Untitled Nostalgia/France/Love/Resentment
When I am sad, I daydream of France. I don’t even really know her. In many ways I know her from the perspective of the white man, since that is often the author behind the novels that I pull off the shelf in the travel section. For a period of time I resided there, and upon returning from Amsterdam I couldn’t help but notice the cruel, masculinity that seemed to juxtapose a weekend in the Netherlands. The sterile orange, street-lamps that could have lined any street, in any city. Amsterdam had lit up this part of me that was feminine, curious and young. It had the electricity that you imagine your life should have at twenty or twenty one. I’d rode atop the front wheel of my best friends bike, for gods sake. We sipped cocktails in a fluorescent pink lounge. The cocktail bar wasn’t far from the Olympic stadium. It felt far from the world I’d grown up in. Upon landing, late, at the Nice airport I couldn’t help but find myself resenting France. For what reason, I’m honestly not entirely sure.The stores on Sundays and afternoons all over the place, closed early and there was no rhyme or reason. Perhaps it was the vigour of my age, wasn’t the world supposed to open itself up to me. Why were shops closing, slowing down? “If Amsterdam is woman, then France is man.” And I seemed, to hate men and thus France. Logic, naturally at play. I resented the dark quiet of the streets, and the language barrier (one which, I was actively playing a part in by neglecting language learning in favor of Virginia Woolf novels). The shifty nature of tired travelers. The next day, I hid for hours in my hostel, writing romantically, with nostalgia, of Amsterdam.
France is not without fault, it is a country that is rigid in its national pride. Not the melting pot of the United States but rather a country that in uniting itself together tightly, like the pearls in my grandmother's knitting, can render anything un-French, obsolete.
I found myself sat in front of Anthony Bourdain, who was lavishing in a cheese board on screen, after a night spent doom scrolling the TV guide. That sickening feeling of nostalgia, one you know cannot be satiated. Marseille, alive on my screen, through food and people. France, dear France happening right then on the show and, what I knew to be true, happening now, 9 hours ahead of me. The sickening nostalgia was homesickness. I have yet to shake the feeling.
6 months is not a particularly long time, in some contexts. When you claim it as half a year, it feels like a god awful long time. Mentioned in the span of an 80 year life, it may not have that particular value any longer. I knew that separating myself from the city would be entirely painful when I returned, from other short trips, and felt that signature sensation of ease, that you only feel once you have arrived back home. I suppose the reason for writing now, although sort of lost on me, feeling kind of torturous, is that a part of me still takes up some residence there.
It is stubbornness that plays in one's heart to hate a city, or a country even. How childlike and absurd to allow something such as store hours define one's entire experience. Needless to say, as I sit here scraping the internet for bits and pieces of literature on Aix-en-Provence, the hate, which I hesitate to even call it such, was short lived. It is a story too lame to tell in the face of many other stories also told, written by many others, in a deep mad love affair with a country that is not my own.
It feels only right that if I attach an image to such a piece of work, that it is an image with intimacy to my experience. My time in Aix was not loud, but neither was it quiet. I look through my albums, perhaps at a sunset. It reverberates within me, this sense of calmness but also a hyperactivity. A near balance.I want to write to an old, longtime friend “do you remember me, that first time you saw me!? On the Cours Mirabeau, in the. afternoon?” Anyways, perhaps it may never matter, I myself can see it now, it was blue, blue and yellow.