You wake up. More precisely, you rouse. You have, maybe, still a burp or two left to expel from the bottle of wine you consumed the evening before, when you were lounging about your studio apartment alone, watching dubbed episodes of MacGyver and Friends. It was only at that late boozy point, while observing a man in a mullet deliver victims from impossible disasters from the comfort of your futon and a frozen quiche, that you let loose, laughing at the ridiculousness both of the television setup and your own personal misery. The truth is, you realize, pulling a thick white drape onto the provincial sidewalk just inches from your face, that you’re trapped here. Fuck.
And when you awake, your thoughts assemble one-by-one into a clanging dread you know only another day can diminish. From your loft bed at the top of a sturdy wooden staircase, you can see the beams of light shining in through the arched windows of your apartment. From this you discover it is daytime and that you are not where you want to be. The light rushes in to pounce on your night-time comfort, reminding you that you are stuck here for another day, that you must find a way to fill the time until you can permit yourself another bottle of wine.
You begin to cry. It is the kind of crying that belongs to tortures much worse than yours — the kind that invokes conveniently religious pleas to absolve you of whatever punishment you have incurred. It is a brand of intensely complete emotional divestment that later you will almost wish you could access, were it not for the fact that at the time you felt so bad you dared semi-truck trailers to run you over in the middle of the street.
When you have fulfilled your depressive moments, either through sobs or naps or both, you think of your ambitions, which at this point do not extend terribly far. You had planned to run this morning, but it turns out that you are slightly hungover, and that it is no longer morning. Perhaps you will venture out this afternoon in your unattractive sweatpants. But probably not. Not to mention, the only food you can afford today is a baguette and jam, with an afternoon snack of canned green beans. Not exactly an athlete’s breakfast.
You would also like to work on your “screenplay,” which these days consists of little more than extended descriptions of the sound the train makes as it passes almost directly next to your window several times a day, and the feeling you would have if you were on that train. You would also like to incorporate the homeless man you often see on your walks home along the tracks; the drunk one with the punched-in face that makes it look like he has no nose.
At night you will traverse your tiny, bougie town, with its rustic cobble stones and delightful quaintness. You will look enviously into bustling pubs containing the word Breizh in their title, and you will be picked up by unattractive Bordelais con-men named Pierre who woo all stragglers with the same quizzical line about tabacs and cigarettes. You will arrive at your new friends’ apartment on the other side of town, and you will be fed great bowls of soup and full cups of wine. You will laugh, and you will discuss the Franco dictatorship with Luisa, and Allison will listen with you, and you will all listen to Neutral Milk Hotel, and you will feel like maybe everything could be OK. Later in the night, the whole lot of you will go out and discover an abandoned dog, which you will name Pinche Cabron, and who you will be sad to discover actually has a caring (albeit homeless) owner. You will cover yourself in water-soluble paint, and when you wake up in the morning on the floor next to Allison’s bed, you will think: ‘I can do this.’
And then you will go home. You will eat a frozen quiche and drink a bottle of wine and sloppily prepare for the English courses you must teach the next day to 8 and 9 year-old children who refuse to learn the meaning of “Hello.” Your breasts will be squeezed by a precocious 9 year-old girl, thus providing the comic relief 6 months of tension have built up in you. You will, for reasons you can’t explain, tear up as you tell a version of the Thanksgiving story that would have made you vomit in every previous incarnation of yourself. You will, however, not throw up, wishing only that you could be there.
During these months, as I have outlined above, you will cry and cry and cry. You will wonder if it is possible to cry any more. You will not understand the depression that has descended upon you like an eternity of fog. You will, more than is entirely comfortable, think about the ethics of suicide (selfish v. selfless?). You will romanticize your previous life to the point that it will not be recognizable upon your return, thereby disappointing you.
But. You will make friends that you will keep for the rest of your life. People you would never have met under any other circumstances, and who — because of your shared misery (and, it must be said, frequent joys) — know more about your substance than most anyone else. You will see places that people have been talking about for thousands of years, and you will realize that what they failed to mention is that there are seriously a shitload of cats at the Coliseum. (I mean, like, thousands of cats.) You will drink real champagne with one of your best friends on New Year’s Eve on the balcony of an apartment in suburban Paris, and it will be more exciting than any party. You will ride your bike along the cliffs of Brittany in the middle of a snowstorm in a flimsy oversized fleece jacket, and you will unhinge your jaw to laugh at the sea. You will walk the banks of Pont-Aven, making a brief foray into the Bois d’Amour to imagine just what Gauguin saw there. You will eat the most fucking delicious butter biscuits you have ever had in your whole goddamn life.
And when you come back, two months earlier than expected and severely damaged, you will yet again proclaim the experience a once-in-a-lifetime adventure that you wouldn’t give up for the world.
