Today I am the guardian of the doors, racing through the corridors of life and culling key after key from the set. There are so many of them, a spectrum of doors, spreading out long like a fan, and they overwhelm me. The desire to measure my existence not in minutes or hours but by the number of these gateways is elephantine. I must resist this urge. But can you not say you have never felt it? Have you never felt the desperation of a locked door which taunts you? A door to which no key works? To say you have not is a lie. These doors divide the entrances from the exits, and there is no correct sens de la visite. One may come and go, or come or go, so long as the door is not locked.
I am not the guardian, I am the Suppliant of these doors, worshipping their ability to stop me cold before them. I collapse at their feet, humbled. One day I will hold these doors in a handful of dust.
But doors are not doors which are men. Each new one is a portal to a possible beginning, and I am the keeper of the keys. What do you do when you silence, sweet and pure, is the only homage you can offer?
I want to throw the keys into the Seine.
* * *
I should be girlishly giddy right now. Yesterday afternoon I met up with Monsieur Lawyer, a doctoral student in International Law, for coffee. On paper he is all I should want: very intellectual, cultured, a tennis player. Polite. He's olive skinned and dark eyed, of Spanish heritage. A violinist. His father is a clarinetist and might be able to get us tickets to the Opéra National de Paris' production of The Marriage of Figaro. He strongly suggested that I look into doing my PhD here.
¨Go talk to your adviser and the head of the department,¨ he emphasized after I shared that last year, Sophie, my directeur de mémoire had praised my work and said it could have been a Master 2 thesis, and Nancy, the head of my department with whom I took a seminar last year, had sighed that she wished they could keep me for my PhD. ¨You could easily get a doctoral contract. The state would pay you to do your PhD here and then you'd be guaranteed another 3 to 4 years.¨
¨And then I could demand citizenship?¨
¨I looked up the law for you. You can ask for it as soon as you finish your Master 2 this year.¨
¨ But then I have to stay during dossier processing.¨
¨Yes, but they'll basically automatically give you citizenship if you do your doctorate here. Plus, Hollande's administration is going to be rather cool about naturalizations for the next five years. And c'mon, France is so beautiful! Why leave?¨
He was more than half flirting with me when he mentioned repeatedly that I should stay in France. I couldn't argue with him though. I don't want to leave. Of all my lovers, France is the love of my life and the most faithful. We had engaging conversation and we do have a lot in common. I liked him. I would see him again.
But these men are becoming my hallway of doors, with me chasing fickle locks and handles. I am the maestro deftly pairing keys with key holes and sliding metal against metal until the cruel grind halts me. Today I am tired of being alone in the corridor, can I just have one, please?
The pitiless truth is this: the paradox of dating so many different people is that it can make you feel more alone than ever, can make you realize that all you want is one. One one one is such a simple number and yet the lack of one elicits a staggering melancholia hard wired into the human condition. We are made to be understood.
I am not giddy right now because I have gone to the dim, pensive place. The place I go after E texts me thinking I was returning to Paris from the countryside tonight, where I explain that my boss chewed me out last night and I was down about it. That my boss has the same age as him. The place I go, a dark portal, when he responds ¨ And to think an age difference of eight years made me hesitate when I was 27,¨ and then we get to discussing the girl he thought was The One and something passes between us that makes me feel like he gets me.
He teases me, corrects my grammar, and after I ask him if she was eight years younger or older and he responds ¨younger,¨ I say that I understand why he would've hesitated, she was still a teenager. His response is that ¨she was more mature than even some 24 year old women now.¨ I breathe, try not to read into this ( I am 24 ), I tell him yes, of course--each person is different--but one cannot look back to the past and what is done is done. I tell him when I was a teenager I learned very quickly what matters and what does not. He does not know this, but losing one of your parents to a heart attack at sixteen will do that to you. I do not share it with him. I do not want to.
He does not respond, nonetheless. It does not matter. Something has moved between us.
These are the intangible, impalpable, imponderable and so very real moments that despite all proof to the contrary DO exist. This is the dark matter of my existence, that unknown quantity shifting everything around my universe, unseen. And that these instances exist is nothing short of a miracle, of some divine force within all of us that stems from the truest of all human truths: we are made to be understood and understand, to love and to be loved.
And yet today I run the hallway, the corridor, perfumed with the eau de toilette of wistful thoughts, holding a key I know will not work to this door. I do not try again, I know it will be a waste of time. But I cannot suppress the desire to want to make an attempt.
There will be time, there will be time, for a hundred decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse. I shall continue on my journey instead, pressing onward down the passage, the chiming of metal in my pockets like bells.
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