind enough to invite me to dine with them and help me whenever I knocked on their door. And now it’s time to move on. Needless to say, I’ll miss it all. The garden, the luxury of having my own kitchen and bathroom, being able to hear the train pull in and leave the station, running to catch it and waiting for hours if I missed it, rushing to the supermarket because it closed as early as NINE at night, cooking my own food no matter how bored I was because there was no McDonald’s about (and even if there were one, it would probably close at 8 p.m. or something anyway), plucking cherries from the garden (competing with birds to get to the ripe ones first) and surviving on them for days on end when I felt too bored to get groceries and yes, even those stupid loud church bells that woke me up every morning. This house has been through a lot and seen a lot with me this year. And soon there will be no traces of me, and it will be someone else’s. Will it take as much time to move on as I know I will? Probably not, and the thought of it makes me a little sad. But when I think of the time I spent here, I keep thinking of Charles Dickens and the beginning of ‘A Tale of Two Cities‘, because these lines seem so incredibly fitting:
“It was the best of times,
it was the worst of times,
it was the age of wisdom,
it was the age of foolishness,
it was the epoch of belief,
it was the epoch of incredulity,
it was the season of Light,
it was the season of Darkness,
it was the spring of hope,
it was the winter of despair”
It was these words that Dickens began his story. And it is with these words that I will end mine.
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