questions for september me, from march me
i'm drunk off one cider and wrote this in like 30 minutes bc i just needed to post something before the month ended
Were the to-do lists done?
What projects did you abandon? Not by choice but necessity; there is not enough time to do it all, to have it all. Are you still resisting this?
Maybe what I’m really asking is: did you ever make peace with this? And will you decide that you are worthy anyway?
Do you still want to be everything? To be everywhere? Does the stillness of spring in a small city make you long for the underbelly of London with its constant thrum of more more more and the sun-blushed bodies scattered across fields in airless summers?
Will you listen to me when I tell you that place is not responsible for pleasure and that home is wherever you choose for it to be?
Have you forgiven Paris?
Does it still feel like a moral failing to no longer want to live there? To experience the lack of wanting as a loss – to no longer love a city that once defined you, realising that you’re no longer capable of being the person one needs to be in order to survive in Paris? (Someone who does not smile at strangers). It’s the end of March and you just came back from spending one week there; on your last morning you cried whilst walking along Canal St Martin because the lady in the bakery was mean in that wide-eyed and furrowed-brow teacher kind of way and everything you did felt wrong and you weren’t sure what it meant to no longer want to live in your past anymore. Maybe this is why I’m thinking of the future now, of September you.
Are you still moved by blue hour?
I know I’m not you yet, but I imagine the answer is yes and always will be yes: yes in March and yes in September and yes in the pale winters; and probably yes even when the force of age has eroded my memories into a fine grain and all the men I’ve loved are far away, greying or balding, and I’ve maybe forgotten the colour of their eyes or the edges of their wrists and what my name sounded like in different rooms, but never forgetting the light: the stain of blue hour on his eyelids that evening as we pretended to sleep because the light already told us all that syllables couldn’t.
My March self still thinks about that night, which is to say, it mattered to me: that silence and all the wanting it contained.
We rinsed our mouths, not looking at the other’s reflection in the mirror. Morning took everything and we pretended not to notice. This is what happens when you were only supposed to witness the gap between two bodies, not to try and fill it with words; you thought that if you could give it a name then you could keep it.
We didn’t know better. Does September you know better? Does she still reach out for daybreak long after it tapers off, leaving behind the shadow of a lone body watching as blue shaped daydreams lap against the bedroom walls?
Are you still ridden with guilt when you eat bread? Do you re-introduce eggs and do you go back to the weight you were before? Do the compliments stop if and when you do? Does your body trust you yet?
Are you in the same job? The same flat? Are the same books waiting unread on the shelf? Does sameness still feel like stagnation? How much do things in September resemble those in March, April – and how disturbed are you if they do?
Do you know that I’m sorry for all the times I let afternoons wither away from inside my bedroom?
Do you know that – despite what it looks like – I really am trying my best for you?
Will you forgive me when sometimes my best is simply hauling a heavy bag of wrinkled bedsheets to the laundromat and buying a kilo of clementines?
Apparently our skin cells are replaced every few weeks; I wonder how often I am shedding from the inside. How much of me is there, in you?
Are you what I wanted you to be?
If not, is there still time?
If yes, was it worth the wait?
If not, is there still time?
monthly offerings
a sound: the trumpet man who plays la vie en rose in the mornings across central paris
a snippet from elsewhere:
“[I]t may be wiser to try to create the place you want to live, rather than to keep trying to find it.” – Frank Bures
a photo:
a french word:
rover - vagabond/to travel constantly without a fixed destination
a song: