The Colombians are playing UNO at the dining room table and I, prostrated on the couch, just had a flashback of Crazy Mike teetering around Charles Street one sluggish Baltimore afternoon when he called me the n-word, which wasn’t the first time someone has called me that.

I stopped paying attention to the one-of-three-possible-languages the Colombians could be speaking long ago, their conversation rendered ambient by my trying to remember where “v” fits into the alphabet (a sick game I call “doubt-on-doubt,” a variation of what happens when you say “skin” so much that it loses its meaning, and somehow turns into “slime” - I am bones and flesh and sometimes genitals, painted over with pale-pink slime…). I am deep in the worm-hole of memory, sparked by that internal query — which took a pathetic effort to resolve — cursing time and wishing I could burrow into some kind of fantasy hammock, woven from reliving how the sun hit rear-view mirrors along Charles Street and summertime Maryland languor.

Using my pinky finger, I trace “dangle from the sky on a silk thread,” onto my palm, wiggling my toes just to give the thought some meaning. I see it plainly for an instant before it disappears.

Doubt-on-doubt plays without me: I seem to delete more than I write, wondering maybe if I go backwards enough I can enter into a double-negative loophole of creation because everything I say seems to turn into stupid, lead-tinged dextrose paste where saliva is meant to be.

There’s a letter on my screen from R. that I keep looking back at, because it’s filled with encouragement and wisdom, words I want to engulf myself in, dip into my belly button until I pass out from poking them in too deep — I consider writing them all over my body in indelible ink, but I’d rather just keep them as secrets in the back-caves of my knees.

(This is where the lede is buried:)

I’ve been holed up in the lavender-painted refuge of J’s apartment for days now, on a stealth mission to avoid, avoid, avoid. Time is distorted in my inaction, hours go by like stretching taffy. Slowly, sweetly it has wrapped itself about me, this inertia. My Jerusalem tan has faded back to an indoor pallor; I’m rotting on the inside.

(This is where we ignore it:)

Crazy Mike called me the n-word which I thought was what he called everyone, but then a friend told me that Crazy Mike said he was a “White Bitch” days earlier when he was en route to Chipotle, also on Charles Street.

The first time anyone’s ever called me the n-word was almost exactly ten years ago, because I was fourteen then and I am twenty-four now, when a 200-something pound Mexican girl said it during a water polo game, before dunking me face-first into the water. The scene was too hurried for contemplation, and so I succumbed to the motion; it was a relief, as sweat does a funny, restorative thing when it’s lapped up by cool, chlorine tides. My Irish, blind-in-one eye, stroke survivor, foul-mouthed coach (I played around with that string of adjectives and deemed this order to be the most appropriate) screamed out, “USE YOUR LEGS, ROSE!” as I sunk.

(He would call me a “daft bitch” sometimes during practice; never at games.)

“Out, coach! Out!” I said over breaths that reached so deep, a sand-paper shovel to my lungs. I wanted to lick the concrete siding of the pool. I thought about it for a second, but I knew it would taste like first-time air. That was enough.

(a narrative dictated to myself through the wayward morse code of beats on pavement, later transcribed over wine and upon eventual consultation with a pair of weary legs)

“I do not like running very much.” That is my first mantra, which starts its internal loop a few seconds after I feel a semblance of pacing, not yet starved for breath. “I do not like running very much,” I hum, leaping right to dodge a hobbling gypsy, attempting to focus on straightening the form my legs make in motion, which is haphazard and ill-conceived, one that I imagine will one day be corrected by someone who knows better, perhaps with the somber warning, “If you would have continued on like this…” Somewhere in the trailing, well-meaning thread of condescension would be the word “ruined,” because ruined is finite and a notion over which I often ruminate — one I convince myself I have, more than I would readily admit, either descended into or embodied entirely.

The slope of the streets leading to the Seine on this side of Paris is downhill and I continue on in fear of losing Pace (that elusive rhythm), albeit with a shifted repetition of “ruined, ruined…” because of my mother’s warnings of racing downhill and my own dubious premonitions that one day my knees will dissolve into leaking bags of sand.

“I do not like running very much.”

“I am much too good at running and thinking,” I say in heavy grunts - a new mantra - because these days I deal in the currency of small victories. Yes, this is the kind of feeling that is, more than anything, just silly, and needs to be heard in the grunt’s pathetic cadence, as it somehow evokes the memory of someone I once knew saying that I reminded him of an oboe.

“I am much too good at running and thinking,” now in a semi-operatic bellowing, mocking the phrase I-went-to-clear-my-head, which is probably the most frequent lie I tell. Because I vacillate between self-loath and self-love and don’t stop laughing in the interim of either extreme, because I am a strange creature with asbestos-cobwebs in the moldy corners of my mind (which should have been emptied the last time I went for a walk to clear-my-head) that are indeed still precious, as I know they taste like sour salt and grime. I have never once cleared my head.

Sometimes on these runs I like to stop and laugh at my breath-starvation and dissolving knees, especially since I have been feeling rather small of late and my own laughter is the only entity that I understand in its entirety, and it understands me back in sweet, imposing force. My laughter and I are self-sustaining, between us is photosynthesis, an un-ruinable mechanism of biology.

(We must stop meeting like this) I whisper to my laughter, red-faced and spent. “I do not like running very much.”

(I wrote this way back in March 2011. It dawned on me that it’s the 2nd anniversary of my little blog experiment, so I thought I’d repost some pieces that make me cringe or laugh or smile)

This memory came to me on the metro today, while listening to some R. Kelly and bobbing my head emphatically, as I was recalling some embarrassing things I did this past week. It’s a weird, nervous tick that I have: whenever I feel happy or bored I like to interrupt the rare moment of mental tranquility by ambushing my psyche with cringe-worthy moments and their intimate details. I don’t know. It keeps things interesting.

This is from when I was eighteen, naïve, and long before the birth of my ‘fuck you’ face: an expression I wear in Paris that has shielded me from the precarious situations that inevitably arise in certain neighborhoods (also: the fact that sometimes I dress like a gender-confused street performer) – a cheaper and more effective mode of protection than a glock or a can of pepper spray.

These were the days when my hair was breast-length and blonder, and I dressed myself in a manner more indicative of me being a normal heterosexual female. I was friendly and talked to strangers and when people told me I was charmante on the street I took it as a compliment and didn’t feel compelled to subsequently exfoliate. I have since learned that one of the reasons French people think most American girls are stupid is because they’re overly eager to please and they smile too much. I was guilty of both: my prickly exterior had not yet emerged in full force and I wanted, more than anything, to be accepted with open arms by this city I had romanticized to no end.

The year was 2007, George W. Bush was president of the United States, and Americans traveling abroad were warned to avoid discussions of politics – particularly those involving our military endeavors in Iraq and Afghanistan, of which I was, of course, Very Informed, being that I Had Just Graduated High School and was slated to attend the Johns Hopkins University, Double-Majoring in International Relations and Writing Seminars. I was also, of course, very impressed with myself – there were evidently a lot of things that impressed me back then – ready to join the intellectual elite, higher education, etc. The world was at my fingertips; nothing could stop me!

It started like this: I was invited to a tango class with a classmate from one of my French courses, eager to meet her French friends, to gain a bit of legitimacy and perhaps even engage in a Bilingual Intellectual Conversation. I was, however, unsure of my language abilities but keen to practice – at night I would talk to myself in the mirror, reciting key phrases to the mundane questions of background and experience – all said with a smile, a tactically-inserted giggle here and there. As expected, one of the gentlemen in our party asked what I was doing in Paris, what I studied etc. I gave him the appropriate shpiel, and upon hearing that I was planning to study Politics (and really excited about it!), he asked me….

“So what do you think about the Iraqis?”

Oh, there are so many things I would change about this moment if I could go back in time.

So, for whatever reason, I heard Iroquois instead of irakiens. As in, Iroquois Native Americans, as opposed to Iraqis. This is the interaction that ensued:

Rose: Uh, I mean, it’s sad what happened to them. We learn about it in elementary school, sometimes in high school.  But, uh, yeah people don’t really talk about it so much.  We don’t really think it’s a big deal anymore..

French guy: Really? People don’t talk about it? Why do you only learn about it in elementary school, isn’t that strange? Americans are so strange.

Rose: Uh, well, yeah… we learn about the different tribes in elementary school. I did a project about it when I was, like, ten. I made a … comment dit-on en français… totem pole ? Drew some pictures?

French guy: Shook his head, said several times that this was “scandalous,” said he had to go to the bathroom and never came back.

The conversations didn’t end there. It seemed as if every French person was so concerned about the atrocities American settlers had committed against the Native Americans during the founding of the United States (or so I assumed). “It was so long ago,” I would start to say. And then I could see that argument wasn’t really working.

“They make cigarettes, have casinos… I don’t know, they get tax breaks. It’s not so bad now! People are usually apologetic about what happened… but you have to understand, it was a really long time ago! Americans are sorry!”

And thus I spent the rest of the summer thinking that the French had some strange preoccupation with the injustices incurred by this particular Native American tribe, too myopic to consider that, I don’t know, the war in Iraq was a pretty hot-button issue at the time and that’s maybe what all of these people were fired up about. 

Months had passed before I had the horrific ah-ha! moment, after which I was sure that I had been placed on some kind of blacklist akin to an online Sex Offender Database, that all Parisians would be informed of my whereabouts, my impertinent remarks - I would not be allowed to live near schools or libraries for fear of spreading my ignorance to the easily impressionable.  Luckily I was probably just written off as another stupid, smiling American.

I don’t talk about politics much anymore, especially not in French.

“We’re going to be fine, right?” I said to them, shifting on a barstool, or on rooftop lawn chairs to groups of twos or threes or just one familiar, dear face. I would wait until the third glass to bring it up, until our narratives became more fluid and I could lift the taped gauze and show the lesions caused from my crumbling doubt.

Felix tells me that I say these things as if they were mantras, repeating them to myself until I’m convinced of their veracity. “I’m going to be alright,” is the knowing I try to achieve by hitting my head against a textbook, praying for osmosis.

On Wednesday my flight landed at Charles de Gaulle ungraciously, as any departure from or arrival into Paris does. In accordance with my theory that Paris is this vortex within the universe that shows you your destiny even when you have to be shaken to see it, the 757 wobbles nervously onto the tarmac, as if it were hesitating to suggest [are you ready for what is about to unfold] rather than engaging in a more swift, mechanical touch-down.

I stayed there for hours before finally taking a cab home. Eight (you’ll know this number is my greatest confession because my freshman year creative writing professor always said that odd numbers sound better in prose). I could say I don’t know why or that I did it because the last time I was in an airport for that long was in Vienna, when I trudged around between the hours of 10pm and 6am with a borrowed Kipling suitcase and feet like lead. I tried to sleep on a metal bench with a rolled-up prayer rug for a pillow and an eye-mask that read ‘Belgrade Dreams,’ only to be interrupted by an African cleaning crew who were kinder than expected when I wailed to them, “Bitte sleep, bitte sleep!” Or because I tell people that I like airports because they’re the best places to entertain my hunger for the dinner-theater of strangers in herds and the sublime loneliness I feel when I invent their timelines like the intimate tracing-of-freckles on a lover’s back.

I needed that existential interim in Vienna after four days in Bosnia and Serbia back then in April, however much it was dictated by fatigue and latent trauma. But when I landed in Paris I was paralyzed by the fear that the moment I was no longer transient I would evaporate into the cold air or morph into a sliver of plastic bag trapped in the windshield of a passing van. So I stayed until nightfall to hang on to nowhere a little while longer.

It turns out I spent the past three weeks in America attempting to induce a revelation. I think secretly I know what it is, even though still I tried to coax it out in the company of men for whom our inconsequence is mutual (when it ends badly they say, “you’ll do great things in life,” and when it ends with a shrug and a whimper they say, “write about me”). They were necessary at the time, I think; now they bore me.

A man with no shoes pushes a luggage cart containing only a reusable bag that reads NEW YORK, NEW YORK.

A man with a haphazard turban slaps his own face and looks for a place where he can spit.

I tried to coax it out again, maybe for the fifth time (the confession is embedded a bit deeper here—odd number) walking through Midtown on Monday afternoon coming in from Washington DC, where I went for twenty hours to see Will who grounds me and Matt who understands my wanderlust. I looked every stranger in the face (I recognize your humanity, and yours and yours and yours and yours and yours and yours and yours) until I was on the verge of a panic explosion from the changing pressures of my inner ear. I tripped on a chicken bone while crossing the street. I wanted to be held. 

Dov and Benny took me out to lunch at the Mahane Yehuda market one August afternoon, when the Israeli heat made everything you consumed feel as if it just sweltered in your gut, whereby some whirling, tepid process it was then restlessly absorbed by a moldy layer within your intestines that you grew from being in Jerusalem Much Too Long; therefore relinquishing the privilege of traditional digestion.

The restaurant was hidden deep along a winding back-alley of the shuk, a passageway that is far past the nucleus of the market’s sensory bombardment, whose aura makes you wonder why its air isn’t marked by a yellow veil of cumin.

Dov and Benny were hungry. I followed them as they rushed by barrels of almonds and technicolor spices; trays lined with glistening rugelach; Hasidic men in centuries-old ensembles - walking anachronisms - with their fur hats and pallid features, who seemed to be ghosts of a forgotten lithograph, relics of some far-off shtetl Brigadoon. I tried to keep up with their pace, though my legs were wooden from my preoccupation with the desire to make a wax mold of Time because I knew so well then that it is just as disposable as it is precious - so I told myself: (remember this), as I do when I travel and am made aware that these powdered-sugar moments pour through my fingers as if they were a broken filter, and in my cosmic helplessness, I merely hope that the sweat of my palms would just make some of it stick.

It was my last week in Jerusalem, where I spent the summer working as a reporter for a small press agency, when my diaries were peppered with cliched exclamations that make me both shudder and beam with the recollection of what it was to be freshly-twenty: “this is what I’m meant to do” and, “I feel like it’s the start of something big, huge even.” I lived on sweet watermelon and Goldstar beer, the soul-sustenance of 1 AM motorcycle rides through the city’s high ledges and billowing slopes, a critical avoidance of the subject of The Conflict among my newfound ex-army friends.

I couldn’t stand Tel Aviv, which to me was something like a confused Barcelona, a South of France slum-town, a city whose vibrance I didn’t quite like or trust: maybe because I couldn’t discern whether or not its inhabitants lived in a rumbling denial or just embraced the ephemerality of a tenuous peace.

Those hurried minutes felt like they were too meager to be a unit of time (remember this), and before I knew it, we were skipping down a concrete ramp that led to an enclave where a band of old men alternated between playing chess and sitting across from each other in plastic lawn chairs, shaking their fists and stroking the underside of their chins. “Here, here it is,” Dov pointed to the restaurant’s blue facade as he approached the waiter, who flicked his cigarette to the ground before shaking their hands and not mine, with the greeting, “shalom, achi,” hello, my brother.

We all ordered shakshouka, a dish whose mere discussion of its origins would prompt a raging geopolitical crisis. Our waiter hesitated his pencil mark, looked up from his notepad to survey the table, seemingly blinded by my pale Irish skin, bewildered by what was to him a radioactive white sheen, and replied with an imperceptible Hebrew phrase that was marked with deep concern.

“He says it’s spicy,” Dov cautioned.

The waiter first looked at Dov, and then back at me, on his line-of-sight’s conveyor belt that went straight from my breasts to my forehead, “it is very spicy.”

After an unfailing “are you sure?” from Benny, I replied with an assured nod, the one that makes me grateful for my tolerance of spice, something that has garnered me respect among most men of non-European origin. It’s a natural affinity; not practiced or cultivated like my taste for whiskey - which I practically trained for, motivated by the premonition that once I could drink it straight without wincing it would feel right somehow, however contrived it was until I finally got there.

Our food arrived quickly, mine with a suspicious delivery; another reluctant glance that I countered with the pursed lips of unspoken defiance.

Benny smiled. “You know Rose, in Israel we say there are two kinds of people…”

This memory was prompted by some Hebrew word I don’t remember, something people say when there’s a newness about you - like a haircut or new dress - and it’s supposed to mean that it suits you (another choice word that inspires the same inner warmth is something in Serbian - which also escapes my memory, but it means that someone is about to bring you good news - and when used at the right moment is the perfect marriage of life and language). As Dov and Benny got to know me they said it about Jerusalem. “Jerusalem goes well with you,” they mentioned, weeks into my stay, as to them their seeing it was the newness about me; “you wear it well,” they meant, I think. I envision it as being akin to the dance you do when putting on a thick wool coat, settling your shoulders into it, tying your scarf to accent it appropriately, sinking your chin into your winter’s costume, ‘You wear Jerusalem well. You’ll be back; we’re sure of it.’

“You know Rose, in Israel we say there are two kinds of people: there are the yellow and the black,” Benny said as he dug his bread straight into the over-easy egg that crowned the dish, breaking through the yolk’s delicate film, letting it bleed into a sea of tomato.

“Tzahof ve shachor,” he murmured low, looking to Dov for confirmation.

“Yes, yes,” I said, half-ashamed that my Hebrew was rendered so elementary from years of silence.

“And I have to say that when I first met you, I said to myself, ehh this girl...” there was a deliberate stop in Benny’s cadence, and he allowed himself a break for pensive mastication - which I think was partly due to his slippery command of English, but mostly the general goof about him.

“Ehh…you know, I thought, I, eh, so I thought you were a yellow.”

He gesticulated nervously, thrashing his too-long limbs toward his chest, as to ensure to me that the compliment would come - it would, so do not take offense, not yet - as long as I cruised along with him though the riptides of his strained language, because his brand of Yemenite is the storytelling kind.

“But now, Rose, I see it in your blood, your soul, I see it - every single part of your body is black.” The ever-stoic Dov allowed himself a not-so-secret chuckle, and maybe it’s my nostalgia that paints these gestures onto memories, but I could swear that he took his fist to his heart - saying nothing - to signal that he thought it to be true.

Such are the things people say to you when you’re leaving, to accompany last looks, like wine with a meal - those studied pairings - as departures give people free reign to make a final evaluation they hope is lasting and honest, because often times “goodbye” is as painful as it is banal.

But something did happen to me in Jerusalem, or I became something in Jerusalem, while I am unsure of whether or not it was a labored transition from yellow to black: if it was an aspirational force I had to pinch my nose and gulp down until I could swallow it smoothly, or something that has always lived within me like jalapeño fire.

Regardless, it’s there now, my blackness. I’m going back to Jerusalem to wrap myself in it like a glowing cocoon, to reclaim that element of my spirit I know I left floating around the shuk, to see if I still wear it well, to see if it can ignite once more.

a letter to my present self from my future self, whose secrets are coded within memories of one Wednesday night, written on the RER C/Line 9/Bus #96/Le Lutétia on Ile St. Louis

There is a homeless man who sits on a stoop next to the Société Générale ATM on rue dauphine, and if you give him ten euros, because sometimes everything seems as if its just getting to be a bit much, C. might tell you, after she’s had three glasses of wine, the last of which was an accident - because you ordered a third, because you needed a wave of inner silence and chablis sometimes is the best way to do it, and our waiter must have thought she did too - well, she might tell you, “Rose, he’ll probably spend it on liquor.” And you’ll reply, because the third glass was your final attempt at tempering the outside chatter as if you were witnessing an impromptu performance, ‘shhh, please,’ and ‘shhh,’  because there is so much beauty in the world and you wonder sometimes whether or not there is just as much noise - “So what? I just did.”

Sometimes things happen in life that make your bones feel as if cold concrete has replaced them, which you tell yourself is how you feel because “sadness” doesn’t have the same bite to it, and it makes you just want to take care of everybody, because despite the fact that you have fed yourself for weeks on dry cereal and instant coffee, out of laziness rather than poverty, and for the past two nights you’ve fallen asleep in make-up and jeans, not out of inebriation but out of at least three kinds of fatigue, if there’s anything you can do it’s taking care of other people.

When “sadness” is too abstract and instead you tell yourself that your body has been drained of sinew and you are just a collection of misshapen cinder-blocks, some of which are more hollow than others, you’ll reach into the change pocket of the wallet you keep telling yourself to replace, because of all the times it was just sitting there in your purse while your most sublime, your worst milestones of the past four or so years just… happened, and it’s about time you acquire a new witness.

And in a moment of despair - the kind you’ve foreseen somehow while writing that story you’ve been working on since last spring and can’t seem to finish, when you wrote about “sorrow hanging from the back of your neck” - you’ll realize that the 50-cent coin is just so paltry so you reach inside for a Ten, which is paltry, too, because his bones shiver so much more viscerally than yours. Because the homeless man on rue dauphine called out, “Maaademoiselllee..” and you said, “just one second,” before rummaging through the coin pocket and then reaching for a Ten, even though you’d like to give him a Fifty and Teach Him How to Fish. He’ll say “OUPLA!” and you’ll smile and wish there was a way you could make more people say, “OUPLA!” when you feel helpless and the beauty/noise divide leans too much towards cacophony’s edge.

Despite the quieting OUPLA! the noise will start rolling, rolling again, so you’ll walk over to Notre Dame with the intention of saying hi to the panini man at the Esmeralda because of his standing offer to go eat couscous at his house (“un jour cher monsieur, un jour”), and that one time when he and the boss of the place debated over how many camels you’d be worth when you went there because it’s a good, quiet place to write, but then the sharing of Life Stories happened and Jocular Marriage Proposals happened and it’s not so much a quiet place to write anymore.

But the Esmeralda will be packing up even though “it couldn’t be later than 7:30,” you tell yourself, looking at your watch, and remembering how you’d stay there until 10 when sunsets were late-night meandering sort of occurrences instead of what happens between descending into a metro station at 6:15 and ascending 45 minutes later into a world of darkness.

So you’ll go over across the bridge to the other side of Ile St. Louis, to Le Lutétia, which is also a good, quiet place to write despite your friendship with the waiter, but he knows when to leave you alone and when it’s okay to talk about your lives, and that you don’t mind if he picks at the last morsel of chèvre from your plate. “Maaademoiselllee!” he’ll call out to you when you come by, extending his hand to shake yours, even though with the panini man at the Esmeralda you reach your whole body over the display to kiss both his cheeks, after which he’ll usually make a declaration of his love for you and ask when you’re finally going to come over to his house to eat couscous. “Un jour, cher monsieur, un jour.”

You were at Le Lutétia the day before - a categorically Rotten day, but, as someone who would know about rotten days told you that morning in an e-mail “these things are part of being human” - and while you drank too much Monday evening to subdue the sometimes-misery of Being Human you still let the waiter serve you three glasses of mulled wine and that cheese plate they do so well. (Jokingly you’ll say to C. days later, “I have these demons, man,” when she tells you that you’re drinking too much these days, which you’ll ignore, but she has this piercing eye into your soul and is inescapably right about almost everything - “well, no, everything” - you admit to yourself, because you accept your fallibility and you love her more than you’ve ever loved anyone that wasn’t blood.)

Although the waiter knows when to leave you alone, he knew even more that what you needed then was talk of his Guadeloupe and talk of your Jerusalem - and after a few minutes, words formed wisps of sunshine: a far-off notion, especially to this particular snapshot of a moment, which would read, “Wednesday / Parisian winter.” One of these days you’ll tell the waiter at Le Lutétia, “arrêtes de me vouvoyer,” to stop using the formal vous, which is what you told him in a dream last night even though you dream of Jerusalem now, speaking whatever Hebrew remains from that lockbox of unused language, woven in with your ever-present French.

Suddenly, a gang of gypsy children will steal your iPhone during the first and briefest of instants you looked away from the tranquil scenery of the Pont Louis-Philippe in order to reach into your purse to pay for the fourth and final glass of chablis. You’ll realize this immediately, and chase after them with the hurried indigence that should have come (but never did) that one time another homeless man punched you in the face and broke your nose. Somehow, after a loud and pointed accusation, the smallest of them will reach into her pocket and give it back to you - just like that - and you’ll wonder whether or not it could have been due to your maternal sternness, that practiced look you’ve used while you were busy taking care of everybody else and feeding yourself dry cereal and instant coffee.

You’ll return to your seat with a bellowing exhale.

“OUPLA!” you tell the waiter. And you’ll smile, despite the sometimes-misery of being human, because somewhere else the sun is setting, maybe in Guadeloupe, maybe in Jerusalem, and while on this Wednesday there is sorrow hanging from the back of your neck, the beauty/noise divide is on its way to lean toward beauty… un jour, chère mademoiselle, un jour.

I process goodbyes in gradients of emotions similar to those that come to me when I listen to Miles Davis and think that somewhere between me and the trumpet’s high notes is the origin of the universe, that this sensation is the only one that has ever mattered. It’s in these moments that I say to myself, “solitude is a gift,” as the back-and-forth in my mind exists without the perfunctory “did you get that!” and “this part, this is the one, this is it!” to somehow explain why I pound on my chest in parts of the song that are both cutting and sublime, as if I was mid-trance, taking part in a tribal ritual.

Sometimes I chart my emotional growth like pencil-ticks in one’s childhood home. One thing I’ve gotten over with age is that thing you say over the third glass of wine, knee-deep in conversation about the future or the past, love or career or injury or loss: “Gosh, if you’d have told me XYZ would happen three months ago/a year ago/yesterday I would never have believed you… I would think you were crazy.” I don’t know if it’s necessarily a sign of maturity so much as it is an appreciation for the pockets of mystery in life, how the little stumbles lead us onto uncharted terrain blooming with possibility.

I’ve now told more or less everyone that I’m moving to Jerusalem: and the reactions that ensued made me realize that my months of mulling over the Next Big Step in My Life/Career were largely internal, that every exaltation I’ve written about Paris over those months was, more than anything, a drawn-out goodbye.

It’s strange to realize that the space in your head where thoughts frolic around like sprites or trolls is private, yours, until you decide otherwise. I take it for granted that I spew these musings onto others in projectile rhythms, to such a mindless and rapid-fire extent that I forget that the slow-roasting aromas of unuttered ideas may come as a surprise when I finally set them on the table.

Because I wake up most mornings and look at the unfinished page in my notebook that was meant to process a whirlwind trip to Rome, of which the only record that now remains is the following sentence: “It’s good to write about these things, to cradle my residual I-don’t-know-whats close to me, to nurse them until they begin to take form.”

Because I wake up most mornings and chew over another unfinished page that serves of the only record of an un-dated “Tuesday, 11:30pm,” on which the only thing that will endure in my Personal History is the phrase, “What it is to be present.”

Because I wake up most mornings and say to myself, “I’m leaving Paris soon,” before I survey my apartment and envision what my life will look like in a stack of boxes. If it’s a weekday the eternal problematic “What it is to be present” will soon flee amid the rush of purse-inventory and thinking that my Survival on This Earth depends on whether or not I can hear the jingle of my keys. “What it is to be be present” bolts from my consciousness amid the day’s various Mad Dashes and even if it is a weekend, “What it is to be present” retreats, too, amid my sludge-like sauntering over to my desk and my opening my laptop and my waiting for some mid-morning flow of words.

Every day these days is a goodbye, if I can help it.

taken from my notebook, a few glasses of chablis in, on Ile St. Louis

Sometimes I go on these semi-pilgrimages across Paris to visit the Exact Place I Was when my heart was broken for the first time.  There are several to choose from, an anthology’s worth, but each carries something so singular about the notion of Heartbreak that every time I land upon it I consider it to be That Exact Place, because it must be.  Call it despair tourism or the cruelest love story scavenger hunt -  it’s a worthwhile exercise while I still have some time on my hands.

Most of it took place vers rive gauche, but there’s a story about him shrinking me into nothing on some staircase in the Louvre - it connects Grecian statues and Egyptian artifacts together hazily in my mind; the only tactile memories that remain are my palm’s sweat against the railings and lungs bursting with the instinct to flee.  I go searching for it until the cocktail of dust and marble gets stale, and I drag myself by the ankles to the outside pavement and wait until I find someone to follow or until the wind herds me back to the Seine.

I am part of the scenery.  There’s a spot on the quai by Notre Dame that’s an asterisk to another story, where I go mostly to feel the gravity of the ledges rather than the story itself.  I let myself be barraged by memories while tourists take pictures of me staring listlessly into the Seine, but really I’m just trying to quell the overwhelming compulsion that wants me to plunge into the river just to see if I can conquer the life force of the city.  They wave and sometimes I wave back, and I imagine the photo they’ll show off at their homecomings over wine and trinkets: ‘Girl In Her Saddest Moment.’ 

In the left bank / right bank interims I sit at an un-extraordinary café on the Ile St. Louis and write and prop my feet up and mull over the idea that my haphazard internal cadence is getting in the way of comma placement.  I reprimand myself briefly in between paragraphs: “SPLICE SPLICE SPLICE.”

These days, wine is my method of vengeance — the cajoling sprite who speaks in tongues, but in discernible language she says to me, “Another,” and “another!” 

I’ve been training my eye to the sight of people in love, just to ease myself into the idea again, even though muscle memory tragically links the sensation of love and heartbreak — or, at least, the preparation of one once the other collides into fate.  It’s such a tired idea, so banal in its truth.  But love, from what I remember of it, comes inexorably with the fear of impermanence, the inevitable last stage of hatred - or worse, apathy.  It’s probably good to mitigate one’s terror at the thought of people so blissfully connected at the knuckles.

There’s this one place I’m thinking about going to next: the stretch of cobblestone on rue Saint André des Arts that’s worn from my heels’ attempt to stake their claim to it, where I sit at a café at which no one I know would guess I was a regular, eyeing it with sips… “another, another.” 
 
Guillaume and Marie come riding up on Guillaume’s bike, Marie half-hanging on to the back, sometimes succumbing to the childlike impulsion to see the stretch of her wingspan. She’s too beautiful to be an albatross; I later learn they’re not in love. 

Sometimes I think of putting all the men I’ve been with in a room, saving a drafty corridor for those I’ve since filed under “unrequited desire.”  I’d make them drink lukewarm apple juice from pygmy straws.

I never write any of their names down when I write about them - never, never, never - I give them cartoonish names like Steven or Joe or Michael when I refer to them in the lazy diaries I seldom keep.  Writing their names would somehow confirm the idea that they have their own color-wheel of what it was they thought to be my spirit, that they stole some part of me I grew just for them.  What a wretched thought.

Or maybe it’ll be the shady haven in the Luxembourg Gardens, where I sat pouring into a letter I never sent — when all of a sudden I found myself fighting off a man who insisted on giving me a massage, who dipped into my shoe uninvited and held onto my foot as if it were a freshly caught fish.  I kicked him with all the rancor I possessed - in swift and hateful movements, choreographed by the spite I felt for him (the cartoon him) turning me into this lonely creature, a grey little mite, who, in those moments, should have been a roaring wave of cerulean blue.

To make myself laugh I start these confessions with, “speaking from my truest self,” which sounds silly and grandiose especially as the world seems looser after this second glass.  But Paris is where I found my voice; it’s the only place I know where I can burrow into the quiet corners in between the sirens and the melody I’ve affixed to that passage, “I’ve seen you, beauty, and you belong to me now…”  I’ve conquered the space where its greys meets its golds, the intersection of where his memory could’ve conquered my psyche on gloomy days like this.  I conquered it with wine, this languid sinking; I sit back into my chair and beam.

I live for eating alone. 

It’s this obsession that I guard fiercely - often mistaken for gluttony or selfishness - born out of my almost romantic relationship with food. 

I form an emotional bond with whatever dish I involve myself in: like the pint of ice cream I clutched like a sad ogre in my break-up misery cave, squeaking, “MINE,” as I slapped a friend’s hand that got too close. Even in less melodramatic moments, sometimes I feel like eating with other people can feel like that ill-fated double date in which everyone ogles each other’s seemingly better-looking partners.

Or maybe it’s because I romanticize strangers. When I eat alone I insert myself in other peoples’ conversations as they happen around me: break-ups in cafés, vitriolic gossip, small talk about nothing. Fork in hand, I am the hands-off director of an A-list production, giving the actors free reign to improvise. I do this even if I’m clutching a bowl of noodles from my apartment window, hips turned in calculated nonchalance as I watch my neighbors feast across the courtyard (albeit stepping in and out of the frame every few beats, feigning preoccupation to avoid being labeled as the building voyeur).

However creepy this sounds, it makes me feel quietly, comfortably human: a standoffish member of the universe’s dinner theater, which requires very little participation other than a wholehearted enjoyment of one’s own meal. 

But my secret passion was tested last summer when I found myself in Singapore for a month.

I was babysitting for a family who returned there to bolster their children’s roots to the land, and in my free time I tried to foster my own connection to this place in the best way I knew how: I ate alone.  I went on excursions to hawker centers around the city, concrete palaces of local flavor, where the food was unlike anything I had ever experienced: like the barbecued stingray that seemed as if it had marinated for generations, exotic yet familiar in all of the right ways - spicy, but tempered, the kind of good I sometimes think might take me a lifetime to accurately describe.  (Months later, however, I came close as I bonded over it with a Singaporean expat back in Paris, when we spontaneously made the same gesture, mimicking scraping the sauced flesh off its thread-like bones with chopsticks to get every last taste.) I ate chicken feet at 10am in a grandiose dining hall tucked in what looked like a municipal pool building; drank tart, fresh lime juice and sweet barley tea from street vendors; and practically lived on fruits I never even knew existed—soursop, mangosteen, rambutan.

“This is new! This is brilliant! Can you believe this?” I wanted to shout after I tasted my first plate of chili crab. Or “What is this!” I should have said, my mouth full of carrot cake - which is neither carrot nor cake - audible euphoria to accompany the rare sensation of not wanting to chew through the newness, instead hoping that every crackling note could just sink through my taste buds. But I didn’t. Instead, my meals were overtaken by a self-conscious, spot-lit silence as I slowly realized that I was the one being watched, as I fumbled through these explosive flavors by myself.

The Singaporean brand of eating is a purely social experience - passionately familial - and I eventually learned that eating alone there was bizarre, disrespectful even. “No one eats by themselves in Singapore,” a girl eventually told me. “Yeah, I can imagine how people would treat you strangely if that’s what you usually do.”

The fact that I’d even met her, a former coworker of a friend with whom I connected through Facebook (at an arranged dinner no less) was proof of the intense loneliness I felt in Singapore, which I don’t think I was able to anticipate or conceive were possible. Under any other circumstance I would gotten a kick out of being the obvious lone foreigner, grunting through the August heat in a sweat-drenched Jay-Z concert shirt and purple espadrilles. But once I became aware of my cultural faux-pas it rang a discordance with the rhythm of the city everywhere I went, and more than anything, I longed for someone to share my meals with.

I decided I would enact unorthodox tactics to obtain some meal partners. I asked the members of a local high-school water polo team I sometimes practiced with if they wanted to grab chicken rice after a scrimmage, but it turns out that cracking (obnoxious) jokes about someone’s age, like “So, you guys, which Jonas Brother is your favorite of the Jonas Brothers?” will not charm them into eating with you.

One day, I made eye contact with a backpacked traveler. In Paris, the pointed, fleeting glance between strangers is so commonplace that one begins to embrace it as the sledgehammer to a window of opportunity. People take leaps of faith based on a millisecond of shared eye contact: they write romances in their head in between just a few blinks. “I fall in love on the Metro every day,” a friend once told me.

But I wasn’t looking for love; I was just looking for someone who would eat with me. I followed the backpacker for what seemed like hours down Orchard Road, to see where he was going, wondering if we would eventually collide on a street corner, and he would ask me if I wanted to come exploring with him — maybe to find some restaurant even Anthony Bourdain hadn’t yet discovered. He eventually sat himself down at the nearest Starbucks, and, dejected, I kept walking.

Feeling rather foolish, and carrying a sneaking suspicion that these weeks of relative isolation were causing me to lose touch with reality, I hopped in a cab and asked the driver to drop me off at his favorite hawker center.

I couldn’t understand the driver’s Singlish, which in theory, is based on English, albeit with heavy intonations and accented colloquialisms that render it nearly incomprehensible to an outsider. So I said yes to his proposal - whatever it was and however much I was possibly being led on an off-beaten journey that would, hours later, perhaps leave me lost and bewildered, not a taxi in sight - like the confident restaurant patron who habitually orders a plate of, “surprise me.”

It was one of my last days before I returned to Paris, and the memory is somewhat obscured in my mind amid the overwhelming excitement I know I felt at the prospect of leaving Singapore, a place I don’t think I would have otherwise sought to visit had the opportunity not fallen into my lap. 

For the life of me I can’t remember if what I ate was Balinese or Malay; spiced and tangy or soft-sweet; if the food was brown and white, speckled with green, or just red, red, red. 

The details of one of my last meals in Singapore that remains lucid as a wasabi-cleared nostril in my mind are these: I was served a 40 oz Tiger Beer at one of the hawker center’s blue picnic tables, which I imagined would be about two beers smaller when I said, “yes” to another incomprehensible Singlish inquiry regarding its size.  I embraced the muddled fate that would come with reaching its end, and toasted to the health of the withered Chinese man at the adjacent table, whose granddaughter later bestowed upon me a unicorn sticker from her personal collection. 

I ate and ate, shut off the ticker of thoughts and imaginary conversations that serve as the usual company at my one-person meals; I took my last snapshots of the archetypal experience of my trip – equally bizarre to the surrounding audience as it was to me – and in my final attempts at embracing this magical, flavored place, I let out an unabashed, “Mmmmm,” which seemed like the most appropriate way to say goodbye.

Last month, I sat in front of a panel comprised of three Very Important Men in the Field of International Affairs and recited a ten minute presentation that I hoped would do justice to the past two years of my education, my worthiness of the title Master of anything, let alone International Security.  I talked about everything from the Clash of Civilizations to hip-hop and street art in Tunisia after the Arab Spring.  I was interrogated on subjects ranging from the extent to which culture - in its minute and grandiose forms - affected Germany’s decision to not join NATO in the invasion of Libya (to which the cartoon gnome who reclines in the cartilage slope of my ear raised his tiny gloved finger and shouted, “Austerity! Austerity!” ) to the war in Bosnia and counterterrorism in Afghanistan to my thoughts on French as an international diplomatic language (to which I replied, after noting historical instances of the French language bridging gaps between societies and creating an aspirational community among global thinkers, ‘But with all due respect, sir, I think the age of the French intellectual empire has ended’).  With three hand-shakes to said Important Gentlemen and a hearty sigh that expressed everything there is to the notion of finality, my career as a student was over. 

There is nothing more daunting than the treacherous space between an end and a beginning. 

It’s funny, the way these things conclude: you spend your years with the luxury of the precise self-definition that comes in conjunction with being in a system you can’t wait to outgrow.  I am a student; I have purpose and my mind races and stops like traffic.  I am clicks on pavement; I am speed and I am highways and my ambition can be traced like high points of topography on a map.  Oh, how I have learned!

Now that it’s all over I find myself in the strange place of delineating what I am in the context of my desires, dreams, anxieties.  The crowning element of this anticlimax is that I haven’t quite yet figured out what it is any of them are: which can probably be epitomized in a conversation I had recently with my mother, as I shrieked nervously, “I JUST WANT TO BE EXTRAORDINARY, YOU KNOW, I DON’T THINK THAT’S TOO MUCH TO ASK.” 

So in the meantime I’ve been testing out rituals and habits, as I’ve come to realize Young Adults are wont to do, especially in times of uncertainty.  I guess I can categorize these few weeks as an intense period of Navel Gazing: often in a literal sense - especially as I look at my abdomen in the mirror after arduous workouts, wondering when it’ll reemerge to the place it was at height of its definition and my water-polo-prowess at the age of 16 (and reemerged briefly at 20 following a breakup, following an emotional dependance on Ben & Jerry’s, following an emotional dependance on Bikram Yoga). 

I’ve been locked in my apartment since I’ve received a slew of much-welcome freelance assignments, and to create balance to the strange sensation of spending my days being professionally trapped inside my head I’ve taken to creating scenarios in which I’m in Solitary Confinement for a Crime I Did Not Commit and do strength training on my resurrected yoga mat, motivated by an as-yet obscure quest for vengeance.  I have also revisited my ceaseless internal debate about whether or not I should be a Strict Vegetarian again, proceeded by external conversations about the importance of Achieving Balance and internal musings regarding my unbreakable affinity for salami.  I’m not going crazy; I’m fine; I’m just Figuring Things Out.

I think all this is intended to provide an answer to my previous post of ….what now? to which the abridged response is the piece of paper now affixed to my bookshelf, “THE BIG LIST OF SMALL ACCOMPLISHMENTS.”  Uncertainty, I think, is best dealt with by taking an inventory of the subtle moments that merit self-congratulation.  That, and trying to abate the inevitable madness that comes with the compulsion to be merciless with yourself as you lie awake in a pool of anxiety that feels like mercury on your skin, searching for definition-upon-definition of What I Am/What I Will Be, wondering which irons-on-the-fire might ignite future’s engine or dissolve into ash.  While the more judgmental cartoon gnome who uses my frown-lines as a luge track would, “feel a lot better if you had some more concrete options for your future, Rose,” I respond by telling him to slow down, “I just did thirty-one push-ups, little gnome, and that is kind of a Big Deal, alright?”

I have ten days until there will be twenty-five minutes that stand between me and my master’s degree.

I’m eating a lot of kimchi these days and dreaming of packing up and going to Asia so I can find someone’s grandmother to teach me how to put love into the spices of her history.  I dream of packing up and going to war.  I think about when I’m finally going to give into my recklessness, betray my restraint: disappoint people who worry about me but give others who don’t as much some vicarious excitement.  I dream of what it would be like to be covered in ants.  I think of the smoky sweet taste of eel that won’t leave my tongue, the kind of bellowing flavor that might drive me to give everything up, just to chase it back to its roots. 

Sometimes conversations with people which turn briefly to their thoughts on my writing keep me going, but then it all seems to be too much and I have a glass of wine and then I’m less agitated and a bit more lethargic and I lose the gnawing compulsion to continue on with another sentence. 

Sometimes I let the sink leak so I can hear it drip while my mind grows dull. 

My favorite chair is broken, so I’m writing in a different chair than I usually do, one that I stole at 3am from a café and walked with it across the Seine back to my apartment.  A man in a car stopped to tell me that he saw me take it, but I laughed it off because I knew he was just jerking me around because he knew I had a bit to drink; I think this is the only reason someone would steal a chair from the side of the street and traverse a city with it on their back.  This chair is broken, too, but it forces you to lean back on it and it sustains you despite the weariness of its construction, and it seems as if it can never fully collapse.  My favorite chair is broken in a way that now whenever I sit on it with purpose it pinches my rear, as if to tell me to forgo my sentimental attachment, to throw it away finally and buy another one or buy an exact replica for just thirty euros.  I’ll pass by the store where I bought it, and sometimes I go in, but I never make it to the second floor where I saw it for the first time and knew it would be a white, modern juxtaposition to the second-hand table that I’d like to think is made of oak.  Half of me is afraid it won’t be there anymore, half of me is compelled to get back to that place of drunken, euphoric mischief so I can steal another one. 

“To: God Love: Rose” was the first piece of art I remember making.  It was comprised of my favorite cat sticker, which I had been saving until I found the right vessel to adorn, along with a few heart stickers I don’t think I cared much about because I had a whole sheet of them, which God probably knew, so I was generous with them, as an offering.  I drew swirls around the cat, to indicate to God that this was my ultimate sacrifice, my Isaac-waiting-on-a-lamb.  I also remember including a small drawing of a house, in addition to a rudimentary depiction of myself, albeit with longer hair: I did, however, make sure to use yellow marker because I was much blonder back then, just in case God got me mixed up with someone else. 

My fervently religious babysitter Maria used to tell me that sharing was important, that Jesus said when you have two you should give one away – something I think I consciously ignored because she talked about Jesus more than I was comfortable with (adults looked over my religious contention and instead called this “selfishness”).  One day when I was about ten we held a theological summit on the issue, from which we determined that when we talked about Jesus we would talk about him in the context of Just Being a Really Nice Guy without any imposing messianic undertones. 

Maria believed in black magic.  She also told me that I was special and I was probably a prophet, which meant that I could talk to God and he would talk back to me, but we would have to see until I got my period to know for sure.  I was thrilled at this prediction, mostly because of the favors God might do for me if it turned out to be true: I made a note to myself to not ask for much during my impending adolescence so he could get me into Stanford University when I would be seventeen.  I painted vivid canvasses of Rose Foran, ten-year-old prophet, in my head, which were a melange of symbolism gleaned from illustrated versions of the Old Testament as well as a more fantastical set of mental images I took from the books I read about dragons and mythical elves. 

I believed in God until I stopped believing in God, either suddenly or in a thoughtless pale.  The realization landed concretely in my awareness in what should have been the most spiritual moment of my life – my bat mitzvah – where I stood in front of a congregation and chanted a passage from the Torah that was rather banal, about laws relating to pilgrimage and sacrifice while the Jews were wandering in the desert.  I couldn’t help but think back to the sacrifice of my cat sticker and feel a visceral missing of that pulling to God, of which I sadly – or maybe not so sadly – could no longer conceive. 

I was only half-expecting him to be there but I was disappointed when he didn’t turn up – even though in retrospect I’m not sure what kind of sensation of knowing I anticipated: perhaps it was the booming voice of Morgan Freeman coming from the heavens or a slight, aging man with tortoise-shell glasses who would be sitting in the back row, nodding at me during the Shma –I always peek out at the crowd even though you’re supposed to say it with eyes closed, in intense contemplation – who would then disappear suddenly in a flash of white light. 

But the service was unremarkable, spiritually at least, and I quietly concluded that I gave my best shot at believing: I was thirteen after all – a woman by Biblical standards – I menstruated and shaved my legs on occasion and wore white cotton training bras from the Gap.  As per Maria’s prediction, this should have been the time when I finally heard back from God: when I would receive instruction as Moses did about how I should proceed in life as a Special Person, but I was left waiting in cosmic silence. 

I decided this conviction would be left unexpressed for as long as possible, the way I hold certain feelings in a simmering cauldron in an elaborately-concealed corner so they can ruminate for a bit, so I can let them gestate in tranquility until they are ready to meet my acceptance, fully formed.

But when I was fourteen, on the way home from a swim meet, I told Maria that I didn’t believe in God anymore – the first time I had ever set my feelings to language.  She pulled over to the side of the road in a fury I don’t think I had ever before seen in her – as if I told her I had spent the afternoon freebasing heroin or selling my body to pay for snacks at my middle school’s vending machine.  She said that at that moment she saw the devil in me, that he had taken me over because he knew I was special, and, at that very moment, she wasn’t sure if she loved me anymore. 

As absurd as my relationship with Maria might appear, at least with these paltry descriptions – it seemed at the time, to her at least, as if the fate of humanity rested on my believing.  Granted, these were delusions that even a mature fourteen-year-old couldn’t persuade otherwise, but they still lodged a profound sense of guilt where her promises of prophecy used to be. 

In the years following my minivan confession, I was consumed with the prospect of my own inevitable expiration, angry at my helpless doubts, cognizant of the fact that my budding anxiety issues would have been significantly mitigated if I put faith in a benevolent force greater than me.  The day I admitted my reluctant belief (or lack thereof) I stopped sleeping soundly, needing to listen to the radio throughout the night – the reassuring sounds of human voices – in order to quell my rolling terror of feeling so alone in the world. 

But then one day I found God again in a backstreet in the Old City of Jerusalem when I gave a lost Russian girl directions in Hebrew, a language I knew previously in both its ancient and modern incarnations, once ever-present in my consciousness like songs that meander in the back of your mind when you do the dishes. 

My comprehension of Hebrew is akin to a sensation in which, after being kidnapped as an infant, you hear your mother tongue being whispered in your ear only in your deepest sleep.  It’s a vague understanding I’ve been able to maintain despite large gaps of silence, with my sloppy utterances that take on a lubricated delivery only when I order falafel or a strong cup of coffee.

The girl seemed disoriented and intimidated by the pushy vendors of the quilted bazaar, and said that her parents back in Moscow would be horrified if they knew she was walking alone in a strange land, especially “among so many men.”  I told her I would help her get back to the Jaffa Gate, and she embraced me like I’ve never been hugged before – as if perhaps I was a divine gift resulting from her frantic prayers.

Along the way back to the Jaffa Gate we wandered through a technicolor morass of slow-moving tourists and half-hearted catcalls and young soldiers with M-16s held closely to their abdomens.  Hardened children carried behemoth carts filled with their parents’ wares, and they did not say thank you or smile when I helped recover scattered boxes as they toppled to the cobblestone.

The Russian girl said to me in broken Hebrew that she admired how I seemed to convey to them an element of sternness while expressing kindness in my eyes – a generous translation – to which I replied (an equally generous translation) that hopefully someday it might make me a half-decent mother. 

We arrived, finally, at Jaffa Gate – a route that I now know by heart from anywhere in the Old City, as I’ve been lost in its darkest corners too many times, alone, in unfriendly hours of the night.  She hugged me again, and said “todah rabah…” until she ran out of breath, which at that moment meant so much more than “thank you,” just as my “bevakasha” meant universes beyond “you’re welcome.”

 It was in the pervading smile that stuck to my face, filling the rest of my day with warmth even in the cool breeze of the Jerusalem night, that I felt something close to my memory of God pulling at me again. 

It is said that learning to be happy is mostly about managing expectations, and I think that it was from the same logic I re-learned to believe in God: not as a grandiose production or whatever crazy vision of a teenage prophet Maria had of me somewhere in between her black magic and Catholic convictions, or even within the confines of religion itself.

God speaks to me in my unwavering amusement with the world, and I believe in God because even though I can’t sing I have a nice chanting voice and I can’t write poetry but I can create trembling melodies in prose. 

I think I hear notes of God in the way that I feel when I wake up to see sunlight dancing on my jasmine plant, and somewhere in the depths of my whirling cynicism I have this child-like feeling that God likes to see me smile, which might be the very definition of faith itself.