A French man said, What’s a Methodist? And I said, I have no idea! It was Paris, and I was unholy. I lost a hat on the train, a scarf in the park, ma culotte in a studio mansardé. At night, I walked and walked the war memorials of 20 arrondissements.
—From Rooned, my manuscript that never found a publisher
I thought I was going to start this serial essay project under the auspices of clothing, that I would consummate our relationship in fibers (and perhaps there is something woven here), but I must start before that, go underneath. I must start with the body.
When I arrived in Paris, I was in shedding. I had auto-uprooted, self-exiled, applied and agreed to an arrangement in which I found myself —5’9 frame, wannabe Françoise Hardy bangs, and a wobbly textbook French — housed in a modern apartment building in Neuilly by a woman who had a refrigerator full of elixirs. Just a month before, in August 2014, I had backed out of the gravel driveway of the apartment where I had been living since the completion of my MFA with my cardboard artist boyfriend. When I left him and the garden I had built with him and the beautiful armoire he had fashioned for me and the linoleum tiles we had spray painted to perk up the kitchen where the roaches lived under the sink, I began conducting what felt then and what feels even now like the last physical maneuvers of my American life. Those August hours were bare and glaring, as if I was, with each motion, dropping a skin of a previous woman and drafting a new constitution of being.
Firstly, my body was writing its leaving of a man. It was writing its leaving of all the men of my 20s who I had let hold more of a grip on my heart and work than I had allowed myself to. I was severing. And the tears that were falling from my face onto my legs and seatbelt and car upholstery as I drove down Moss Street and towards City Park Avenue were the little old refrains that had to evacuate so that I could refuse the sentimentality that normally subjugated me.
Secondly, my body was writing its leaving of the South, this region from which I had been almost daily submitting apologia for being whatever is I am. My mouth was tired of its progressivism or conservatism or bipartisanism or impartialism. My ears were tired of their witness. My whole body, and all I had done to give it intellect and art, felt regularly pushed into zones of commodification. I sensed a violence everywhere and most basically and most underestimatedly in how we talked to each other or how we didn’t. As I drove past the old Bud’s Broiler on Canal Boulevard where I hadn’t returned since a strange man told me, while I was waiting on my #4, that I had “a funny foreign look” about me (which was curiously not the only time I had received a comment like this about my appearance), I knew I was on my way to writing my body out of these appraisals, out of American paradigms, out of the speech of them.
Thirdly, my body was writing its leaving of a certain relationship with the word “daughter.” As I followed behind my parents and watched their heads bop up and down with each hit of the U-Haul wheels on the uneven concrete planks of I-10, I was writing a goodbye to these parents — parents with a daughter just five car hours away, parents who felt adept at helping said daughter because they had worked hard to give her opportunities in this country. From the bench seat inside the moving truck, my mom leaned in to adjust the A.C., and my dad worked the mirrors. I recognized this scene from childhood, I recognized the being carted, and that particular posture of my father’s neck when he’s driving over 30 mph. I was writing myself away from them, away from their purview.
But for now, we drove northward together, towards Birmingham, and when we arrived at their house, we unloaded my books and clothing, kitchen supplies and miscellaneous linens. We tucked away the antique desk they’d bought me in college and the standing globe my brother had given me a few Christmases ago. When we went upstairs, I drank one of my dad’s beers and sat with my mom at the kitchen table in a silence that refracted years of saids and unsaids. I was leaving them, making a hole where I had once been, and stockpiling their basement with the remnants of my half-assed American adulthood. They were helping me, but I wasn’t helping them. I was breaking a promise, writing my body into a breach.
Who was I, then, as I disembarked in Paris? I wasn’t sure. I arrived with a suitcase, backpack, and mandolin. I had a one-year au pair contract with a host family. I wanted to speak French and walk a city, really walk a real city. I was someone who wanted this experience, who had wanted this experience so badly she had excised herself from all familiarity. I knew no one here. I was ready for my near-total anonymity. I was someone who didn’t ask for a lot of things but was going to save all of her centimes for a great coat for my first winter. And I was a writer, who was going to write the woman in me who needed, who had been waiting, to be loosed.
What a fantastic introduction to this new project. Can't help but think of James Baldwin's opening to Giovanni's Room, which I also can't seem to ever stop thinking about:
"Perhaps, as we say in America, I wanted to find myself. This is an interesting phrase, which certainly does not mean what it says but betrays a nagging suspicion that something has been misplaced."