La question de demenagement

In 2003, I flew to France for a week, and when I came back, it was 2004. It happens every year–this year, New Years was spent gorging on grapes (a Spanish tradition) on the floor of my friend’s Upper East Side living room while we watched That 70s Show which, grapes aside, is not too different from how I spend a normal evening.

But there was something surreal and odd in that night between 2003 and 2004–it was the first real French party I went to, and, still in my perpetually angry phase, I crossed my arms and watched as everyone else did an odd dance that looked to me like swing dancing, secretly hoping that someone would teach me how to do it.

Midnight came and went without fanfare, and we all curled up in sleeping bags to go to sleep–sleep, that is, until I was awoken by the words of a French boy repeating the phrase I had heard countless times since my first trip to France two years before. “C’est elle l’américaine?”

I rolled over and looked to see who had spoken. I was sleeping in oversized plaid pants with Eeyore embroidered on them, and my hair was flat on top from the bandana I had insisted on wearing. I’m sure I looked a wreck, but the boy came over anyway, and he started to talk.

I forget most of what he said–I can’t tell you how much I wish I could go back in time and be a fly on the wall during that conversation, and yet, if offered the chance, I’m not sure I would. Things that seemed deep and complex to my sixteen-year-old self would probably be trite to me now, and I like to let my teenage self keep her naïveté whenever possible. The one part I do remember is the quote he gave me from a relatively unknown poem by Baudelaire. I’ve never been able to find a hard copy, though I’ve made a part-time job of perusing collections by Baudelaire in used bookstores and at outdoor book vendors.

The quote?

“Je pense que je serai toujours bien la ou je ne suis pas, et cette question de déménagement en est une que je discute sans cesse avec mon âme.”

I can type it without thinking–it’s become a sort of mantra. I tried to translate it once with the help of my high school French teacher, but what we came up with never resonated nearly as much as those words did the first time I heard them, syrupy with sleep and surrounded by the intoxicating smell of too much cologne and cheap red wine and cigarettes that emanated from this boy, whose name doesn’t matter because, as far as I’m concerned, he no longer exists.

“I think that I will always be better there where I am not, and it is this question of displacement that I discuss constantly with my soul.”

It’s “displacement” that bothers me, but there’s no better word–not in English, anyway. It’s a feeling I have nearly all the time, although I’ve gotten better at ignoring it in recent years–that is, until all three of you who are still out there reading suddenly got bombarded by my complaints of missing the City of Lights.

It’s the feeling that makes me miss Paris when I’m in New York, that makes me miss New York when I’m in Cannes, San Sebastian when I’m on Long Island, Long Island when I’m anywhere with a beach that isn’t Long Island.

When it’s summer, I long for snow, and when it’s cold, I dream of the ocean. When I’m in the city, I long for the calm of Paziols, and when I’m in the middle of nowhere, I crave the thousands of hot spots in Paris and New York and Toronto that I never took advantage of.

It’s a feeling that makes me want to recreate experiences from one place in another, a sort of false memory that convinces me that it’s not all gone, that place that I left so easily a few months or years ago. It’s the reason I buy Jamba Juice on 86th street and make gratin dauphinois on Long Island at Christmas and carry endless packs of ramen to France only to stuff my suitcase with bottles of wine and bags of Carambars when I come back.

But Jamba Juice has never tasted the same since one opened near my Subway stop–I’d much rather leave it in San Francisco and settle for black coffee and a hard roll in New York City, though I steer clear of Tim Horton’s. Now that one has appeared on a Lexington avenue corner close to me, I don’t want to go in and remember what it was like to spend all night there in Toronto, watching my friend do magic tricks and observing the other oddballs who made the 24-hour coffee shop their nighttime haunt. Instead, I settle for a typical New York breakfast that I tried endlessly to find in Toronto, where late night Tim Horton’s bagels that tasted like bread replaced the paper white-and-grey cups that are omnipresent here.

When I left Toronto, I missed the endless falafel stands and bubble tea places and tried to find them in Cannes and in New York and was disappointed when I finally found what I was looking for to see that, like Disney world as an adult, it just wasn’t the same. Carambars and wine, for whatever reason, don’t taste the same here as they did in Paziols and Paris.

I’m trying to be happy where I am–really, I am. I’m excited to be in New York, to be exploring Brooklyn, which I never had the opportunity to visit in my three-week rushed stints back here over the past eight years. I’m excited to leave for Cannes in a few weeks, to show my brother everything that was my “normal” nearly three years ago. I’m excited by the prospect of seeing San Sebastian again–in the summer, this time, when I really can spend all of my time surfing.

I’m excited to go back to Paris, too, although mostly I’m scared: that I’ll miss it too much when I leave, that it won’t be as good as I remember, that it will be as good as I remember. I worry that the life I’ve carved out for myself in New York will be pulled away from me like my life in Paris was. I worry that I’ll forget to miss it all someday.

La question de demenagement is a tiring one, to say the least. My brain is cluttered and tired and looking forward to Cannes and the beach and the sea… but I think I’d like to put everything on pause for a moment to just be. If only I knew how…

No recipe today, but I do have this fun cheese to share–it came from my local supermarket in Paris and offers three cheeses made from different milks. The Parisian and I made a game out of guessing which was which and washed them down with rose on a sunny day like today, nearly exactly a year ago in Paris.