Once again I am using a foreign keyboard that somehow has all its keys in the wrong places. It has been almost exactly 24 hours since I arrived here about 10 minutes away from the small town of Uzès. I will be here for the next 24 days, walking Loulou the dog, taking care of the three cats whose names I still have to learn, cooking, cleaning, and helping with the gardens of herbs and veggies.
The past week with Sam travelling through Copenhagen and then France went by remarkably quickly. We ventured quickly from Paris to Lyon to Nice, walking, eating, cooking, and occasionally participating in the Eurocup excitement. (The Irish are abominally loud though). I apologize for the lack of photos but unfortunately because I am travelling all summer without a laptop it is harder to upload photos, especially to this blog!
I spent the last week not only travelling but also devouring books. I finished the Neapolitan Series by Elena Ferrante, which is absolutely remarkable and which I think everyone should read – and yes, not only women, though it touches on many themes important to women and which gets heavily neglected in literature. I have also been chewing through a dense but I think important book about ISIS, from which I am learning the history, presence, lure, and consequences of the remarkable – yes, remarkable – organization and how America, amongst other nations, has failed the navigate or succeeded in certain instances against. I have lots of questions, but most importantly, I want to know that I am informed in a time of such ignorance and pure aggression in the country.
This also ties back to the reason I think it is important to be writing. I wasn’t quite sure why I came to France to write a play, to be honest. After all, couldn’t I have just lived at home, cleaned, cooked, and adopted a few animals for my parents and have them feed me? But I hope being here, working with my hands and not just my head will bring me to touch with important elements of my self that I may have lost. Having turned 21, finally, though I keep forgetting it happened, I want to remember how young and small I am, and how tat should inspire both humility and also power. Not ego.
This morning as I was vacuuming for the third time in the day while sneezing in the swirl of dust, I thought to myself, “I feel like Cinderella,” and yet how lucky I am to be here in France, working with my hands in a beautiful area of the country and world, with Zaza, a lovely and eccentric French lady who even bought me Greek yogurt today! I was told that I am in charge of cooking every day for lunch, which scared e at first but I am excited to cook things from home, if I can pull them off. I realized, eerily, it is no longer exhausting to think in French all day, and I do it almost naturally. So this is not about studying abroad, or taking classes, or travel. I want to be as simple as I can be about routine and learning. We are eating food we are growing and nurturing with our hands, where the sunset tells us to sleep and the sunrise that is time to begin the day. I let my body tell me when it is tired and bike to the town with a basket to buy necessities. I have begun to write by hand, which is its own challenge but which I think will allow my thoughts to naturally take over the page rather than the other way around.
Everything I do nowadays is in excess – work, exercise, eating – and this sense of routine will hopefully bring those necessities back to being necessities not excessive consumption or exertion. I miss home, and I think being isolated in this way really scares me, but I hope these next few weeks will teach me simplicity is not isolation or loneliness but a way of simplifying our overly complicated lifestyle of today. I want to learn not to resent other people’s successes or happiness, but to find it within myself in a way that I can sustain even in the midst of my own mundanity or momentary lows. I also hope this will lead me to find and keep the right people in my life. It has already begun to slow down time in a way that has decreased my over-hyped anxiety about the future. The future is far and non-existent, and I trust it will bring itself to the table in the way life takes its form – in the present.
I hope everyone is having a beautiful day and I miss you all, Ma, Pa, Sam, and thank you for travelling with me through the past few weeks. Thank you to my family for reading, following, and putting up with my labyrinth of thoughts. Thank you to my friends who I cannot wait to see soon but also am slowly learning will not, as my anxiety usually dictates, disappear if I don’t “keep things up” through technology.
As I walked to the train station in Nice yesterday to board my train to Nîmes, I watched the planes take off from the Nice airport where Sam was headed as they went off into the sky and I was both saddened and amazed at how soon my sister would be so incredibly far from me and yet all these years, with technology, I am always under the façade of how close my loved ones are. Technology cannot build or break those bonds. Sending love to you all, and please send me addresses so I can write to you all! Physical contact still makes a difference!
AixBenedict 