Paris at night

I steal away again, to Paris, and the glow of the lamplight, and the smoke in the café.  I eavesdrop on the geniuses as they argue about Proust, and analysis.  She is beauty, grace, elegance, and her thoughts feed into my mind and fill me with wonder.  Her dark eyes pierce as she gently gazes at her companion with a mix of wonder, admiration, and uncertainty as he rails off again on some new imagined transgression against his pursuit of realism.

Each night, I lose myself in her thoughts and observations: keen as a hawk, gentle as a dove, and poetic in her recollection.  She inspires me, enthralls me, calls me to introspection.  I feel my inferiority grow as she transforms, and I realize that I am her unrefined, 'before' self.  I feel the self-loathing as I realize that I can't change as she has.  And yet, I feel that I am her, as I wander around in the dark recesses of her mind, and run my hand along the walls to find my way in the poorly illuminated passageways of her thought and mine.

"You have shown me so many Anaïses", he exclaims to her, and I feel our protean kinship in his vivid characterization of her.  I smile to myself, briefly satisfied that I am so strikingly similar to this woman who holds my fascination - she is my June.  I am filled with doubt to realize that she is so much my better.  It calls me to question: my recent relationship, my past, my future, the way I behave and the intrinsic 'goodness' that permeates me and is so like hers; and I wonder if my motivation for being this way is the same as hers - the result of fear, and a broken spirit.  I wonder if my goodness is a malady to overcome.

Each night, curling into my bed, I lose myself in the cafés of Paris in 1932.  I am with her as she reads Henry Miller's 'new' manuscript Tropic of Capricorn, and I marvel at her observations in the age of reason.  Her consciousness is so unlike her existential contemporaries.  I look into my own eye, when I see the world through hers, and I yearn for the courage to live as she does.

Her home in Louveciennes, makes me long for my home; my perfect home, how I miss it and the smooth wooden floors under my bare feet.  Her visits to Clichy and the mismatched china, are reminiscent of my present bachelors' existence, and the home of the men in her life casts my life in its same harshness.  But the thing that rivets me to her most is her honesty.  It is inescapable.  It binds me to her as in the gaze of the gorgon, but it melts rather than petrifies me, and I feel my being flow and become a tide of emotion and thought as the words enter my brain and feed my perception.

This woman, this famous diarist becomes my muse.  As I live alone and deal with the loss of the great love of my life, I transport myself, detach myself and become the fly on the wall.  When I drift off to sleep, into that state between wakefulness and dreams when the world seems unreal, I am there with them.  I feel my own loss.  I wonder if my character, and hence my destiny can really be altered, as she supposes.  Would I want that?  What would I gain?  Would I lose myself, or add yet another facet to my cristalline nature?  My heart beats with excitement to ponder such things.  It thrills and terrifies.

Sleep overtakes me in it's velvet embrace.  He tells me that I talk in my sleep.  I miss the warm skin beside me, but feel empowered in my loneliness.  I'm waiting.  I have decided that I want devotion.  I read her words.  She suggests that it is wrong to have only one love.  I am torn.  These past years, I have been finding myself, stumbling about in the dark: discovering.  Only now, when I have finally decided what I want, what I need, what I can live with, am I thrown into confusion by her narrative.  Is this some cruel cosmic joke?

I decide to go again into the café and decide later.  I feel the now familiar ebb and flow as her words again stir me, and I wonder where this tide will deposit me.