April fools

It's a new month. That makes three since I came to Paris. It's difficult to describe how I feel about the passage of time. It's better when people are around. With Becca going back to America I find I have more time on my hands and less interesting ways to spend it. I think I may be stuck somewhere outside of your standard temporal dimension... like maybe I am existing in a single horrible moment, endless and eternal and dull. Often I find myself watching the time wishing it would move more quickly, as if I am living for... searching for some unknown future when I will have something to do or somewhere to be or some overall purpose. As if I am waiting for real life to begin. When I have a thought like that the motivational poster area of my brain (the part that reminds me that "who I can be is up to me", and to "never, never, never give up") always has something catchy to say like "Life begins when you begin living" and then I kind of freak out because frankly, I have no idea where/when/how to "begin" but I am terrified of missing it. So I stay here in my moment completely unable to perceive the passage of time, anesthetized by anxiety, fearing, first of all, that my biological clock will run out before I ever figure out who set it... and why, and secondly that if I stay in this moment outside-of-time for too long I may just stop existing.

And then the future never comes.

But somehow, today I look at the calender and here I am... the future. Except it's not the future... not the one I've been living for. This future is exactly the same as the past. And looking back at the previous three months, it's as if they never really existed.

This probably doesn't make any more sense to read than it does to feel... but a lot of my life feels like this... as though I am only catching glimpses. One might say that I've been alive for a grand total of five minutes. A minute when I was ten awaking from a bizarre dream about the end of the end of the world to a horrifying feeling of self awareness, then I teleported to the junior high lunch line in ninth grade minutes after being dumped by my "girlfriend" in the hallway, then I was going for a walk in a snowstorm at three in the morning my senior year of high school, and then I'm pouring my heart out to a bathroom wall in Pittsburgh Pennsylvania. That brings me here. Paris, France April first 2010. Emerging from outside-of-time for another brief moment of consciousness. Over twenty-five years and I've produced nothing of value to anyone.

April fools, your life is meaningless... It's the joke that I've played on myself.

Quick somebody stick a fish on my back. That's the thing to do in France I guess. Martine did it to Martin earlier today and they explained that the traditional joke is to take a paper fish and try to stick it on someone's back without them noticing. As a side note, Martin also mentioned that one of the neighbors was interested in me, wondering if I gave courses in English, so this could be a possible solution to the job problem. Three months of no work, it's no wonder I feel like my life has evaporated. But I haven't been encouraged to look for work because I still have issues with my French. It's true that it has improved and I feel like I have learned so much in the last three months, but I still need to be spoken to like an infant to understand anything.

They speak too fast in Paris. I only catch glimpses... every fifth word. That's another interesting feeling, that so much is happening all around you, but you can't help but feel that you are missing most of it. I guess I can either just start ignoring it all or keep trying to understand. A lot of my life boils down to that... either give up or keep trying. For now I'll keep trying. I'll continue the struggle. I'll keep my head up and my eyes open and try to piece together what I can. But the days pass, and the weeks and months fly by, and years later I don't feel any progress. What language am I supposed to be learning again? Sometimes I just want to lock myself away in my room until I have everything figured out. But I've been trying that already for so long... life just doesn't work that way. A language is learned in the speaking of it.


...you know, there was a time when I felt that my life was about to begin. That the things I had been waiting for all of my life were finally here. And then... they weren't. And then I moved to France.


Sincerely,

Willim



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