Tweet
After finally graduating college with a Bachelors Degree, and finishing a long season as a beach lifeguard, I got on a plane and flew to Paris at the invite of a female friend, Isabelle. The agreement was that I would stay with her for no more than 14 days, would leave when she left in the morning, and would not be allowed to return until after 6PM, because, as she said, "You don't come to Paris and sit around the house all day." We were not involved. We met as she was one of my housemates at the beach that summer, in Maryland, on the East Coast of the United States.
I turned thirty-five that summer, before I went to Paris, and was the oldest lifeguard on the beach patrol. I had done this for so long I had difficulty finding meaning in much else. I became a Fall Guard, one who doesn't return to college or a teaching job, and works until Sun Fest, the 23rd of September. I covered a mile of beach by myself the last two weeks. It was lonely and serene, just me, the seagulls, and some bluefish. The last three days it rained, and I was ready to leave.
I left the states the first week of October, on my first plane trip across the Atlantic. When I got to the airport in France, and survived Isabelle's thrill-filled drive back to Chatou, a suburb of Paris where she lived, we settled into her nice condo just North of the city.
The next morning, I caught the RER (Train) into northern Paris. I dressed well during my time there, but was forced to eat tuna from a can on the street, for lack of funds.
I found the French people looking at me perplexed yet wonderingly at this, but I smiled within myself because I had somehow managed to get here and had a pad to sleep in for free, but only for two weeks.
I was a dichotomy of myself then; inward turned outward, reduced yet expanded in space. It was truly foreign to my world.
(Two weeks extrapolated in novel goes here...)
I was once young, but realized that would never be again, after leaving that fateful day from the Chunnel station in Northern Paris.
In solemnity, because of the tear-streaked cheeks of Sandrine, my heart.
I exited Paris; which to me was a modern world of romance, love, dreams fulfilled, crushed, then scattered for the ages, and entered England, which turned out to be the harbinger of the present, with all its requisites and needs to be reached, struggled with, and ultimately fulfilled.
I left my child in Paris, and I became a man on the edge of a cliff in Normandy, overlooking the Seine's entrance into the English Channel, under the stars, entangled in the arms and blessed and smothered by the fine scent of this woman of 20. Her name was Sandrine, and somehow, after her, I knew my life would never be the same....
I turned thirty-five that summer, before I went to Paris, and was the oldest lifeguard on the beach patrol. I had done this for so long I had difficulty finding meaning in much else. I became a Fall Guard, one who doesn't return to college or a teaching job, and works until Sun Fest, the 23rd of September. I covered a mile of beach by myself the last two weeks. It was lonely and serene, just me, the seagulls, and some bluefish. The last three days it rained, and I was ready to leave.
I left the states the first week of October, on my first plane trip across the Atlantic. When I got to the airport in France, and survived Isabelle's thrill-filled drive back to Chatou, a suburb of Paris where she lived, we settled into her nice condo just North of the city.
The next morning, I caught the RER (Train) into northern Paris. I dressed well during my time there, but was forced to eat tuna from a can on the street, for lack of funds.
I found the French people looking at me perplexed yet wonderingly at this, but I smiled within myself because I had somehow managed to get here and had a pad to sleep in for free, but only for two weeks.
I was a dichotomy of myself then; inward turned outward, reduced yet expanded in space. It was truly foreign to my world.
(Two weeks extrapolated in novel goes here...)
I was once young, but realized that would never be again, after leaving that fateful day from the Chunnel station in Northern Paris.
In solemnity, because of the tear-streaked cheeks of Sandrine, my heart.
I exited Paris; which to me was a modern world of romance, love, dreams fulfilled, crushed, then scattered for the ages, and entered England, which turned out to be the harbinger of the present, with all its requisites and needs to be reached, struggled with, and ultimately fulfilled.
I left my child in Paris, and I became a man on the edge of a cliff in Normandy, overlooking the Seine's entrance into the English Channel, under the stars, entangled in the arms and blessed and smothered by the fine scent of this woman of 20. Her name was Sandrine, and somehow, after her, I knew my life would never be the same....