A Toast to Our Former Selves

A friend of mine recently got some bad news prior to leaving for a trip abroad. At the time I was gradually working my way through 4 years of Columbia correspondence, rereading emails that random people had written, and laughing in horror at my own responses. Freshman year I sounded like I was on acid. Either that or deliberately trying to sound like I was on acid. It's strange to see so many incarnations of yourself in succession; I reacquainted myself with the naive, the dorky, the affectionate and the acerbic versions of my college self. It was overwhelming.

But to return to my original premise, I decided that when I wrote to this friend to wish him well before his trip, I would include excerpts of emails that I sent to various people when I first went to Paris. I sound like some enchanted idiot, but that's what travel does -- and reading these at least 2 years later, I'm glad that I didn't stop myself from gushing shamelessly about being frightened yet amazed by my surroundings. It's funny to me that I'm now so uneasy about being frank about my feelings - both anger and love - but that despite living in more volatile circumstances abroad, I could articulate exactly what I wanted to say.

There are things I'm struggling to say right now, but I guess eventually they'll surface. It's like that poem by Mallarmé in which he says, "Ne crois pas qu’au magique espoir du corridor" to a fellow poet leaving his native shore. I grant the poem itself is rather more violent in character than I've given it out to be, but the line is self-sustaining. And I do think that there are some phrases, letters, telephone conversations, and even shared photographs, that contain some impenetrable truth about ourselves, no matter how we change. Perhaps it's terribly important right now that I continue to believe in being charmed.

01.17.04
...enjoy things, keep an open mind, and don't expect anything. it will be different, hard, it will be exhilarating and new and earth-shattering. That's why we left nyc and came, right? I mean, aside from our unholy craving for nutella...

01.28.04
...I've also been visiting a lot of museums, and am so moved by it all. I got oddly emotional in the Musee D'Orsay because I was seeing all these beautiful artworks that I've studied for so long, and that are like old kindly friends I finally get to meet in person. Suddenly I'm rendered speechless by their faces...

02.16.04
...good luck with papers. I have them too, but it's hard to focus on work (yes, this is me still talking) when I'm in this city. A lot of the time I'm afraid of the enormity of Paris. But then I find myself standing at street corners staring at cars go by, sensing the pulse of something beyond myself and yet within myself. I feel radiated with emotion. It's amazing...

03.04.04
...that being said, today I discovered seven different versions of myself in seven different places in Paris. Quiet, green spaces, where I stopped thinking about poetry and began living it. It's impossible not to sense the importance of just existing when you're a foreigner abroad. But then I am always abroad, aren't I?...