Home Again

February is fast approaching, and I haven't posted anything for nearly two months. I not only didn't post, I didn't write. Not once. I think not doing something is as habit-forming as doing it. Entertaining the idea is always much more strenuous than the act, and I think it must be like that for everyone. I was also afraid that I wouldn't be able to say what I wanted to, but that's never the point anyway. Words will come like rivers, jumbled and bold and unrepentant. I am finding that they aren't the ones I look for, but they'll serve all the better for it.



I often think of Strasbourg now that I'm newly settled into my dorm in Syracuse. The last 2 things I'd posted were about the terrorist attacks in Paris. The remainder of my term was shadowed by them. I did not go to Berlin the following weekend, and people were afraid. Stunned, but life went on. Strasbourg had its Christmas Market, and it was greatly reduced by cautionary measures.



I can't help but feel that somehow I didn't appreciate my last days as well as I should have. They say you fall in love with the first city that loves you back- not your family, but you. I miss Strasbourg so much that it must be true. I miss my friends, I miss hearing the guttural elegance of Alsatian French, I miss the serpentine curls of smoke from Claire's cigarettes and the way the smell lingered for hours by her chair.

Quais Rouget de Lisle

Sometimes when I can't sleep, I whisper the tramlines to the darkened room. F, Place d'Islande and Elsau. B, Hohenheim Gare. C, Gare Central. D, Poteries. And so on. I trace my path to my university building, lingering over the tram lines and stops, and the streets I walked on. We always met at Gallia. There was a bar near there, just along the river, that we went to every weekend in the beginning. Jimmy's, it was called. I never figured out who Jimmy was.

I'm not such a child that I don't see that I miss Strasbourg because it was the site of that terrible and beautiful uncertainty,when you are more adult than child for the first time. I'm not such a grown-up that I let this fact make me sensible. Frankly, I don't have a single sensible bone in my body.

Half Timber in San Diego

San Diego is the home I knew as a child, Strasbourg the one I knew as a changeling. There will be others, of course. But these nights, these are the two that make me lay awake and think and think and think.

In my little gray-blue room in San Diego I have a box stuffed full with train tickets and the set list from the Hozier concert in Amsterdam and maps. Brown paper from the markets of Nice all the way to Fez, holding figs and oranges with fleeting ideas scribbled on them.Even a coaster I stole in a drunken stupor from Oktoberfest. When I come home in March I will put them in order. You will hear then how Rue des Cordonniers looked those fine December evenings. But some things I have in this orange sketchpad, like the angry poem I wrote after being mugged in Morocco.

There are many things I never wrote down. The Lennon Wall, the towering irony of it all, and the first Cat Cafe I ever went to was in Prague. The Tower of London, paling to the wild Irish beauty of Glendalough. Some things I will never remember, and some have become part of me, mingling with blood and bone, like San Diego during a rare storm.



I think I will go back to France next year.