The West Coast is the Best Coast

At my mom's urging of "Why don't you finish it?" in regard to this blog, I am finally posting my got home safe entry. I'm in my pajamas on a Thursday morning(ish) getting ready to go to the public library to sit quietly at my computer and apply for jobs online. NARAL Pro-Choice Washington and the Northwest School Summer Camp already have copies of my resume. I plan to apply until someone says yes.

Being home has been good. Part of being away so long is that it's hard to immediately miss where you lived before. And in a lot of ways, I realized this year that I am a Seattle girl. I love Paris, but I don't think I will ever love it the way I did when I was seventeen and it was magic, and that's okay. I also forgot how good it is to be around friends and family. Constantly. Until they begin to annoy me.

Finally, I'm going to yoga with my mom, meeting old friends for Greenlake walks, running into people I knew in high school all the time, watching bad TV with my brother and whatever cadre of college brahs he brings home with him, calling up my dad with questions about the new espresso machine, and getting back in touch with people I used to call all the time before I left.

It's nice to be home. Being on my own in Paris was an adventure, but this is where I live. This is my home base. There is no smoking of Gauloises in public parks or drinking a beer with new friends at the foot of Notre Dame. But as weird as it may seem, I don't really miss those things. Because I really missed Seattle. And it's really good to be back.

I'll post pictures in the next few days. But for the moment, this blog is done. I made it through the year. I survived my crappy job. I made it home. It's now been a year since I graduated from college. My mom suggested that I keep this blog going, but I'm pretty sure that chronicles of job applications and going to my parents' yoga class belong elsewhere. Although as it turns out, they aren't so bad. Sometimes I forget that the simplest things are the ones that make me happy. Like sunsets over the Olympics or driving to good music or watching the rain fall, comfortably inside. The farther away I go from home, the more I know it's where I'm from. Maybe it took four years in Massachusetts, four months in Dakar, and a school year in Paris to remember that there is really no place like Seattle.

Oh yeah, sometimes I do write poems...

This is not going to be my departure bye-bye France post, partly because I don't want to write that yet, and partly because, thanks to our friend Eyjafjallajokull over in Iceland, my flight got delayed/partially canceled. I still will probably be home tomorrow, but for the moment I don't know when. I'm really frustrated about this, but I'm posting one of my Paris poems, because I've been writing them all year, and this one kind of sums up the best of Paris. FYI, a berceuse is a lullaby. It's not totally polished yet, just something I felt like writing.

Berceuse

I’m lying on the grass, eyes up to smoke winding like shadow on blue sky
from the Gauloise between my teeth, and when your laughter crashes into me
I catch it in my own throat, lightness remembering something I forgot I forgot.

Below us, the children of drunk Parisians brandish sticks,
collide through streams as planned as stalagmites
in the cave where waterfall echoes interrupt baisers.

Weeks from now, I’ll be on a plane,
you’ll be somewhere on the map
we’ve carried in our minds all year
of ways to get out of Paris,
and those of us with more adult lives
will go back to living them.

But for now, our steps zig-zagging into each other,
we catch the old Nerf against our bare toes
and as the children sneak in with us, the echoes are ours.

Paris is the three cans we abandoned at the foot of Sacre-Coeur,
it is a dotted path between alimentations generales
and lives displayed in rectangles of light,
the clinking of broken glass against the steps
and Hey Ya, the acoustic version, as we walk home
the roofs spreading out like playing cards
you hold in your hand.