In the months that followed Henryk’s total meltdown, I thought I’d clean up my act by fully committing to a relationship. Henryk’s divorce somehow inspired me to find true love—if a dysfunctional man like Henryk was single, I thought, I should surely be hitched. But I went about it all wrong, just like Henryk, mistaking a romantic relationship as an easy answer to my problems, instead of as an opportunity to ask myself the right questions.
The time I spent with Sandra felt like a four-year disintegration. We broke up on a Sunday when I was supposed to come over for carbonara; a petty misunderstanding over text-message ended everything.
The last thing Sandra said to me was,“Someday far in the future, long after this is over, I hope you’ll remember the good times, and what we used to be.” But the thing is, I don’t remember much of our relationship at all now, and even less of that person I used to be.
Sandra was from the rocky cliffs of Brittany, where the North Atlantic winds and frigid waves batter the land incessantly. In many ways, looking back at it, our relationship played out on a cliff face, always on the edge. For years, we tried to keep our heads above the whitecaps of our profound dysfunction with cocaine-fuelled, ecstasy-laced dance parties. Whenever we watched a sunrise together, we hugged and apologized and promised each other we’d be better—to ourselves, to each other, to the relationship we thought we were building … but the further back we tried to remember the good times, the further we floated away from them.
In those final years, we tried satisfying ourselves with Netflix-and-Chill, make-up sex and grasses matinées—sleeping-in until it was too late—hanging onto those pitiful life-rafts as we floated out to sea.
We became numb to our bodies. She developed an eating disorder, and I became addicted to smoking weed. Inevitably, indubitably, we sank further into the tearful depths, finally hitting rock bottom on the Sunday evening of the carbonara dinner.
Someday far in the future, long after this is over, I hope you’ll remember the good times, and what we used to be.
I remember the last time I saw her in Paris far better than the entire relationship. It was a few months after the breakup, on a sunny day in autumn, while I was sitting on a bench in the park just south of the church at Saint Ambroise. Sandra was in the neighborhood visiting an apartment to rent. She invited me to join her. I don’t know why I agreed to it—misplaced comfortability, maybe—but I remember walking up the typical Parisian wooden stairwell. I could hear the faint sound of classical piano coming from somewhere down in the courtyard, and I remember thinking, for the first time, that Sandra would make a good, kind neighbor. I remember the beams of light in the spiral staircase, and the way Sandra took the lead. In that moment, I realized Sandra was no longer the person she used to be.
The apartment was on the third-floor. The door was ajar and the living room windows were wide open when we entered. I leaned out over the railing of the windows and looked down below for the source of the piano. When I turned around, Sandra was standing in the living room with the real estate agent, asking questions about the building.
I remember thinking how adult she seemed. I sat on the blue sofa against the far wall and watched her, and I remember being enamored with the way the sun shone at a sharp angle across the hardwood floor as I listened to her voice, the same voice that used to whisper bonne nuit, mon amour for so many years.
I closed my eyes and imagined a different world, one in which we were considering this apartment together, one in which I’d brew us a pot of tea and we’d go to the window and listen to the piano from the courtyard while we watched the light from the only star in our solar system creep along the sun-drenched floor.
Afterwards, back in the quiet of the park, we hugged, said goodbye, and I finally understood what it meant to let her go: I’d never get to know the person she was becoming. The last I heard, she didn’t take the apartment and she lives far away now. It’s funny how certain memories float through us like distant clouds, both revealing and casting a shadow on the person we used to be. That’s the story I tell myself about my time with Sandra, anyhow
And now I’m back on a train slicing through the fog, and it’s bleak and grey out there beyond the drizzle-streaked window. I shouldn’t have gone to Normandy to see my old flame—I know this now. She said it best: “You’re like an ember who, when it gets too hot, tosses itself from the fire.”
At least I have clarity. Nobody else is going to help me understand what it is to be me. For now, it’s best I stay out of the fire until I know why I’m in it. And whether that reason has anything to do with being something more than advertised, something more than a complex biochemical machine with basic needs and impossible wants—something more than, as a Parisian poet once said, fleshy bags of mostly water—more than characters who do cocaine or ketamine or say a sanctified no to drugs, more than shadows who stay inside our whole lives watching overproduced TV, committing to happy and toxic relationships in order to make babies and create meaning and perpetuate the human species, sometimes choosing but often succumbing to the inevitability of settling down, sometimes thriving but mostly killing ourselves in our endless commute towards the career, the career …whether or not we are more or less than any of this, maybe that’s the point: life is only ever what we choose it to be, from fucking strangers to serial monogamy to ordering takeout to homemade meals to forgetting about the Sandras in our lives to ignoring our estranged friend’s drunken wisdom to riding a high-speed train towards Switzerland for no other reason than we’d like to see the Matterhorn. Is any of this a sufficient reason for why I’m on this train? Because I just want to see the Alps? Isn’t that enough? And wouldn’t it have to be?
PS:
In 2011, I met a Franco-British poet named Yann at a book-swap in a swanky Parisian bar called Le Carmen. The idea behind a book swap is simple: in order to enter the party, you have to bring a book you care about and are willing to exchange with a stranger.
Yann gave me Ray Bradbury’s “The Illustrated Man” and I gave him Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay. We’ve been the best of friends ever since, and Yann just recently migrated to Substack. He’s my favorite poet around and has a singular style. Give him a gander:
A Tall, Parisian Tale (Part 8)