Sea Salt, Car Keys, Postcards
Dispatches from an August roadtrip in the Mediterranean. (August 2024)
Toulon, 6 Aug 2024
The month of July was good and strange, full of wonderful things like spending time with my parents, walking under the trees, finishing novels, and especially, sharing the Basque country with three beautiful friends. It was also a frustrating month in which I set myself ambitious goals for work from home and accomplished maybe a third of them, if that. Lesson learned: I don’t think I can be particularly “productive” in that house. It exists in another dimension, divorced from my daily life; it would be too strong to say it’s disconnected from my “real life” because it doesn’t feel unreal. The fact that friends can now visit—they didn’t, from far-away New York, for the longest time—bridges the gap. But it didn’t make it easier to conceive of as a place to work. I wanted to work (an ambition to do more, do better, develop ideas and plans and schemes) and I wanted to rest (naps on a mossy log under a beech tree). Impossible to reconcile, neither desire won out; a full, and frustrating, July.
I took a serious look at my “to-do” list this weekend and organized it “for now” and “for later” and plowed through what I could. Sunday evening, I ticked the last box under “for now,” and tried to let myself feel like I was finally, properly on vacation. I packed my bags in preparation for a day-long drive across the South of France to Toulon, crawling through traffic by Toulouse, Carcassonne, Aix, to reach salty air and dry foliage, bathing in my grandparents’ pool and in the thunderous sound of cicadas. A passage into a different dimension.
I listened to (and finished) Hot Milk by Deborah Levy on the drive. I read some online reviews, felt dissatisfied, and would love to talk to a real person about it.
Now I’m reading Baba Yaga Laid an Egg by Dubravka Ugrešić. It’s distinctly less summery but timely in a different way. Both this book at Hot Milk feature aging or eldery, difficult mothers. It’s an odd theme for summertime, that I didn’t choose on purpose, and yet I’ve been picking up threads of it since summer is the season in which I spend the most time with the aging or elderly women in my life.
I spent the day by the pool at my grandparents’ house and it felt almost like a regular day, and then I come back to the house for meals, and my great aunt is commending her older sister, my grandmother, for how well she’s using a fork and knife. My grandmother stands up occasionally, only with the help of a machine that lifts her up and a physical therapist. Her life has lost most of its verticality, she hasn’t been upstairs in her own house for years. The ground floor is wallpapered with medical accoutrements, cloths and pill boxes, among which she moves back and forth in a wheelchair pushed and pulled by my grandfather, between an air conditioned room on the first floor and a deck on the terrace. Old houses like theirs were not built to be this old in, and my grandfather stuck railings into the walls around the entire house as my grandmother’s legs gave way to time.
Sometimes my grandfather says nothing during an entire meal, maybe because he’s dozing off, other times because he simply has nothing to add. Today he was lively and encyclopedic, a closer to resemblance to how he still is in my mind, and I collect the references he makes: the 19th-century adoption of the arabic word “chouïa” in French; three verses of a popular song about garçons marrying vielles dames for their money; the life of a French painter who converted to Islam and lived out his days in Bou Saada; the last letter of Saint-Exupéry; that when I was very small I would tell him, “nous les artistes.”
My grandmother interrupts my grandfather’s anecdotes to ask for water, or adjust her wheelchair, or more cheese, or because she thinks what he’s saying is silly. Her recollections are rarely over-long, and always razor-sharp, and as we talk about uncles and nieces and cousins she remembers each person’s spouse’s name and where they got married and the neighbor who told her mother her hat was “too fancy for around here” and the name of my street in Paris and the fact that I’m going to Italy with three French and one Greco-English friends.
My grandparents’ kingdom is memory. They celebrated their 68th wedding anniversary this week. We move a microphone connected to my grandmother’s hearing aid around the table. My grandfather scoffs at us googling names and dates on our iPhones, ces engins qui contiennent toute la Science (pejorative).
Baba Yaga has been teasing out the melancholy parts of seeing my grandparents age, which I’m glad to be there for but is hard to watch up close. Could any book make me feel better about that?
Benabbio, 9 Aug 2024
We made it to Tuscany! Yesterday I woke up in Toulon, and today I wrote to you from Benabbio, a truly tiny town in the Chianti mountains, une grosse heure from both Florence (inland) and Pisa (coast). Almost half of the drive over from Florence was through winding mountain roads and tunnels of trees through which terracotta church towers occasionally sprang. Several cars were parked at the trail heads of hikes it’s objectively too hot to undertake. I think people mostly come to this neck of the woods (emphasis on woods) for the hiking.
When we were looking for our AirBnB we came across a nonna who knew exactly what we were looking for with one glance at our suitcases. It’s funny to feel at home somewhere you don’t speak the language, but I think small villages must all be sort of the same, and saying « Bonjour madame » or « Buongiorno signora » carries the same weight in all.
Benabbio has a population of about 300, making it bigger than our village in the Basque country, only just. Our terrace (!) looks out over criss-crossing hills to the sunset and blueish grey mountains in the distance. The foliage is drier than in the Basque country, where it rains all year, but greener than in Provence. The stretch of hills and valleys before us is covered in forest, so different from the patchwork quilt of fields in Soule, and I wonder whether these are former fields, now unused and overgrown, or whether they were never particularly cultivated. What’s the soil quality in the Chianti mountains, and what grows here? The few small fields I see from afar might be vines, or olive trees. Our neighbors tend a lush vegetable garden.
There’s a pizzeria in the village, a church, a small museum of sacred art, and an open-air dancing bar, La Lucciola (“firefly”). We haven’t crossed any young people yet (another uniting factor among all small villages?) but maybe we’ll cross some there. So much to discover!
Today we’ll have lunch in nearby Bagni di Lucca (population 6000), and maybe dip our toes into the Lima River. As I looked up the name of the river I discovered that the village has been known for its thermal springs since the Etruscan period, and that Virgil noted this area for its chestnut forests. And in the 19th century, the town became the summer residence of the court of Napoleon! The more you know.
Arcola, 16 Aug 2024
Hello from Arcola, a small village near La Spezzia, the door to Cinque Terre. Five fishing villages—Monterosso al Mare, Vernazza, Corniglia, Manarola and Riomaggiore—are connected to the national park, from which you can swim out into the sea or hike up into the mountains, though the latter is not a likely option for us in the next two days in this weather.
We left the extreme heat behind in Tuscany after saying goodbye to Benabbio and our wonderful starlit terrace. It actually rained, a blessed relief after a full week of 35-degree heat, after which even 30-degree days feel cool by comparison. Yesterday was even cooler since the sun hid behind a grey veil all day until sunset, when it decided to put on a spectacular show over the sea visible from our table in Tellaro. Maybe it was trying to apologize for scorching us earlier in the week. Apology accepted, if so.
When I told my colleague Lorenzo I was coming to this part of Liguria, he encouraged me to visit the storied town of Tellaro, as he recounted:
“In Tellaro there is a small church by the sea. On a stormy night, the sentries slept peacefully, thinking no one would dare ride the tall waves to port. But pirates had exactly that idea. Just as they were about to reach the docks, the bells of the church began to ring. Biding the alarm, the Tellaresi rushed to defend their town and pushed the attackers back to sea. They turned to thank the sentry, but he admitted to having been asleep. They went to find the priest, who had also been asleep. Ever more curious to whom they owed their thanks, they ventured up the bell tower, only to find an octopus with its tentacles still wrapped around the bell’s ropes, carried up by the crashing waves.“
Unlike other legends this tale has no clear moral, since as a Tellaresi, one might be so grateful as to stop fishing octopus; but can report that dinner last night proved the contrary. I suppose the tale dates from a time when the Tellaresi had already decided what was sacred to them, and the octopus was only ever an octopus, if the story is true at all.
We’ve been told by several people that the best way to navigate Cinque Terre is by train, so this morning we’re off to La Spezzia station.
Cinque Terre, 17 Aug 2024
As I compose this scribble, Kelly sits next to me. She turns to me as we’re about to start dinner, and says, “I love seeing you in your element, in the dark cold, writing.” Vivement l’automne…
I am becoming a slug, dreaming of precipitation and wet pavement and dew on leaves and misty mornings. I feel my hand against my perspiring cheek, my hat atop my slicking hair, my sunglasses aslip on the bridge of my nose. Do we leave a glistening trail of sunscreen and bug spray and sweat when we sludge through the miasma of tourists and sun-roasting seaweed and baking stones? I cling to the shade of a leaning wall at noon. I scrape my knee on barnacle-encrusted rocks to dive into medusa soup and crawl back out with salt already drying on my arm hair. Are any of us walking, or are we crawling, in the middle afternoon on the coast of Italy? Suddenly the folly of a moth attracted to light makes perfect sense, and more the fool am I because the moth flies for free, whereas I had to pay for gas to drive here. I sit in front of a fan, or step into a grocery store, or eat a gelato in the shade, or sleep under the stars, and I forget enough to get dressed and step back out the next day.
Heat is craving water after years of ignoring the need. Italy is finally making me hydrate. It’s not something I broadcast about myself, the fact that I’m perpetually dehydrated; I know it’s a red flag, which I obfuscate with my love of other beverages of all sorts. Water simply pales in comparison—and who as the time for blah?—though of course, the blandness is the point. The importance of water is not groundbreaking and I did not come to this realization in Italy, but I have finally accepted the necessity of blandness in order to not literally metamorphose from slug into raisin. I’m still drinking many other beverages in consolation, sour limoncellos or bitter espressos, the stronger-tasting the better.
I have been thinking about what it takes for me to write. It is a choice, and I am writing now, and I wrote yesterday, so it is clearly I choice I am capable of making. Today, it took about 1.5L of water, two fans, 9 hours of sleep, a sweaty nap on the couch, a lunch made by Kelly, two cups of coffee, and an afternoon-long zone-out after a walk in the old ramparts of Arcola for me to sit down to write. I wanted to write from the moment I woke up. I am learning how to nurse myself into it.
I’m currently reading Virginia Woolf’s Orlando and last night, on the train back to La Spezzia, I read the passage in which nobleman Orlando decides to flout the expectations of his class and become a writer, not just someone who writes. Of course, the fact that he has written, “by the time he turned twenty-five, some forty-seven plays, histories, romances, poems,” might make it relatively easier to take up the mantle; though, as Woolf astutely observes, “the plight of the rich man… who writes books, is pitiable in the extreme… He would give every penny he has (…) to write one little book and become famous; yet all the gold in Peru will not buy him the treasure of a well-turned line.” These are funny passages, and crucial, and I found them moving. What does it take for anyone to pick up a pen—Heartbreak by a Russian princess during a great frost? Metamorphosis into a slug on the Ligurian coast?—and what will it take the next time, and the next time?
My two new habits of the summer are water and writing; in both, something of necessity has had to intervene, at least for now.
Tomorrow we drive back to Toulon. Kelly and I have spent today recovering from the past week of galivanting across Tuscany and Liguria, which has been sublime and an ordeal, of a sluggish and mothish and antish sort. The Fratelli d'Italia would probably love to think of their country as a beautifully obedient ant colony, but humans make very bad ants, and sluggish tourists are the worst ants of all. Maybe that’s why they created no-driving zones, so we can’t drive right into the center of their anthills. (ZTLs: my great logistical enemy of the past two weeks.) Clara informed us last week that ants remember a path for up to two years. They can also carry up to twenty times their own body weight. Humans have cars for that, instead—C’est la voiture qui porte ! is my réplique de l’été—but we must slug along by foot or by train to get to the heart of any Italian city.
The five fishing villages of Cinque Terre are in a natural park, a coastline where the mountains plunge straight into the sea; it reminds me of a Mediterranean version of the Spanish Basque Country. Kelly very rightly keeps pointing out how nice this entire trip would be in winter, and I particularly felt the same, enveloped by sublime nature and embalmed by the heat. You can walk along a narrow path on the coastline for forty minutes between the first two villages of Riomaggiore and Manarola, or for about five hours across the entire park to Monterosso al Mare. From each village, small trails leading up into the mountains with spectacular views of the sea. Everything is at an incline. There are no streets in Cinque Terre, only stairs. A special train ticket between La Spezzia and Levanto also gives you access to all of these trails and hiking amenities, which we of course did not take advantage of at all, due to our state of melting. The only thing gloopier than me by the end of the afternoon was my gelato, which melted into soup faster than I could eat it, no small feat. We were not the only fools to choose Cinque Terre as an August travel destination, and I can be thankful for this if just for my ego, and maybe for the anthropological (or ichthyological) experience of being packed in to a pebble beach like sardines. A small graffito on a drain pipe read, in Italian, something to the effect of “Tourism is a banal cancer.” I can’t blame the author. If I come back (if I am so lucky) it’ll be in the dead of winter. In slug state, I haven't the strength to navigate this kind of anthill; I’d like to come back as sheep or a dog or a seal, ready to leap and bound in the mountain or plunge into the sea in a wetsuit. But for all of the Kafkaesque palaver, I’m so grateful to have seen this exquisite place.
In the late afternoon yesterday, we scraped our melted butts off of the beach in Riomaggiore and decided to end the day in Vernazza. Kelly braved the steps up the old fortress tower (my knight in shining armor) to secure a table at Al Castello. From the terrace we watched the sun set over the mountains and light dim over the marina, as live Friday-night music wafted up from the town center. A staff member, an older man whose accent was so strong it sounded like he was speaking Italian even in English, leaned on the balustrade to watch the sunset, a view he’s probably seen a thousand times. We ordered Ligurian seafood specialties, fished locally, followed by slices of pistachio and coconut cake. The owners bustled around the terrace all evening, and as night fell and the train schedule shortened, we prepared to descend the stairs and went to pay; they pointed us to a little door in the side of the next building. In we walked, into part of the owners’ apartment, and met Monica. She welcomed us in and asked us, and everyone who came inside, where we were from, and how was dinner, and help yourself to cake and cookies, limoncello and little glasses laid out on a round table by the entrance. Monica runs the restaurant with her brother and their family, who are local to Vernazza many generations back, including her ageing mother who sat there quietly (and, I suspect, doesn’t speak a word of English). In cooler months, Monica runs the till from a table outside, but when it’s hot, she and her mother take refuge in the air-conditioned room, keeping cool and each other company. We lingered the time of a tiny glass, not enough time to enumerate the knick-knacks and baskets and baubles that wallpapered the seafoam-green room, but enough time to fall in love with Monica. Kelly and I are, at the end of the day, lovers of grandmothers and ageing women.
It was a choice to come to a hot country in August, which I don’t regret and which I won’t do again, unless I really am no wiser than a slug or a moth. Time will tell!
Cassis, 20 Aug 2024
Bonsoir from Cassis and the Calanques de Marseille! The moon is just post-full, and the lights of the town are slowly sinking into the marina as restaurants close for the night.
Tonight we are not driving and none of you are dense (quel bonheur!) so you can assume the rest. Kelly said that tonight she would be in charge—take charge?—and so we are going on an adventure to find the best ice cream in Cassis. The main service-continu shop is not a top contender. This might take a while. Maybe we’ll walk towards the moon. It rose above the buildings of Cassis as we had dinner on the water and I wondered whether I would ever meet a woman as beautiful as the moon? (I actually said this out loud and Kelly laughed a lot.) Maybe I have already and my memories pale in comparison to tonight’s sky.
Last night, when the moon rose full above the trees in Toulon, it was the color of pastis, a substance which makes me a lesser writer but tastes like the month of August!
I asked Kelly if this was worth sending and she said it wasn’t as deep as what I usually share, but I don’t think scribbles needs to be a novel every time, so as I put my phone away to stick my feet in the nighttime mediterranean, I leave you all with a taste of anis seed and an invitation to look at the moon wherever you are tonight!
Addendum: Kelly is being very nice to me and not as mocking as she sounds here!
Unfinished Business, 22 Aug 2024
On Thursday I dropped Kelly off at the Marseille airport, after spending the afternoon in Aix. On an airy yellow street we stumbled across the open doorway to a leafy courtyard, where a red giant’s arm reached out from the ground into the base of the green canopy. It was the café of an art gallery. Kelly picked up a pamphlet—quickly, with a flight to catch—in which we saw the Design Parade expo that we visited in Toulon, alongside dozens of other contemporary art exhibitions, landmarks, and festivals in Provence this summer.
In the pamphlet we found a shared feeling that embroidered the whole trip: weaving discovery of new things and focus on the present moment, wefting the groundwork for future trips, learning what sort of travelling we want to do (together, or alone). Here was a non-exhaustive list of things we didn’t do this summer. Here was a list of things we could come back to do. Here was an invitation to do all sorts of things in all sorts of other places.
“Unfinished business” is a weighty feeling, sometimes burdensome—a toppling pile of books to be read; a never-ending to-to list; projects accomplished and others, inevitably set aside—or full of exciting possibilities.
With a first-ever guest scribble, Kelly and I have both written our feelings about “unfinished business,” an ode to the road behind us and an invitation to whatever may come.
💌 From Kelly
Today I had one wish for the final stop of our road trip. I wanted to sit in a courtyard, read my book, have a nice meal, and do the final bits of “holiday admin” before Charlo dropped me off at the airport.
We arrived hungry at Aix-de-Provence. After briefly browsing some overpriced terraced restaurants we settled on a blandly decorated, airconditioned, manicured boulangerie before going to a bookstore cafe to fulfill the rest of our wishes.
I quickly forgot my original wish of sitting in a bright and airy courtyard when we reached the bookshop - four walls of dark oak bookshelves and promise of caffeinated sugary beverages will do that to you. (A cute barista also helped.) At the end of the day I was just glad to spend a few more hours with Charlo in our natural habitat—reading, drinking coffee, yapping about abstract nature metaphors that anyone hearing us would think we have taken hallucinogens.
I ordered my final beverage of the trip, a cherry blossom ice tea, and as we turned on the corner of the bookstore we saw it—the terrace I had been dreaming of in the morning. It was like it had been made for me—attached to a gallery exhibition and with a very small menu of overpriced hipster food. There was a huge red hand sculpture in the garden.
We had no time to sit but there was an exhibition pamphlet by the door and I browsed it, various artists, some of whom I had heard of and some I hadn’t, being exhibited at this installation. There was a map of the whole region and the season’s over 50 art exhibits and I was equally reassured and excited to see the exhibits we had visited two days ago on the list. This was one of many, and definitely not cooler than the one we had seen in Toulon (I am sure Charlotte will speak about this design expo in detail on a future scribble).
Past versions of me would have been haunted by this list on the pamphlet—a physical archived series of “unlived experiences” and unseen art. Nothing haunts me more than the weight of all the places I will not have time to visit or books I will not have time to read. Not because I am too old to do everything I want to, but because I want to do EVERYTHING. To read everything ever written would take 50 lifetimes, and to visit every travel destination on earth would take 50 more.
But today I felt at peace seeing this. How beautiful that we made the discovery of this garden. We might visit Aix again, we might not. But discovering that the garden I was dreaming of this morning exists did not fill me with dread of what could have been if we had walked down a different street earlier—it showed me that everything I want is out there, but also that the things I want won’t determine the fulfillment I feel or the enjoyment of any singular moment. Being focused on the outcome can detract from chasing how you want to feel.
But the biggest takeaway from this very mundane moment (me reading a pamphlet) was how beautiful it is that there will always be more to see, and that we will never be able to see it all. But around every corner, wherever you go, there is a new abundance of surprises. Wishing for things that we won’t have time to do doesn’t detract from how special it is to wish, and how wishes are the stardust of our souls.
Over the course of this trip we have had a true tapas tasting of Tuscany, Liguria and the South of France. We have tasted just enough to know that we want more, and the circumstances in which we would consume the more. We have also talked endlessly about all the travel destinations we want to visit, together or apart—Peloponnesian road trips, Italian winter countryside retreats, adventuring in Mexico or Japan or Peru or New Zealand. All in the 25 days we get per year, while also factoring in visits to family and rest time (which we are both desperately in need of) of course to read all the books on our tbr list!
The likelihood we will do this exact trip again is slim to none. But our dreams of how it could have been different, what we would do again, is what separates us from being robot consumers, tickbox travelers, Instagram tourists, whatever you want to call it. Wishing and hoping and dreaming is how we connect our souls to the physical world around us (e.g. through traveling) or the spiritual world (e.g. art, books, human connection). In a way, you are what you want. That’s the difference between bucket lists and to-do lists. Bucket lists are fantasies, and fantasies guide us. They should give us the wings to free ourselves, rather than keep us locked in a cage of past desires.
In my own life, a hard pill for me to swallow has been that I can’t live ten lives at once. The common thread between all of my many internal crises has been that I need to CHOOSE—and choice requires exclusion of other choices. But just like in art, where the only way to have taste is to curate, curate your life, your outfits, your daily routines—without curation, without saying no, we would have no sense of identity. I left London because it was a city that made it impossible to say no to anything. I wanted to inhale all of it. It gave me everything and in turn left me with nothing. I have been holding my breath for eight years and now I am trying to remember how to exhale.
All the concerts I’m going to miss, all the memories I could have made. I weed them out and weave together what is left. You told me that the world expands and contracts when we travel—I think that it doesn’t just apply to travelling. Life in its most literal sense, inhaling and exhaling, is about expanding and contracting. What remains inside us when we exhale unfulfilled wishes, unexpressed desires, unfinished business? And what happens if we hold our breath to keep it all in?
💌 From Charlotte
This August I have sunbathed and dined and driven across the Mediterranean, which has been glorious, with something in the pit of my stomach resembling September and the beginning of a master’s program on top of my full-time job. I’m not sure how restful this trip has been, and that’s made me anxious, in anticipation of two not-so-restful years ahead. Actually, I can’t know exactly how hard the next two years will be. I think that unknowable has been the true source of anxiety underpinning my despair over quick-melting gelato in the Ligurian heat.
For the past few years I had been wanting to come back to Italy. (Let’s be real: for the past seven years, since I saw Call Me By Your Name thrice in theaters, after first family trips when I was a tween.) I loved these two weeks of golden yellow streets, white pebble beaches, winding mountain roads, and bright orange spritzes. I loved counting shooting stars on our rooftop in Benabbio. I made wishes that I can’t recount there.
I’ll want to go back, for New Year’s or for Carnival; or to Naples once I’ve finished Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels; or once I’ve actually started learning Italian, and speak to everyone I cross paths with; or for a writing retreat in a little cabin in an olive grove, and speak to no one. But if I ever say I want to go back to Italy in the summertime, please check my forehead for a high fever or my nightstand for a novel about gay youths in the Italian countryside, and give me a reality check. “Everything is romantic,” so says Charli XCX, except temperatures over 27 degrees Celsius, so say I.
As Kelly and I drove across the French-Italian border, I breathed a sigh of relief, in part (but not only*) because French roads and highways are much safer and better built than in Italy. I loved being in Cassis for its boulangeries, for the fact that we were walking distance (no driving!) to a national park, even for the fact that I could speak the language. In Toulon, I loved showing Kelly around the city center and the quiet streets around my grandparents’ house, sitting by their pool for an afternoon and talking a moonlit walk, visiting a design expo and critiquing the furniture as if we were shopping for houses we do not have. I love feeling my roots under me in France, and feeling them grow deeper into the ground when I see my grandparents, when I show friends around, when I order pastis en terrace sur le port.
(*We arrived in Toulon and my grandfather told me that the first autostrada were built before the war, then massively expanded by Mussolini, whereas the French got into autoroutes in the 60s. First, clearly, is not always best.)
When I go abroad the first thing I miss is the boulangeries. I like to know that I am within five minutes of a baguette or pain au chocolat, for less than two euros, at all times. This is simply not the case in Italy, land of pasticcerias full of over-stuffed canoli and fussy choux. In Cassis, Kelly and I had our least expensive meal of the entire trip, where I bought a pain au chocolat, a croissant, and a small quiche for four euros. Ça, c’est ma France.
I go on holiday only to come back and say how great France is. I’ve become more adept at complaining. Je pourrais presque plus facilement vous écrire ce gribouillis (traduction de “scribble”) en français, sauf que je n’aurais pas envie d’envoyer des membres de ce chat se balader vers Google Translate. I am becoming more French… but for now, I’m writing in English.
Please indulge me for a brief enumeration of complaints: Italy was too hot, and in the heat, many places were too crowded. Driving this much was exhausting. Holidays are “supposed” to be restful, but they’re also the only time you have to see and do new things, which is not restful. I spent this holiday with Kelly rolling these ideas under my tongue, a confusing dissatisfaction that felt guilty at first, an inability to appreciate the beautiful trip we were on. Then we were talking about “unfinished business” (though we almost are always talking about that in some sense), and I realized that the discomfort was learning: not a disappointment about this time, but a yearning for next time. What a relief to remember that we’ve got however many summers before us to take long walks at dusk through grassy fields, to count the falling Perséides, to write in the morning and read in the afternoon, to cook courgette flowers and eat croissants and make giant pots of coffee. Or to go back to Florence and get inside the cathedral; to make reservations to visit twenty Italian museums; to take the time to take every photo in film rather than just on my phone; to let other people drive my car or to travel by train or boat, bike or bus. And to go back to the Scottish Highlands and the Mont Saint Michel and Andalucia, to discover Dublin and Istanbul and Vienna, to fly to Japan and New Zealand and Peru. I couldn’t, and wouldn’t want to, do all of that in one summer.
I only realized when I got home to the Basque Country, in conversation with my mom, that this is the first weeks-long-travelling-holiday I’ve ever booked for myself. I modeled this summer on childhood holidays, when we’d visit family in France, always the same places. These trips plucked me right out of adolescent angst, which I resented in June and gloried in come August, and I should better remember the clarifying powers of getting outside of myself, outside of my own life, to rinse away the sediment of bullshit that inevitably settles at the bottom of the quotidian ocean. At a dinner recently I told a family friend I’ve been in France for over four years (le temps passe vite). Now I have my own trips and lessons to mold from. Now I have my own life to extract myself from.
This trip has whet my appetite for others. An inconvenient hankering when faced with the next two years, about to begin, of study and work. I’m not sure how anything else will fit it. But somehow, I’d like to shoehorn in some trips, or rather, shoehorn myself out of Paris where I’ve been busy building a life, and now, I want to see more of France. Tout dans son temps.