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Alone in Paris

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  It is 37 degrees in Paris, and I decide I want to get off the stuffy Metro a few stops early to look at something. I don’t plan to walk the rest of the way to the museum I’m hoping to end up at eventually, but I get distracted by a garden, and then I’m walking. And walking, and walking. 

For some reason, on very hot days I almost always find myself outside, walking for a lot longer than is probably advisable. 

My feet are dusty and sore, my cheeks are red, and my hairline is sweaty. I am dishevelled. I sip the water in my bottle. It’s warm. My steps are slow and steady. I chase shade and rest often. I think about the muscles and bones in my feet, and the trajectory of weight through them as I walk, and about how I’m probably getting sunburnt. I gaze at buildings and the river and the other people walking and shimmering in the heat. 

When I reach the museum, what I wanted to see is closed. But I have walked all this way in the heat, so I pay to see something else. And I walk more. Only this time it is cool. In the bathroom I splash water on the back of my neck, but there is nothing to be done about the dusty feet.

The art makes me think and feel. Things I don’t have words for. Things I don’t have to find words for because I am alone. 

One year when I lived in Sydney, I had a theatre subscription, and most times I went alone. I would walk home from the plays in the dark, thoughts and feelings rattling around in my head, changing me ever so subtly. That I went alone and walked home alone felt precious to me. Solitary in the same way as reading a novel. 

The walking, the museums, the river, the dusty feet, being in Paris alone feels like this to me. 

By the river another hot day I buy an ice cream. Even though I eat it within five minutes of receiving it, it still melts all over me. My hands, my legs, then my face when I touch it with my hands. I get what I think is most of it off, then realise I don’t really care. 

I keep walking. Dusty feet, ice cream sticky face and hands. Smiling. Solitary, like reading a novel. 

Thinking time

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I seem to spend a lot of time on my own these days. I only realised just the other day how much time I spend in my own company. Most of my work is in the evenings at the moment, and I’m not a late sleeper, so I spend a lot of time pottering around by myself during the day.

But by no means am I lonely. In fact, I thoroughly enjoy the time.

Most Mondays I get on a train and head up to Newcastle to visit friends up there and attend a production meeting for a creative collective I’m involved in. The trip is three hours long. At first, I thought of that three hours as a chance to get a little bit of writing done. Or some class planning. Work-time, that is.

As it turns out, I find it impossible to work when I’m in transit. I’ve tried, but I usually end up with two or three words on a page and frustration in the space between my eyebrows. I’ve found the same thing on the three-hour bus trip I sometimes take to and from Canberra when I visit my Ma, Pa and brothers.

So recently I stopped trying to force myself to work. When I did, an interesting thing happened: I started to think. Properly think. You know, about life, the universe and everything and nothing. I thought through the problems I was having with my writing and often came up with solutions — I thought through life problems and again, often came up with solutions. I also started to think bigger than myself, to think, dare I say it, philosophically about the world. No solutions there. But interesting nonetheless.

How often does one get a chance to just sit and think these days?

Now, when I travel alone, I call it Thinking Time, and I don’t understand how I ever did without it.

Here’s the view from my thinking seat on the train to Newcastle. Sigh.

On being alone.

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What leaves me more bereft than anything else is the feeling that there are stitches loose in all my joints; that I’m wobbly when I try to do things on my own, because any one of the stitches could break at any moment and I would lose a limb. I have not aged: I have been pushed back in years to a time when the unknown in the world was terrifyingly weighty.

It is heavy as it presses in around my body, like I am deep underwater and fighting to keep the barrier of my skin intact. And in that dark world of water I am alone. But, even as I wonder how much air I have left in my lungs, I am learning to sew.