As I sit at Cafe Delmas, I am trying not to be a miserly writer. I deeply want to record my travels, but something is keeping me from having the largeness of spirit to let it drip out.
Hopefully, the wine I ordered to go with my fig and cheese starter and beef tartare will lend me some generosity of words.
I want to start at the beginning but we’re no longer there, so before wheeling back, I’ll share an update: It is July 4th. I have been in London and have lost my luggage. I have found my luggage and attended a wedding. I have changed my plans at least half a dozen times and somehow always ends up doing the right thing.
This is my last night in Paris. I leave for Lisieux by an early train tomorrow morning and will be moving on to Krakow. But one doesn’t become a woman in red shoes eating cheese at
Cafe Delmas overnight. First, you have to be a person in San Matteo who keeps changing her mind about whether she will be ok without a nail file for two weeks while also being a person that has lived most of her life without one and becoming someone who did by one, decided she didn’t like it, bought another and then didn’t bring either of them after all. Interestingly enough there was a moment when I really needed one.
Is it me or does packing give most people a crisis of belongings? It is uncomfortable not to have enough and overwhelming to have too much, but wait! There’s a third option- packing gives you the opportunity to viscerally imagine (anticipate) both at once! This is not some sort of interesting melange. Imagine two planes of existence, like sheets of vellum. One one is written a treatise on being without. One the other is some sort of fauvist verse about why there is all this shit around me. Try holding those two up to the light together.
It is in the very middle of packing that you are forced to realize that you are going somewhere and not as the supercharged version of yourself that you were thinking of when you bought your ticket. And now, all you have to mitigate your droves of inadequacies both dizzying in their as yet lack of conviction (what did Schroedinger pack for the cat?) but limited to the volume of one hard shell roller case. And the truth is that you will never really be packed because humanity is trying to zip their glorified selves in with the balled-up socks and that one t-shirt that you won’t actually wear (I thought it would be the red one, but it’s actually the grey one).
No wonder women of bygone times had ladies' maids. Outsourcing existential incompleteness is a grand idea!
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