It's a really difficult thing to remember how to write in English again, when all I've done is write in French for the past few months. Today was the first time that French came more easily than English. It makes me worry about when I go back, and what will happen. It won't be easy, I don't think. Any transition like that, a total shift in pace, language, in country and responsibility. It isn't supposed to be easy.
I think more than anything, being away each time teaches me how much I miss home. I spent the better part of this year hating home. Not wanting to be there and definitely not wanting to let anyone know that I was from there. America, the greatest frontier. The scene of a great fire. Vermont, which has taken eight people from me in the past year and a half. Vermont, where my parents might get divorced, where my father lost his business and where I learned it would never be enough for him. Vermont, where we have and will continue to face financial, emotional, moral ruin. It is not easy, this existence.
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I have tried to live these past few months with a new sense of purpose. My purpose had been, before that, to stay alive. To literally make it through each day alive. That was it, really and truly that was all I wanted, was to stay living. Purpose takes a whole new meaning when you don't have one except in the right here and now.
I've not been incredibly successful, because real life has a way of derailing even the best laid plans. My primary focus is still on staying alive, on being alive and realizing I do not have to feel guilty for that. But I am realizing that I have let things, other than just absolute survival, back into the peripheries of my life. To be fair, they are there on the very edges, just static and not quite involved yet. But they are beginnings and if there is anything the last two years have taught me, it is that beginnings are some of the most beautiful and unloved things.
And I am starting to feel like myself again, I think. I am a much more cautious, more easily upset and always with an underlying sadness, but I think I am beginning to feel like a new version of who I was. A new beginning which I hoped for from September on, from the moment I saw Kerry and absolutely lost it, in a crinkled white dress in a stifling hot church, covered in tissue remnants and tears. I hadn't thought about the future at all until then, until I saw this woman that has known me since I was in eighth grade, whose child I've seen grow, and who I have been in charge of for intermittent periods of time. I had never been that glad to see her, to hug her and to know she was there, and in that moment, I felt so acutely the way that time had passed. I was taller than her, and much younger, much newer to the world, but I knew we felt the same sadness. It made me feel so old, so tired, so aware of the fact that I was older than I had ever been. That she was too.
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"Call me by Your Name" really shook me, the first time I saw it and every time after that. My friend asked me what the entire premise was, why Oliver asked Elio to "call me by your name and I'll call you by mine." I was just so shocked she hadn't gotten it immediately because for me, I didn't even have to think about why this weird thing was happening. What are we but an extension of our significant others? As we learn them, as we know them, we become mirrors of what we know of them. That's a vague literary description and it may not even be right, but it is exactly what I thought. Those exact words, which I wrote down because I have a long note on my phone of the things I think.
And the end made me sob. Really, truly sob, because. Because I know the feeling of becoming who you are, of going through that life-altering process with someone. Of them leaving. I know what it is to be loved and be left. And I'm sure most everyone else does too. That's what makes a good movie. For me, it just made me sob. And it made me so happy. To see Elio become who he was supposed to be, to see his parents love him so much and so easily.
To be loved, to be left. To still be loved. To still love. The cycle that never really quite ends.
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"Je sais qu'on y parlait de roses à ma fenêtre."
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