playing house
Travelogue #4: my days alone in Perpignan, France - May 2022
I woke up that first morning on Almond Street, half-sunken into the velvet understanding that I had just exited the best days of my life. Beside me, beneath the mug and its desiccated tea bag, lay the first book I’d tried to read in months. I recalled chapter one from the prior night, something about an angel. I hadn’t considered angels lately, but I was beginning to consider ghosts — the sensation that my boots were still rooted to a sticky bar floor, though I could see them presently, kicked off by the door. It was over, and it never would be finished.
It was all so quiet. The mornings in Bonn had never been city-loud, but I’d always spent them racing. Internal motors revved and hummed beneath the music that was always streaming through earbud wires. What will I eat what will I drink will I be beautiful and loved today or swollen and besides the point why did you tell me that if it wasn’t supposed to mean anything are you still mad at me or will we laugh again today will there be a mirror when I get there and how long will I be allowed to look in it. Walk to the U-Bahn stop, wait, get on, ride two stops, get off, walk to the grocery store, buy mango, walk to school, make three more coffees, turn on the low light, open the laptop, open the notebook, open the book, others start arriving, someone turns the big light on. This is the signal to take your coat off now, shoes off now, get on the mat now, move. Follow the leader, be a bird, a vending machine, the earth, the twelve signs of the zodiac, a turtle, an astronaut, a castaway, a zombie, an actor — anything but yourself. Fly, crawl, levitate, die. We were all over us.
Oh, to be theatre kids in theatre classes across the ocean, weaving whims into utopia. As soon as play-class was over, the real games began. Emotion was currency: fear, lust, tension, panic, aggression, elevation, hilarity, grounding. We kept the softness to ourselves, mostly. Hesitant to expose the underbelly, we needed some degree of privacy. But what we had was gentle, too, so we forgave the abrasions.
I couldn’t leave all that behind in the light of day. That final day was burst-scab springtime, gelato and park picnics, rallies for the mayor and children on the cobblestones. I couldn’t run into you after I’d said goodbye and meant it. I had to leave late, under the same covered darkness that I could trust to shelter me again.
I waited on that same train platform, bound for France again. Two months before, I’d been carried to Paris in a sunny haze, zipping past old castles, older rivers, generational fields of grain. This time, I had no friend beside me, no sunshine. I had all my winter sweaters, once so necessary, weighing down a suitcase that had been built to carry less.
I watched the archway clock tick closer to midnight. There were two other lone travelers with me, and they made me nervous. The Bonn I’d come to know had always been safe, quaint. Even the bus station drunks had seemed harmless. But on the final trek to the Hauptbahnhof, getting hassled by a leering man with a beer in hand who’d only speak to me in English, I realized the spell had been lifted. Here was no longer a home.
I was running out of dream sand. This study abroad program was as far ahead as I had ever been able to see. All those Sunday mornings when I was still a child, sitting at the sun-bright breakfast table with my mother and her morning coffee, waiting until she was awake enough to tell me her stories. She was the first to tell me that college was fine and fun, full of lively, smiling parties, but the real meat was over the ocean. I followed the steam rising out of her mug, and I swore I could see autumn cresting into winter: Vienna, where the cold is killer, and a hot plate and one pair of gloves are insufficient for keeping thawed. Where they look at your mother sideways for jogging, unable to understand a runner who isn’t being pursued. They can’t see that she is being pursued, she’s haunted, it hurts. Hyper-real, she’s never felt like this. In Vienna, the fractures are mosaic, instead of pothole. These fissures will never repair.
My life is a variation on my mother’s, which cannot help but become repeatedly apparent at every mile. She grew up on 91st Street, so I did on 95th. Enrollments at the same elementary and high schools. College in California for us both: Bay Area for her, L.A. for me. Vienna shifted into Bonn — the land had to speak German.
There was no particular exoticism to Bonn itself. It was less grand than my mother’s journey, in that regard — no Billy Joel song, but an aura that would reveal itself over time. A storybook hometown safety descended like a fog and dissolved upon the brink of summer. Retroactive juvenile delinquency, drinking on the streets, sneaking back into school after dark, brushing past the Trainspotting types who’d long since invented the art form we were aping. We’d take little trips to big history cities for architecture and exhibitions, to wear the best of our outfits and take the photos we’d show everyone we’ll meet for the rest of our lives. But, barefaced on a strange family’s balcony, smoking right after the rainfall, there was a sinewed tenderness I couldn’t find in postcard places.
That sweet, soft anonymity threatened to devolve into obscurity as soon as I skipped town. I slept in tortured fits on that midnight train out of Germany. I felt the machine reverse its direction in the center of Switzerland, and all I could do was pull my suitcase tighter against my legs, curl deeper into my makeshift nest, and trust that I’d kept enough pixie dust pooling in the corners off my eyes to keep misfortune at bay. Wherever I was going had to be the right way.
When the sun rose, I peeled back the wrapper on my protein bar, in the spirit of beginning to get rid of the remaining things that wouldn’t last. Another languid day of searching landscapes from window seats passed me by. Another world ending, and I could see everything, everywhere I would never encounter again. Here was a sunrise, yearning; a morning, aching; an afternoon, bristling; an evening, binding.
Off the train in Perpignan, I lugged my luggage, and the first wheel broke off from my suitcase. All four would be gone by the time I met my mother again. I reached the Airbnb on the Rue des Amandiers — Almond Street, in English. Once I was inside, a rubber band snapped, and I couldn’t tell what I had done. What was I doing here, alone? Was this adventure or retirement? Had an expiration date already passed? What did I have to look forward to now?
In 2020, Interview Magazine used Andy Warhol’s old interview questions on Joan Didion.
Why can’t it be magic all the time? they asked her, in Andy’s voice.
In her own voice, she replied,
What.
Perpignan was a halfway house in which I kept believing it could still be magic all the time, though I had no idea how to make magic on my own. The faeries had pulled me into their circle, and I had danced with them — but they let me go. They weren’t supposed to let me go, that’s what all the stories said. I was supposed to dance until my feet bled and my heart gave out from the effort. Even expiring before my time, I would have gone out laughing. In Perpignan, I realized I was tired, half-beat-up, in need of a shower. Sober now, alone in the deep, dark woods.
I walked most of my way through these interstitial days, covering all the ground I was able, trying to let movement and pretty views distract the bees inside my skull. I looked in window displays, I read signs. I got big ideas. But it was all of little use, because I was out of Bonn, up from the dream.
I was in town at the same time as a film festival: Filmer le corps, filming the body. I watched Summer with Monika, Swedish with French subtitles. Body was the language, and I should’ve been more fluent by then. I went to the grounds of an old fortress and explored as far as I could get without taking the guided tour. I muttered lines from A Midsummer Night’s Dream to myself. Which words were mine, original? Je ne comprends pas du tout. The one-room on Almond Street had shutters that closed out all the light. Night was really night. There was only some Internet. What did I need the Internet for anymore? I walked to the CarreFour. I bought nothing I needed to use the stove to cook. This was how I tried to temper exile with vacation.
In a few days, I’d pass through Cannes, stay a day in Nice, do the South of France more properly. After that, I’d lodge in Barcelona and Florence, reunite with some friends again, if only just for a stint. I’d do warm Europe, vacation Europe. It would all mean less.
In Nice, I’d find the same beach where my parents had Euro-tripped once. I’d look out at the water with an almond croissant and a Fiona Apple record on repeat. At 7 AM, people would be swimming in the sea for exercise, which was regular for them. I’d agree that this was profoundly beautiful, and feel a dull pull to a life of seaside obscurity, which I imagined would be full of candlelit home-cooked meals and miles-long bicycle rides, my own mornings swimming in the sea. At the same time, I understood, gutturally, that this was not for me.
If any of warm Europe was for me, it was Perpignan, with its shuttered businesses and absentee nightlife. I took myself out to one restaurant meal. It was not as delicious as it could have been. My French was not as good as it could have been, but the waiter would not speak English to me. It began to rain. I went back to the movies for a documentary on children tasked with recreating decades-old Pina Bausch choreography in front of the formidable, withered Pina Bausch herself. I recognized the choreography, we’d studied it in Bonn. I felt an uncanny comfort in seeing the same costumes on smaller people, their moves less certain than those of the taut professionals we’d seen, the originals. These gelatinous children didn’t know anything. It was all from Pina, for Pina, who would pass away before very long. I hope it all hadn’t been too late to mean something to her.
My one allotted tourist chip in Perpignan was cashed in on an excursion to the Forteresse de Salses. It took the better part of a day. I’d spotted it in the final hour on the final train during my truncated journey out of Bonn, and felt duty-bound to come back and investigate. It was a landmark that seemed like it held an answer. I figured I'd be able to find some lifelines to channel. Here was the reality of my medieval picture books; I was treading where warriors had long since fought, screamed, and bled. I tried to imagine battles and conquests, blood and metal, horses and guns, swords, archers, cavalry, Spain against France. I tried to conjure nobles and servants, children and parents, fires and feasts, but all I saw in front of me was dry-bone dust. Life was happening somewhere else.
When the faeries let you go, it’s best to not replace them with the ghosts. Keep moving, quickly; don’t linger. Whether you’re ready or not, it’s time.
