I lie in the same groove that I left in this shitty mattress, and I wonder if this is what people mean when they say getting back in the groove. I’m already fucking sick and tired of being here and it’s only been three weeks. And I try to think back to a time when I was really free, and I can’t think of one. Maybe when I was younger, when I didn’t know any better, when I enjoyed myself because I wasn’t pensive enough to point out the deceitful motives that fence me in.

Even if I roll over I’m still stuck in discomfort, and this feels like a metaphor for experience. After a while you know which parts are the most comfortable, but from time to time you intentionally roll back into them just to see what it is you’re missing. Then comes regret. Regrets, regrets—I wish I had stayed.

I want to work hard so I can get back. So I can forget this life, and brush it off like the dirt on my shoes that it is, like George Bailey in It’s A Wonderful Life. And I want my life to be a movie, but one that I haven’t already seen. I don’t want faint music to play in the background, a familiar sound that has dictated so much of what I have done, either voluntarily or involuntarily. I’m sick of lists of rules, of snickers and scolding. I need to make my own decisions and one day they will understand that I knew what was best for me since the beginning.

What do people want in this life? To wade through it blindly in comfort, unaware of the marvels that can be experienced with a smidgeon of intelligence? I’m jaded with pessimism, because I know that what I’m due doesn’t match what I desire, and I’m dissatisfied. I don’t believe this can be wrong: my eyes are open wider than my inferior counterparts, and if I didn’t possess some level of vanity than how can I really be the best of myself?

“Often through life you will really be at your worst when you seem to think best of yourself.”

One day I want to rehearse a dramatic monologue to my former teacher like Keanu Reeves does to Bob at the end of My Own Private Idaho after he becomes rich and stands in that restaurant with his face half-lit with crimson.

I keep running my hand through my hair and rubbing my head and dandruff keeps falling out because I’ve stopped washing my hair. My hand becomes slick with grease and I think back to watching My Own Private Idaho and I wonder how River Phoenix died. At the end of the movie his narcoleptic body is just driven away on the long road that looks like a fucked up face. He’s just driven away. Asleep. I imagine that’s how we all go.

Zoé and I are sitting in Hamroe’s front room, like we usually do. Doing nothing. I tell her again that I’m leaving but she’s okay with it now. We made up.

‘Remember when we first met? And I put my phone number in your hand and the bus driver pulled away?’ Zoé nods.

‘I never thought you’d actually call me.’

‘The sky just looked strange that day so I thought it was a sign. I had to call.’

‘I’m glad you called.’

‘Are you?’

‘Yeah—Yeah, I am. Or else I wouldn’t say it.’

We share a comfortable silence, where we stare at each other and I try to think of reasons why I won’t forget this face, try to memorize the small details like the the creases in her lips where her shitty lipstick gathers or the way she looks down her nose. I mean, this girl I barely know, but I feel like I really know her.

‘I feel like I really know you.’

‘Say goodnight and go.’

‘What?’

‘I can’t think about you leaving, so I think it’s best if you just do it quick.’

‘That’s all you have to say?’

‘Yes. Get on with it.’

I discuss my future plans with her but her blank stare tells me that she’s apathetic and pessimistic about us ever meeting again. It’s true I may never make it back to Paris unless I become a male prostitute and find some sugar daddy to buy my plane ticket. Hell, I’m not even narcoleptic, but it feels like I’ve slept through a life.

‘I could just cry.’

‘Come here.’ I move over and sit on Zoé’s lap in her easy chair and we just sob and pet each other’s heads like we’re having some outer body experience.

‘Would it kill you to—to, to stop doing that?’ Zoé manages to croak through her heaves.

She means my sniffling. I’m making her shirt wet with snot so I wipe my nose on my sleeve and I just kiss her teary lips in some half-hearted gesture. And then I say goodnight and go. I sleep through the flight like Mike Waters and I wake up at the airport and my mom picks me up and drives me home and I’m too jet-lagged to appreciate anything but a pillow.

I wonder what it’s like to look out of a pretty face. I imagine I wouldn’t perceive differently. I would be perceived differently—like a treat getting treated. I can’t fathom the mass amounts of people who never receive a look of interest, a pang of desire from another human being, who go on living life content with an isolation coated in ugliness. Somewhere, the Beautiful and the Damned are outliving the rest of us at a lavish party full of attention seekers and megalomaniacs.

While we board the métro, trying to avoid eye contact, counting the warning sirens from station to station as the doors close in succession with a ‘clack!’ and the stale lighting perforates the crowds that couldn’t find a seat, something stirs in me. It’s a beautiful scene. People concerned with their own problems, furrowing their gorgeous brows as the train leaves Odéon in the direction of Gare d’Austerlitz. Maybe being beautiful and seeing beautiful things are mutually exclusive, and my lack of beauty can be replaced, made up for, by the beautiful things I notice and focus on.

I’m trying desperately to find a cause for which to progress. I move within the city looking at everything with a new pair of eyes, and thinking how damn lucky I am to live here. I feel like Amory Blaine in This Side of Paradise, when he sees the banalities of the roaring sea, feels it. I’ve decided this life isn’t a competition. All that is required is the ability to recognize the beauty on offer. I want to be better tomorrow than I am today. I’m not an approval junkie. I am marvelous.

I think too many thoughts and don’t write enough of them down. Then they all come flooding back as ideas I think I’m having. Somebody once told me about Japan. Or maybe I just heard it somewhere, read it even. He said that this Japanese family had them over for dinner, so to thank them they brought a plant. Apparently, the Japanese get offended by gifts when you are the guest and they are the host, so the story culminated in the Japanese eventually giving them something prodigious after a back and forth gift exchange.

The point is, there is no point. Trying is futile because everything is regurgitation, and one more mouth open is one more mouth to feed. I’m starving, both visually and mentally. I need to get out of here. It’s not fucking working for me. And this just seems cyclic, like all things, because repetition is unavoidable and I’ve been at this place before, but not in Paris.

Zoé tells me she’s going to a “no furniture” party because her friend Tierney just moved into a new apartment in the fifth arrondissement. I meet up with my friend George, from South Korea, at the Palais de Tokyo. I pass security and take some photos in the photo booth that I’ll probably use as a bookmark because I’m narcissistic and then I walk along the tubes suspended from the ceiling until I sit down at the couch near the far end past the staircase and cross my legs. George finally arrives.

‘Asians are disgusting. I’ve already removed myself from that part of the planet so don’t follow me around with your straight pubic hair and sideways penises.’ George brandishes towards non-existent, straight-pubed Asians.

‘George, you can’t say that.’

‘Why not? I’m Asian.’

‘That’s still offensive.’

‘Fuck off.’

George is one of those people you never introduce to your parents, or anybody you know, because he will say something to discomfit everyone in his proximity. The irony is that we share the same name. I can only stand him in short doses, like clips of Lost In Translation. George has these cheekbones that make him look Mongolian. He’s about six feet tall and has hair to rival Pocahontas.

‘How was your weekend?’ I ask.

‘It was alright. I saw this naked ballet with only men in it. It didn’t seem as graceful as I had imagined it would be.’ He laughs and his wide mouth reveals sharp incisors. We sit and talk for about ten more minutes and then I make an excuse to leave and leave.

I regret coming, save for acquiring a bookmark, of which I was in desperate need. My awkward entrances and even more awkward exits make it seem like I have something important to do. I decide to let George extol my awkward exit, as if I weren’t compensating for the nothing I have to do back at the apartment, and the nothing I will probably do when I get there. It’s all a sham, but a brilliantly drawn out one. This tells me that it’s time to make my way to Charles de Gaulle Terminal 2, where I will depart awkwardly with languor, back home where I belong.

Usually when things come to an end we really try and squeeze as much as we can out of them. I’m flying away in a couple of days and I’ve really started living. Maybe goals are not always meant to be set with the intentions of fulfilling them. Maybe it’s just enough to have set them, knowing that working towards something is more important than accomplishing the actual goal itself. Maybe the hackneyed life as a journey remark holds incredible merit. When I look back, I see an entire orchestrated concerto rather than the separate overture or unrealized coda. Life is a power ballad that rises and falls with the delicacy it takes to survive unbruised.

I like to stand in front of mirrors because they tell the most truths: objective, omniscient, wise. Nobody else has studied what a mirror sees to such extremity as the mirror. It sees the same area for as long as it is placed in one location. It not only becomes acquainted with its surrounding, it really knows it. It’s detachment allows it to infer judgment, but it doesn’t impart its opinion, but merely reflects what it sees until the user arrives at realization. It may never happen, but if it does, the mirror has fulfilled its purpose.

I like to stand in front of mirrors because they tell the most truths. Nothing has loved me more than my own reflection. Nothing knows me better than myself. Nothing else can see through me like my own reflection— transcendence of the past and insight into the future. It doesn’t predict; it accurately reflects the present moment—the only moment in time that truly exists. Everything else is fabrication. As I stand there I say, ‘We ain’t got nothing but love. And darling you’ve got enough for the both of us.’

I like to stand in front of mirrors because I don’t need much else. I no longer need to arrive, because getting wherever it is I need to be is meant to be dragged out and sped up in periods of imbalance. That’s the magic. That’s the secret.

I don’t know much about direction, but I feel as though I’m headed in the right one.

I clip my fingernails and I get kind of worried that maybe leaving some of my DNA in Hamroe’s apartment could turn into some fatal flaw or lead to some CSI bullshit. I just want shorter fingernails because they are getting too long. So I clip and Zoé hears.

‘What are you doing?’

‘Going home.’

‘What? I meant right now.’

‘Clipping my fingernails.’

‘You’re going home?’

‘Yeah.’ I stop clipping my nails and wait in silence hoping to hear some sort of reaction, but she only mirrors my silence and so I turn around and finish clipping. Snip, snip, snip. My clipped fingernails leap into the empty garbage bin in Hamroe’s bathroom. I find it a bit strange that before he decided to die he managed to empty all his trash bins and tidy up the place to an immaculate state of clinical cleanliness.

‘You’re going home?’ Zoé repeats.

‘I just said that.’

‘Why?’

I know why but I don’t want to tell her. I miss cheddar cheese, the convenience of getting all my groceries in one location, the general convenience of daily life—the simple, mundane things that nobody gets excited about but they should. Stuff like people picking up after their dogs and talking in loud voices so you can hear them a mile away and knowing how to take money out of the bank and going to a movie at the theatre where you aren’t reprimanded for eating something.

I admit it’s not just the place. It could be the people I’m missing. Kelly, Rory, Julia, Millie, Joey. Hell—maybe even my parents. Maybe this whole death is some sort of symbol, like the divine showing me that it’s time to move on. It’s a taunting event that makes some sort of mockery of life and molests the event attendees until they significantly change. The alternative being a life of servitude to the molester. I refuse politely.

I walk into the living area where Zoé is cutting up some lines on Hamroe’s bedside table next to his sugar bowl of coke. I say living area because his apartment is fairly open, with his bedroom raised just enough to identify itself as its own space.

‘Really, Zoé? What the fuck are you thinking?’

She looks up with her nose caked in powder. ‘What?’

‘You’re not even worth the effort. You do remember our friend, right? And how he died? And how he was lying face down in his own vomit and how he probably choked on it and how after all of that—how, how it could probably be seen as sickening and disrespectful that you would put that shit anywhere near your nose?’ My voice gets a little raised, like a crescendo declaring importance.

Zoé shoots me a look of contempt.

‘Besides,’ I continue, ‘That doesn’t even fucking belong to you.’

I start to throw my belongings in duffle bags that I set out as the third act of my chastising performance. Why doesn’t she get it? I better stop before I kill us all.

The congratulation’s a wave. It washes over me, but like all waves, after the crest comes the sinking trough. I can’t even enjoy the crest because the inevitable dip is incoming. Highs and lows I think they call it. I seem to experience the highest highs and the lowest lows, and in that high, it’s a complete release of acknowledgement of the approaching low that allows me to lose myself. And in that low, I am stronger knowing that it will pass and I will be breached by a new wave that will shake me back to a strong foundation, bring me back to solid ground only to wash away the ground on which I stand, like a cycle.

I lost it all—my sanity, my direction, my friend. And it’s taken sitting in silence for me to realize what a fool I’ve been. I don’t know when I’m going to die but I hope my last words are something about how living it out has been worth it. That it was all worth it. When you lose everything, and when there is nothing left to be taken from you, freedom is achieved. When you realize that you are not your mistakes, discharge is rewarded.

She said it over and over under her breath: “free, free, free!”. I am riding the wave. It’s euphoric. I won’t let you go. I have finally freed myself. I make my decision and I depart, like buying a train ticket headed in any direction but where I currently stand, hoping to derail because a new adventure could embrace me at any wrong turn. I’m done in the driver’s seat, and I’m finally willing to submit myself to the tranquility of having my destiny try to contact me. I don’t believe in fate, but fate must believe in me, or I wouldn’t have led myself here.

I clothe myself in ambition and groom myself in the reaffirmations of what it is I have learned. The proof that I can be comfortable knowing what I’m doing is right comes in the slow unravelling of my gut. Instinct. It’s finally at ease, not sick with itself, more acute than ever. I just want them to know that I know better. I do better. This is the marriage of education and existence. Time passes and lesson’s learned.

I’m finally telling myself the truth, repeating and repeating it because my ears hear anew. And what a sweet sound. And greeting death like the minor complication that it is—one that leads to a major affirmation. I am prepared to die at any moment, knowing that this sole realization could be the single most euphoric achievement of my entire existence. I die happy.

I knew I couldn’t deal with death convincingly, and I was right. It’s strange to think that at any moment it could be the end, so when the end finally arrives—unexpectedly, to boot—you expect some sort of prologue, or at least rolling credits. It’s as though somebody’s death is a sick warning from the undertaker that, somehow, you’ll be next.

I walk around with a pit in my stomach, worried that I’m not making enough of a life that anybody would be satisfied with, and marinated in guilt that it was all my fault. That seems too obvious a choice, especially when Zoé and I find a sugar bowl of coke next to the alarm clock on Hamroe’s bedside table. His apartment is bourgeois retro in an homage to Karen Hill’s parlour in Goodfellas complete with the zebra couch throw. It’s almost sickening that everything is so in place here, just like the perfectly groomed dead body in my hamster cage of an apartment.

We take off our shoes.

‘I’ve never been here, have you?’

‘No.’

We walk around the room, Zoé picking up random books and decorative objects that could be just as comfortable housed in a museum. I wonder where all the sundries had been taken to, everything that littered the place.

‘Ham—’ I cut myself off because saying his name is too unbearable to hear. ‘He once told me that he started out with some great antique furniture, and he traded that furniture for rentals, and whenever he gets bored with the furniture he’s got, he trades those rentals in for an entire new set of rentals.’ I start laughing hysterically and it feels unkind.

‘Might as well make ourselves at home. Not like anyone’s gonna visit us here.’

The jokes put us at ease, remove the guilty feeling that constantly threatens to take our own lives. Zoé and I make ourselves at home. We take the zebra throw off the couch and put it on the floor and we slowly move all of our clothes to Hamroe’s place. The closet in my apartment isn’t in my bedroom so we can just shut the door to my bedroom and pretend that Hamroe’s corpse isn’t still propped up on the bed like Peewee Herman. We christen the new place with incense and get naked and fuck on the zebra throw and read each other snippets of Island of the Blue Dolphins and The Power of Persuasion. The latter in case the police come calling and we have to tell the truth.

Hamroe committed suicide. Not on purpose, but how else do you call it when somebody kills oneself? Accidental suicide? Is there a term for it? One time, my mom’s client, Kenneth Joliffe, died of a skull fracture after his head got kicked in by a horse. How do you blame a horse for a death if there were no witnesses?

Zoé and I get accustomed to each other’s company. I mean, really accustomed. She lets down her hair and, over time, we make the apartment our own. Our good friend Hamroe is soon a distant memory, but just close enough that when we walk around Passy we can’t help but think of the mortal remains on the sixth floor of 63 rue de Boulainvilliers. Zoé becomes an addiction. I knew we’d have a heyday, but we would become addicted to each other—like anchors, too afraid to drift and too comfortable with our position. That’s when I knew it was time to leave.

Sun peeks in through the shutters but I only know it’s daylight because I can hear the pigeon’s claws scratching as they shuffle along the gutter outside. My vision is blurred and my head is throbbing and I’m intertwined between Zoé’s legs and we’re still naked. Hamroe is lying face down on the hardwood floor in a pile of his own puke. I wake Zoé up.

‘Oh, shit. Oh, fucking fuck. Hamroe, wake up.’

I get down on all fours and start to shake him gently.

‘Hamroe, it’s morning, get the fuck up.’

I turn him over and his face is grossly pale, like a vanilla milkshake. Zoé slowly climbs off the bed with a horrified look on her face. Hamroe is dead. And neither her nor I could wrap our heads around it. For hours we deliberate what we would do with the body, between fits of furious tears and ‘What ifs?’ and crying shouts and snotty sobs. It takes a while to calm down, but when death looks you right in the face—between the veiling tears—you start to thank those lucky stars that it wasn’t you. Stars that you’re made of and stars to which Hamroe’s soul has returned. Spirited away. That lingering life force that attached itself to his walking, talking body, vanished leaving a hollow shell in a puke puddle.

We clean him up. We dress him. We lie him on the bed—he looks better that way. We brush his hair and this becomes some sort of a game. It all seems preordained, like he had some sort of appointment where he would be fully attended to, some sort of visit or mental retreat where everything was taken care of. Well, he’s definitely retreated, mentally speaking.

Zoé and I leave the house because we need to evacuate the scene. Was it suicide? It was the drugs, no doubt. Speculation at this point is futile. We know the cause.

I sit across from Zoé in silence over tea on Rue de l’Annonciation. This is the first time either of us have been so close to death. When it arrives, you treat it the same way you treat any minor complication—its importance is shadowed by incoherence, and drinking this liquid is an attempt to burn the guilt from our closing throats.

‘Que faire?’ Zoé blows smoke from what must be her tenth cigarette into my face.

‘I feel like Winona Ryder in Heathers.’

‘I haven’t seen that movie.’

‘Why don’t people play croquet in France?’

‘We do, croquet is French. It used to be called paille maille.’

I reach across the table and Zoé only has matches so I fumble trying to light my cigarette because that’s what they do in movies. I have to follow the rules.

‘What if we were just to… ignore it?’

‘Do you mean Hamroe? Are we calling him “it”, now?’ Zoé shoots me a look of disgust.

‘Okay, sorry. I mean him. I just—I don’t know what I mean.’

‘You know, that actually may be a good idea. Well, not a good idea, but I can’t think of anything better.’

‘Look, I can’t go back there. I say we just go back to collect our things, we’ll grab the key to Hamroe’s flat, and we’ll stay there for a while. You know, keep each other company and collect his mail so nobody notices he’s… gone.’

‘You’re fucked up, you know that? You’re really fucked up.’

‘You didn’t think that when I gave you my phone number. Jesus, this really is like Heathers. Can we wrap?’

I leave eight euros on the table and Zoé follows me, for lack of a better idea. Shock still guides my actions. It’s strange to have something ripped out from under you, especially since it was there just yesterday. It’s like a lost wallet or something. You wish you had the money, but you can’t blame yourself for losing it. Most people would jump to the conclusion that it was stolen. That’s how it feels to see your friend dead in his own puke. Robbed. Lifeless. Naked.

Fall on your knees. Oh, night divine, deliver me from this awful mess of a life. I’ve never taken to pray but I need help, and even though I loathe people who only come in times of need I don’t know if I have many other options. My apartment is filled with the pages of books that have come unattached from their binding and the smells of the Lebanese restaurant below waft in while I’m forced to listen to my neighbours having sex for the umpteenth time and this fucking sucks.

I bite my nails and kick at the papers that litter the floor, like a hamster cage. A Lebanese hamster cage. Apparently gyros were invented in Lebanon.

‘Hamroe!’ I shout at the phone. ‘Come over; bring some friends. I’m not going down without a fight.’

‘What’s wrong?’ After what seems like a minute that includes me not replying he says, ‘Okay, babe. I’ll be right over.’

My mother forgot to send over the money. I’ve got to figure out some way to stay alive. Survival of the fittest—but I can’t recall when I last exercised.

O Come all Ye Faithful. Hamroe walks in my flat after I buzz him in and he’s followed by the blond girl that I saw the other day on the bus, the one I gave my phone number to. Hamroe doesn’t understand the confused look on my face when he introduces her as Zoé, and we exchange cheek kisses and we both linger, suspended in the electric connection that we both feel, inevitably, as her rouge-covered lips feel the hollowness of my cheeks. This I was not expecting.

She speaks poor English but her voice is lower than I expect, which leads me to believe that her personality is even more alluring than I judged.

Hours pass. Days maybe. We talk and we fold paper airplanes and we live like they do in The Dreamers, which is maybe why they made the movie here. We take off all our clothes and light all of the candles that I found in the closet and we open the shutters and flash the people in the office across the street and we prove to be a distraction. We bang on the neighbours door and he opens and he brings his girlfriend over and we all sit naked and do all the drugs that Hamroe brought over.

This time proves to be happy even though I have trouble remembering it. The girlfriend gives my neighbour head and Zoé touches my cock. The candles flicker and this reminds me of another movie, Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom. We act out scenes and this real life movie gets even more fucked up than it actually is.

‘I’m dirt poor,’ I explain to Zoé when she asks me to explain the décor.

‘Dirt poor? I don’t understand.’ She has a slow voice like Nico from The Velvet Underground. It’s velvet, alright.

‘It’s like those people who are minimalist, only I don’t choose to be. I’ve stopped eating and this cocaine isn’t doing any good.’

‘But, of course it is doing good!’

I can’t argue with her. Her voice renders me incapacitated, drunkens me to her whim. Hamroe goes to the bathroom, where you can’t actually flush down the toilet paper because the toilet will clog or flood. So he has to put it in the garbage can beside that is possibly overflowing. Nobody should live like this, yet we are happy.

At least momentarily.

‘I think Hamroe is a faggot,’ says Zoé.

‘Zoé, Zoooaaay. I think you might be right. But aren’t we all faggots? I mean, it isn’t like it needs to be an issue. And besides, now you have more in common. You both enjoy dick.’

‘Well, when you put it that way…’

She has this sexual way of talking that almost prevents me from taking her seriously. But she has these great dick sucking lips that I lunge forward to kiss. We move to the bed, which has no cover on it, and Zoé grabs onto my pillow and puts it just below her stomach while I slip it in. Hamroe hugs me from behind while the candles keep flickering and slowly melt. Flames dance and take us to heaven or hell—whichever one feels better.

O Holy Night. The candles are brightly flickering.

‘I love you,’ I say, to no one in particular.

‘Me?’ Zoé says.

‘No, he means me.’

‘I mean, both of you. All of you. Separately and together.’

We all feel beautiful, removed from the social conscience of the collective. Between 1976 and 1971 over half a million Americans left the cities and set out to create thousands of experimental communities. It was one of the biggest migrations in American history. It’s a mass exodus that we’ve recreated here on a smaller scale, here in our apartment, here—enjoying each other’s nude company. We open the shutters at night and look at the flowery sweetness of stars that protrudes, as light always does, into the chaos of my papery living room. It reaches through all transparent barriers and beats upon our breasts with its unleashed energy. I once heard we are all stars, and I’m feeling pretty famous.

I can’t even remember where I am. The days slip together into one continuous line—even a cycle would be more exciting. I look at my watch twice because the first time I forget. I’m looking at the time, but I’m not seeing it. I don’t even know if Needlenose Ned would feel as though I’m worth bothering anymore. Or if the radio will play I Got You Babe tomorrow. It could be today.

You know those people who constantly talk about suicide but never actually go through with it? I can’t decide what’s more selfish: taking your own life or talking about taking your own life. It’s all fun and games until someone gets hurt. What a stupid warning. Maybe this really is Groundhog Day and if you kill yourself you’ll just wake up once again to Sonny and Cher.

The book I’m reading slides off of my lap onto the floor and it could be The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man or it could be Atlas Shrugged or it could be The Power of Persuasion, but I keep looking at the cover and end up not seeing the words. They wash over me as if I asked for a bath. I kind of just want to remain dirty.

I get a glass of water and pick up the phone and this could almost be described as multitasking. I dial a number I’m familiar with—my fingers move to all the right numbers—but I can’t think who it is.

‘Hello?’

I didn’t expect to get this far.

‘Hi mom.’

‘George! Wow, it’s so great to hear from you! It must be—what time is it there?’

‘It’s three thirty. Wait—no it’s six fifteen. I couldn’t see the hands.’ I really mean my hands.

‘What are you doing up so early?’

‘I couldn’t sleep. I thought I’d call to see if you were back from vacation.’

My mom starts talking about Aruba and every sentence starts with ‘It was good, but…’ followed by a list of exaggerated complications like how she got a tan and now she’ll have to buy darker make-up and how the bartender put pineapple in her Bahama Mama when she asked him not to because she’s allergic and how her free massage came with this appointment she was forced to attend where a condo was pitched to her by a high-pressure salesman.

I take the phone away from my ear and my hand is getting cramped and my right ear is turning red and I pace around the room anxiously thinking of everything but my mother and her overblown vacation. What kind of problems does she think she has?

‘Mom,’ I interrupt before she tells me it was ‘all in all a good time’.

‘Hmm?’

I tell her that for Christmas all I need is money because I’m scraping by, and scraping is an exaggeration. I don’t eat. I barely move if I can help it. The highlight of my day was scaring the pigeons off of the windowsill, and that was only so I could close the shutters and suppress the light. She doles out condolences and promises to wire me money and all this motherly love bullshit that I know is just her way of saying that she wants me to come home—not so I’m closer but just so she knows what I’m up to. She plays the concerned parent role from time to time which is excruciatingly annoying.

We finish with an ‘Okay, great’ and I’m sure she’s smiling at me through the telephone so I hang up on her like I always hang up on any sign of happiness.

I drag myself around the apartment with at least a hope of getting some money to probably do more drugs and buy more books. I live the imagined life of a writer, minus the actual sitting down to write bit. Maybe I’ll buy a typewriter and peck away at the keys as if I’m accomplishing something other than moping.

I can’t imagine living without this internal dialogue, without looking in the mirror and being completely dissatisfied with whatever’s looking back at me. It seems futile to go to sleep because I know I’ll wake up not really living.

I stop looking when I cross the street because I’m not sure I would mind getting hit by a car. I want to be somewhere that doesn’t smell of shit, but reeks of the pleasures of neutrality, of zero scent. I can’t imagine such a place exists and I’ve gotten used to the stench on line nine when it goes past Miromesnil.

I jump over the turnstiles to get on the metro now. I can’t afford to ride like the rest of them, as long as I don’t get caught. I can always play the tourist card, as I have before. I’m surrounded by scribbles, and I know if my apartment were ever to burst into flames, thousands of papers would go up in smoke like they do in the movies, so if somebody broke open a window the papers would fall like they do in the end of Die Hard. But I don’t exit the building with Holly McClane, I exit out the side window with the papers, sadly floating together to our eventual demise.

This doesn’t trouble me. What have I got left? Die hard. I guess that’s what it’s supposed to mean. My life feels like a grand overture that has exhausted all its mysterious parts, and now all that remains is certainty. Shut off the stereo, we all know how it ends. We’re just too lazy to find out. Predictable.

I sit in the park and it’s too cold but I’m sitting alone and don’t really feel like getting up. I brought a book to read but it seems a real effort to peel back the cover. Maybe reading something will take my mind off my mind. I get on the bus headed for Place de la Concorde because I’m going to go to the book shop. This seems like an inevitable solution. I get on the bus and don’t pay and just shrug my shoulders at the bus driver and he isn’t even looking—what a waste of energy. I sit down on the very back in some sort of symbolic move that will hopefully be remembered as my Rosa Parks moment. There is this girl who gets off a stop before me and she is wearing pale red lipstick that is disappearing around the edges and she has bright blue eyes and a long ponytail and she is wearing this long puffy coat that disguises a lithe figure—or so I imagine.

The bus driver stops and I say, “Pardon”, to the man sitting next to me and stand up and open the window and I shout at her and I slide my hand out the window holding a piece of paper with my phone number scribbled on it. She giggles and blushes and takes it out of my hand and the bus driver probably rolls his eyes and drives away leaving her in a mysterious gas of dirty bus fumes, like that scene in Funny Face when Audrey Hepburn is having her picture taken at the train station by Fred Astaire after he says, “You may never know that kiss again. You may never know love again.”

I’m still waiting for her phone call. At least she didn’t laugh at me.

And I’m gone. I don’t know how to feel because I need validation from everything around me; I need someone to recognize that I exist and tell me how to live and how to feel because it’s exhausting to think about. The cold creeps in and I can’t eat—there’s no food. I take deep breaths and hope that somebody will hear my breathing, notice the shortness of breath, and fill my lungs with real air—fill my body with spirit, come close to my lips and just stay there, unwavering, smiling, and maybe reach out and lick me.

When your mind is overstimulated you become choosy. Too many things offered leaves a disconnect over what should be taken. Sometimes this is a good thing, but when you have nothing—when you aren’t eating, not due to lack of hunger, but due to lack of food—the choice is made for you. Go back to the simple. It’s hard to imagine but if you’ve arrived you’ll know it because freedom is that sense of having nothing and owning everything.

I refuse to believe this is as happy as I’ll ever be. Or that the happiest of my memories is the happiest I’ll ever be. I cannot neglect the future, or I cease to exist. But, the problem is, existing seems to be all that I’m doing. I’m waiting for something, ironic in impatience. My feelings are paradoxical because I cannot define what I’m waiting for. What are you waiting for? Repetition. Repetition. Repetition. I cannot wait to everything. I need to break the cycle but I’m stuck in a squeaky wheel. Abstract expressionists instead of contemporary concrete examples. Show me, tell me, serve me.

 My mind is drunk on empty. All alone I sit on the edge of my bed and ask myself why I can’t get up and move the mirror that won’t stop looking at me. When I’m awake I don’t know it. Gravity somehow holds my eyelids open so I’m exposed to reality, but it feels like a dream sequence. Every movement is predetermined and I can’t just sleep it off. I can’t sleep at all, even when I’m supposed to. If there is a solution to the problem, why worry? If there’s not a solution to the problem, why worry? If there’s not a problem, why am I wasting my time, consumed by its existence? What am I supposed to feel? Tell me.

Answer my questions. Voices ask various existential questions. Tell me how to feel. Are you comfortable? That’s why I can’t move from this place. Stuck in the comfort of mediocrity, I can’t get up off of this bed. Absorbed by my own reflection, I live in the shade of narcissism. I’m clawing at the walls with boredom. When will my time come? How much must I suffer before a hole opens up in my roof and a great hand reaches down to pluck me from this bottomless pit and places me amongst the surroundings in which I belong. My life is neither literary nor theatrical and follows a non-linear narrative. Jumps from there to nowhere in particular, how frustrating.

Don’t crawl, or walk, just run, run, run.

I was broke and I break down. I go to the bank and there is insufficient funds. I have twenty euro in my wallet and I don’t have a working visa. All I have is a key to my apartment and a pillow on which to shed more tears, but I’m tired of crying and my ducts are exhausted and can’t summon what they used to. I was blinded by my consuming passions, willing to try something only to be left in a trap.

Nobody warned me this would happen. I need a symbol of hope, like the green light that Gatsby sees at the end of his dock. All I see is the blinking green light on the hot air balloon that is advertising something, always floating over the rooftops in Boulogne-Billancourt.

I suppose this is when most take to drinking. I stop by Nicolas and spend two euro on a cheap bottle of Vin de Pays. I drink that and hope it will make my hunger go away. I call Hamroe and tell him about my situation, which is ironic because my phone line still works and because I know he is the only one who can help. It’s like the one call they give you when you’re put in jail, only most people call somebody they care about.

‘I am broke,’ I start.

‘You’re telling me. I can’t even afford to eat a good meal these days.’

Hamroe has no concept of money. His parents just wire him transfers once a month expecting him to spend it getting educated at the Louvre or the Bibliothèque Nationale or, hell, even going to the opera from time to time.

‘No, Hamroe. You don’t get it. I can’t even afford to eat. I’ve bought this shit wine and I’ve got nobody to drink it with.’

‘Oh, is this an invite?’

I can’t tell at this point whether or not he is trying out his dry British humour on me. Hamroe comes over and I buzz him in and he lies on my bed next to me and he asks why my pillow is all wet and I tell him that I was trying to read my book while drinking a glass of water and the glass tipped over onto the pillow and it’s ruined the book I was reading. He asks what the book is and I tell him and he tells me that it’s his favourite. Hamroe pours himself a glass of wine in a plastic cup because I’m too selfish and he turns on some music and he starts to dance and he asks me about my problems.

I’m glad he came.

I tell him and he listens like he’s my psychiatrist and I’ve never talked in such a long string of words. I feel passionate. Hamroe sits next to me on the bed and he says, ‘How about we just lie nude?’ I don’t know anybody else who could put it so bluntly while being taken so seriously.

We lie naked and there is a mirror just across from the bed and it reflects light onto his nose, which is perfectly straight and deserving of a kiss. I lean over and kiss his nose and we just roll back and forth naked, but I have to stare at his ass crack in the mirror and it creeps me out. This is mostly sloppy, and maybe it’s because there is a lot of pent-up tension, or sexual desire, or frustration, or desperation, or sadness, or maybe we just need to feel something, somebody other than ourselves so we roll back and forth kissing each other but we don’t fuck. We roll and we run out of wine and we get up and dance and then Hamroe lies down and I sit on his stomach.

I never have enough time to say everything that I mean, and when I’m having a really good conversation I always forget what I want to say. I’m doomed to observe—a receiver, not an offerer. And so after a couple of glasses of cheap wine I really flourish, the best is brought out after the threshold has been toed over but not crossed completely. I tell Hamroe that he looks like the young version of George Bailey in It’s a Wonderful Life.

‘And where’d you get those eyes?’ He asks me. ‘They’re the eyes of somebody you see from across a way—a park or something—and when you meet those eyes they hold your gaze as if eyes could breathe and your eyes were the very air that had finally been let in.’

For once we sit there laughing at each other, with each other, without clothes on, drunk. We spend several moments being that couple you see in public that we all hate because they ooze a genuine happiness that sparks a pure envy. And we are totally incognizant of anything else but each other, surrounded by an impenetrable force of, well, of something—maybe love, maybe infatuation, maybe just friendship of a wholesome breed. And for that moment I feel hopeful; somewhere a light turns on, and just as I’m about to pass out I see a green light and it’s telling me: go, go, go.

People start to trickle out of the party like a garage sale is going on across the street. At every turn there are less and less drunks and more and more empty floor space. The clutter that has been kicked around to make room for more clutter is starting to look frightening. I decide to leave and I kiss Hamroe on the cheek and I say goodbye to everybody at the party.

A lot of people are honking because they can’t comprehend that wherever they’re headed is not important. The best way to fall in love is to not even try. My phone rings and I pick it up, but I answer in French.

‘Allo?’

‘What? I’m looking for George.’

‘Kelly? Is that you?’

‘George! It took me so fucking long to track down your number because your dad didn’t know it and—Oh, I’m so mad at you.’

‘Why?’

‘What do you mean, why?!’ I could hear her angry spit hitting the receiver.

‘Look I’m not going to talk to you if you can’t talk to me normally.’

I start to hear whimpers from the other end. Kelly starts crying and she apologizes and tells me that she misses me, misses spending time together. She doesn’t know how she feels about us but she had to talk to me. She had to hear my voice. She keeps blowing her nose between monologues and I sit in silence, listening to her sobs.

‘Stop it! Just shut up! I can’t think with you heaving…’

Kelly’s sobs trail off.

‘Jesus. Look, Kelly, I miss you too. I don’t know what to say…’

Pause. ‘I think I miss you but I’m just getting used to things here and I can’t deal with this right now. That’s why I left everything the way it was. Sometimes things just have to be left. They just have to be ignored. I was tired of my life so I changed it. Isn’t that what everybody wants? And, look, it’s working out for me here. I’ve met some people but it’s not like that. Just friends, okay? Some people never get over love, but it either works out or it doesn’t. And in our case… Well, I’m just trying something new. I don’t know if you’ll ever get it, but I can’t wait around for something that’s just holding me back. We weren’t—I don’t know how to put this—meant to be, you know? I mean, we had a lot of fun but obviously it ended there, nothing more. And believe me, I wanted something to happen to us, really. It just never, and it got kind of tiring waiting for something, like a birthday that never comes. You’re a cool girl, Kelly, but it’s time to move on. The hope is lost, and so was I until I left. And we’re young! We’ve got it all ahead of us, and even if I die not having loved somebody like we loved each other, it will be satisfying knowing that we were once happy. You have to think of yourself now. If you go on like this you will only grow old and bitter living through this sadness. It’s something that I can’t help you with. And you know how they say time heals all wounds? Well, it does, Kelly. You have no idea what time can do to people, so you have to live in it or else it will just pass while you look at empty digits. Everything was boring before I met you. For a while we had fun, but that was just time that we spent together, like the time you should spend together now with someone else. Like the time I’m spending here trying to figure things out. Look, just give it a chance, okay? Promise me?’

There is a click on the other end and Kelly hangs up on me. I drop the phone and collapse from exhaustion onto my bed. My eyes close and my ears are filled with Rachmaninov’s ‘Piano Concerto No. 2 in C Minor’ because my next door neighbour likes to play classical music and the walls, even though they are made of cement, are filled with tiny holes that lets the sound pass through even on the worst of days.

I often hear him having sex with his girlfriend, and I know when it finishes because they always order Chinese takeout afterwards and the delivery man always buzzes my flat instead of his. It’s the irritating shrieks and the pleasant smells that make me curious to meet my neighbour. Maybe one day soon I’ll bake a pie. Maybe one day I’ll get up off of this bed. Maybe one day I’ll see Paris.