I'm 21. I write. (Don't mind the "21" bit. I'm planning on staying young forever, anyway.)
I believe that: (1) language is the most powerful tool we have (2) that bravery is the most admirable quality in a person and (3) that the best is yet to come.
Website | About | Non-Fiction | Published Fiction
No pictures; no video I. As we explore Paris, the South of France, and Rome, my sister keeps me in stitches with her deadpan sense of humour. We are walking along the streets of Aix when a l…
No pictures; no video
I.
As we explore Paris, the South of France, and Rome, my sister keeps me in stitches with her deadpan sense of humour. We are walking along the streets of Aix when a little old car typical of France passes us at a clip. “Woah, buddy,” my sister says calmly. “The last thing I want is to get obliterated by such a dumb looking car.”
Rome is beautiful despite the torrential rain that soaks us over the course of the entire weekend. I can’t believe that, every day, these people grocery shop and walk and chat among buildings that date back two thousand years or more. My sister and I see the Villa Borghese, the Vatican, Colosseum (for which there was only one exit; we and a few other tourists feared that we were trapped forever), the Roman Forum, the Pantheon, Circus Maximus, and the Sistine Chapel. We stare up at Michelangelo’s ceiling and take secret photos even though it is not allowed.
My sister imitates the Italian security guards under her breath: “Silence! Silencio. No peec-tures and no vee-dio.”
II.
We walk up and down the street staring at Google Maps until a man with a cigarette hanging from his lips motions us over.
“You are looking for the hostel?”
My sister and I look at each other in the way we do when things are getting absurd. This man is standing in front of a laundromat.
“Yes,” I say.
“Follow me,” he says.
We soon learn that the hostel is a moderate scam. The public laundromat serves as its makeshift lobby and every one of the employees looks questionable. Despite its 9.0 rating, I quickly realise that every one of the hostel’s reviews was probably written by Laundromat Man with Cigarette.
We drink terrible, complimentary red wine with a British teenager we just met who is trying to travel Western Europe but has “washed” his money. I am not from Britain but assume this means he is broke. Watering down the wine with 7up, my sister and I complain about the German PhD student with whom we share our hostel room—every day he gets into the shower and uses it as an opportunity to hack and cough and clear his nasal passages, waking us up.
III.
Later, my sister and I are sitting at opposite sides of the hostel room. A photo appears on my phone. It is my sister’s face at a strange angle. She has just taken it and is Airdropping it to me from across the room, for no reason in particular. If you have a younger sister you may be familiar with this particular brand of nonsense. I try to click exit but it keeps popping back up.
“What am I supposed to do with this?” I ask. “It won’t let me exit.”
“Click accept,” my sister says, half-smiling. “Just accept it…”
IV.
We attempt to buy some souvenirs for our parents from a stall on the street. It quickly becomes clear that the vendor does not know any English.
“Man?” I say in Italian, pointing at a shirt.
“No,” he says. “Bambini.” A child’s T-shirt.
“Ah,” I say, in the way I have heard Italians and Frenchpeople and other Latin language speakers express assent. I turn to another shirt. “Small?”
“Sì,” he says. I sling this shirt over my shoulder for my father.
“Woman,” I say, pointing at another shirt. “Medium?” I just heard him use a word which I think means medium so I decide to try it out.
At the end we have 3 items, a sweatshirt and two T-shirts. “Twenty,” I offer, attempting to barter.
“Non possibile,” he says.
“Twenty-two,” I say, inventing the number because I do not actually know the word in
Italian. It turns out to be right.
“Ventidue,” he agrees. We pay the man and leave.
“Congratulations,” my sister says, rolling her eyes. “You’ve saved exactly 2 euros.”
“Don’t you think it’s strange?” I ask, ignoring her sarcasm. “Two Jamaican-Canadians wandering the streets of Rome, speaking semi-coherent Italian. Don’t you think that’s random?” In Toronto we are already far from home, and all the way over here, in Rome, doubly so.
My sister shrugs, and we step back out into the rain.
From Here
When I get back to the South of France, I wonder how it is for people that are actually from here, who look around at the Cypress trees and the cobblestones and feel that familiar twinge that reminds them they’re home. A sigh is coaxed from their lungs and their heart is pinched, maybe.
Das ist gut
At 4 or so in the morning, I put my sister in a cab and tell the driver in French where she needs to be and what time she needs to be there by. “Take care,” I say, sadly, hugging myself against the early morning chill.
With my sister on a plane to Toronto, it’s back to business as usual. As I am walking toward the laundromat to wash some clothes, a German friend peeks her head out of the window of her apartment just as I pass. I love Aix-en-Provence for this, the smallness of the place. How you are constantly bumping into friends everywhere you go. Sometimes you may be texting a friend, or walking into town meet them, or merely thinking about them, and you will see them—something that is virtually impossible where I’m from.
“Hey!” I call out in English, involuntarily.
“Salut !” she responds in French. Hi.
“Ça va?” I ask in French. All good?
“Ja!” she responds in German. Yeah!
In true exchange student style, I switch to German too. “Haha, Das ist gut!” That’s good.
In the laundry room I load my clothes into the washer, laughing and shaking my head at this bizarre, multilingual conversation.
There will come a day When the books and clothes are tucked away, The boxes sealed, the shutters drawn, My small apartment Emptied of song When you come to help, you’ll say: ‘Doesn’t this room look…
There will come a day
When the books and clothes are tucked away,
The boxes sealed, the shutters drawn,
My small apartment
Emptied of song
When you come to help, you’ll say:
‘Doesn’t this room look big!
Without your life inside,
Without your socks and printer and iced tea, inside!
Without the fridge’s hum.’
Our voices will bounce around in echo
Pounding like a tuneless drum—
Whispering: “Thank you for your courage,
Safe travels back to where you are from.”
We knew this was a passing thing
(That’s what happens when you are nomadic)
We also knew that wouldn’t make
‘The End’ seem any less tragic
Come, friends, and sit with me
Wherever we first met:
Class,
Café,
On the stairs,
Or on that rocky bench,
Then tilt your face toward the sun,
Let its heat cradle your head.
Years from now you’ll be reminded of these:
Cypress trees, Mediterranean breeze,
And I’ll think of you—you’ll think of me
I can chart our growth just like a map,
Look!
There we were young and here we are old;
There we were nervous, here we are bold;
Here, we spoke in riddles, in themes,
like love, distance, and fear
In personal musings, in philosophy,
Voices growing louder, more clear
Shoulders were offered, dinners were held,
To help us all get through,
We realized even the bravest souls
Were lost and wanting, too.
I’ll see you all again, someday
Once the wind has blown us
Every which way,
We are strangers. She messages her boyfriend and hands the phone back to me, saying, Thanks for letting me borrow it. At least he knows where you are now, I sigh. She smells of alcohol, and is wear…
We are strangers. She messages her boyfriend and hands the phone back to me, saying, Thanks for letting me borrow it.
At least he knows where you are now, I sigh.
She smells of alcohol, and is wearing a very short dress that rides up on her thighs. Beige heels. Then she asks, Can I talk to you for a while? Just small talk. Don’t feel obligated to say yes. You can say no, if you want to do your own thing.
It is very late at night, I think. But I close my book, agreeing, because I always do—because I always have to—with the people on the bus.
Three minutes in and I am her confidant. She is a half-Dominican, half-Quebecois mix who admits that she can speak neither her mother’s Spanish, nor her father’s French. Her parents are separated and she lives with her older sister in a basement apartment. She’s going to McDonalds to exist, drunkenly, with her boyfriend and to bother the employees. What could be better?
Her smile falters. She knows it is strange, and says so.
At least she knows.
Ten minutes in and I am an unlikely friend, made privy to the hazy world of the sad, pretty drunk girl. The cloying gaze. The alcohol-induced charisma: arm slung coolly over the back of the seat, swaying with the rhythm of the bus. Uneasiness bubbling somewhere underneath. A flicker of self-consciousness every time I look away, out the window, away from her.
Look at me, she screams silently, hazel eyes wide with childlike ferocity. Like I have all the answers.
Twenty minutes in and we are adversaries.
What’s your background?
Jamaican, I say.
Oh, cool. Her eyes light up, the thrill at the duality of my citizenship. The way I am suspended perpetually between two lifestyles,
Two cultures,
Two modes of being.
You’re pure, though, she says, and my ears buzz, as though clogged with radio static. I ask what she means.
Other black girls stand in groups and stare at me; they ask what I am. I’m just a person. But you’re not like them. You’re pure, you know?
I don’t.
Thirty minutes in and my stop is here, and we are strangers once again. It’s a shame; I was just starting to get used to the smell of the alcohol, the way she leans forward as if to absorb my words before they dissipate into the air, her story, the subtle storm that bubbles beneath her skin.
Once off the bus, I weigh the encounter in my hand, like a stone with heft. The desperate, heavy way she stares at me; the way she measured my movements, my discomfort.
I stand at the corner and look up as the bus drives away, expecting her to wave, but she does not see me. She is moving breathlessly through the aisle toward another waiting pair of ears, as though our small words are her sustenance, and she is starving.
Halfway We are halfway through. If the exchange were a day, I imagine this would be the point where the sun creases over the sky and begins its slow but deliberate descent. The exchange students mu…
Halfway
We are halfway through. If the exchange were a day, I imagine this would be the point where the sun creases over the sky and begins its slow but deliberate descent.
The exchange students must now regroup. Our friends who were staying only for the first semester are gone. We are not exactly sure who is left, and are reminded, yet again, of temporary nature of the year abroad.
In a recurring dream, I am at a final dinner with these people who have become such good friends. Here it gets confusing: I am wearing a one-shoulder green dress and I do not own a dress like this. Anyway, there I am, wearing I dress I do not own in a restaurant I do not recognize. (Bear with me, here.) Raising my glass, I try to tell the people at the table how much they mean to me but I am having trouble getting the words out. I do not know if this will happen. Probably not.
But it gives me comfort, because everyone is there. And you, reader, are by my right-hand side.
Home, briefly
I.
While I am home for the holidays, my family goes to one of our favourite restaurants. We
dash through the -28 degree weather to the entrance, with as little grit as you can expect from a family whose members were born minutes from the Caribbean sea.
Once at the table, we grin at each other and lean forward, speaking in hushed tones as though telling secrets. I know that anyone looking at us can tell we are an adult family. Average age around 35; children living in different cities, all over the world; communicating through Skype, FaceTime, and a family group chat. The contents of the conversations being, more often than not—is everyone alright, does anyone need money, have you completed this paperwork, have you paid these fees, when is this due. Poetry and news articles shared by my mum. The occasional exclamation in patois. Brief discussions about politics. When did we get like this?
II.
People like to say, “Time flies.” Looking back at my family’s history; however it does not seem that the time has flown. It has passed, evenly.
It is clear to me that it has been a long time, especially when I peer around the table at my family. My father is wearing the sort of hat his father used to wear, a flat cap; my sister, a university freshman now, has her eyes shadowed by mascara; my mother is wearing her signature shade of dark red lipstick; I am wearing shiny brown shoes and a watch. We have all developed our particular styles but are all wearing black coats, as though this one aspect was carefully coordinated.
“First person to remember to remember our server’s name gets ten bucks,” Mum says under her breath. My family loves to play little games like this, where no one actually keeps score and no money ever changes hands.
Later: “Are we going to Jamaica this year?” The question is posed by my mother to the table at large. We are long past the days where our parents were the sole planners of our family trips. Now there are schedules to be thought about, vacation days to be organised.
“Yes,” Dad says.
My sister and I smile. If you are an immigrant you may be aware of the concept of on-years and off-years, where, some years, you go back to your small island and others, you don’t.
These periodic trips are important. They are like tacks, pegging us to our history. They remind us who we are and where we are from and where we were born. It’s been decided; 2018 is a Jamaica year.
III.
I tell my family that I do not know whether I will stay in France for the summer or come back to Toronto. “I’ll go wherever the jobs are.” When I say this, I feel much older than I am. “If Toronto, I might look for a place downtown.” This, too, makes me feel old. But I am half-joking. Rent in Toronto is sky-high.
“I think you will have to,” my mother says, taking a bite of her lobster. When available, she will always order lobster, steak, a baked potato, and a virgin strawberry daiquiri. I know her order by heart. “I know you’re bored in the suburbs.”
“What? You’d let me get a place downtown?” I say.
“I think you’d have to.”
“Wow,” I say, and squint out at the restaurant, past the people.
Please, touch the art
I knew I was an adult when I walked past a wall of felt in an art museum that was meant to be touched but did not touch it.
Bedbug level: 12
My sister is coming down to France for a week. It will be her first time in Europe, so we decide to book a spontaneous trip to Rome over Skype. We end up having to put it all on Dad’s card because mine is not going through.
“What! Do you think I’m made of money?” Dad cries over the phone, when we call to ask. This is his constant refrain.
On skype, my sister and I giggle. I am reminded of a video on Facebook of a person throwing money out a window, with the caption, “This is what it’s like having daughters.”
As if it is not enough to rob him blind, we tease Dad relentlessly, sending him text messages with lots of ellipses and strange punctuation, just as he would send them to us:
No problem… putting it on your card… will reimburse thanks,
Once the train tickets are booked, my sister and I search for hostels. I read out some of the worst reviews to her.
“On a scale of 0 to 10, where 0 is no bedbugs and 10 is bedbugs, I would give this hostel a 12, as in, don’t even fumigate, just burn it down.” We double over laughing.
Sailing
I am sitting in a class called l’Europe et la mer dans l’époque moderne (Europe and the Sea in the Modern Era).
The professor made a huge show of singling out the foreigners in the class when we walked in, first to welcome us, and later, to reprimand us, saying, “I know in England you may eat in class but here in France we do not do this.” I roll my eyes at his assumption. I am not from England.
I work out how to fight back in my head. We don’t like being singled out every time we walk into a room, I would say in French. It makes it difficult to integrate. And at this point, when we are nearly fluent, it is frankly offensive. But I decide not to say anything because arguing makes me tired. Instead I look out the window and notice the sky is a cloudless blue.
My eyes shift to the syllabus, which has a painting of sailboats on the front. I think of how I would much rather be at sea, rather than discussing it. I want to taste the sea air and feel the sun on my legs.
I am reminded of something a colleague at my internship last summer once said to me, in the staff kitchen:
“You’re so young. Have you ever been in love?”
I shook my head sheepishly, retrieving my lunch from the microwave.
“Well, one day you’ll fall in love and you’ll do things you never thought you’d do. You’ll go—I don’t know—sailing, and you’ll love it. You’ll say, thank God I met you otherwise I never would have sailed.”
Every time you wake there is a storm. You open your eyes and they’re flooded with light; you breathe and air rushes into your lungs. You have arms that swing, Hands that clench; You are alive…
Every time you wake there is a storm. You open your eyes and they’re flooded with light; you breathe and air rushes into your lungs.
I. Before I miss my train, a few very crucial thoughts go through my head: Where are the service people? (My ticket wouldn’t print, and I insisted on fiddling with the machine, on my own, for way t…
I.
Before I miss my train, a few very crucial thoughts go through my head:
Where are the service people? (My ticket wouldn’t print, and I insisted on fiddling with the machine, on my own, for way too long.)
Where is the platform? (It doesn’t say on the confirmation.) How far is it?
Why aren’t I running! I should run! (The clock on the wall reads 20:17. I have two minutes. And I remember, heart sinking, that European trains always leave on time. Without fail.)
“Ca va être chaud, hein ?” The guy who is trying to help me print the ticket is shaking his head, saying it will be difficult for me to make the train.
“Go! Just go!” cries his colleague.
By the time I get to the platform, the train is already pulling away. It is moving so slowly it is hard to believe it is really missed. I want to jump on top, or something. But when the train is gone, it’s gone.
It is a strange end to what was otherwise an incredible holiday—two weeks in Toronto, followed by three days in London and three days in Paris. It was the first time I had been to London, and I was struck by the city’s mix of styles, unlike anything I had ever seen. My first impression was that the city had a really industrial look to it; the brown brick and red metal of the buses reminding me vaguely of a fire station.
I was led around the city by Londoners I met in the South of France, also on exchange, who were back in the city for the holidays. I walked around the Tate Modern gallery and was actually moved by the artwork; I wandered through markets with my friends and chatted with the merchants; I ate brunch at a restaurant with an underground speakeasy, which required a password to get in. I watched a show called “A Comedy about a Bank Robbery” at Picadilly Circus which was very slapstick but entertaining. All the while, I admired eclectic style of Londoners: bangs, turtlenecks, newsboy hats (which I haven’t seen since 2008), and huge fur coats.
“Was that the last train to Marseille?” I ask a guy in uniform, panting.
He is with some other men, also in uniform. “Oui,” he says simply. Then the group turns away in unison and walks away like a gang. I am left alone on the platform, gripping the handle of my suitcase.
Think, Marisa. Think. I force myself to find a chair and sit, because when I panic, bad things happen. I leave things behind, like bags and wallets and keys. I have an English class to teach tomorrow morning, and if I miss this class it will be the fourth week in a row I have missed, due to the holidays.
Using the GoEuro app, I do a quick search. It compares all the possible routes from one place to another in Europe: plane, train, bus, whatever. The trains for tomorrow morning are 100+ euros. Nope. The flights are 150+. Double-nope.
It’s worse than I thought. I’m stranded.
There are three buses leaving from Paris to Marseille. They are 10-11 hours. Overnight. I vowed years ago to never take one of these buses. But I have to teach a class. You made a commitment, you have to follow through. This phrase flies to the forefront of my brain, without me even realizing. These are my mother’s words; she said them so often that they are now mine.
II.
At the ticket counter, I try to get reimbursed for the train ticket.
“There’s nothing I can do for you,” the guy says. “The ticket is non-remboursable.”
“But it’s your machine that wouldn’t print my ticket.” Would he rather I have gotten on without one? I want to ask this but do not know how to say it in French so I let it go.
“Sorry,” he says. “Nothing I can do.” He prints, now, the ticket that wouldn’t print when we needed it to and tears it in half. I find this very pointless and look at him squarely. Then I gather my things and leave.
The train has left and I am not on it. It has left without me, and it will get there, without me. While I was arguing with this man, one of the three buses has left. It is late in the day and I am running out of time.
I pull out my laptop. I buy a ticket for one of the remaining buses. Immediately there are a few issues:
This bus is overnight and I cannot sleep upright (!)
I cannot print this ticket because there is no printer near me.
I do not know where the station is in Paris.
I check my watch. I have a few hours. More than enough time to find out.
III.
I find the bus stop and realize I still have a ton of time to kill. I eye a McDonalds from across the station. It’s raining and I want to sit inside, idly, but in Europe they always make you buy something. And I have not eaten McDonalds in over a decade so if they make me buy something there, I will be upset.
I decide to take the chance and set up in a booth, eating a sandwich I have packed. A security guard eyes me shyly for around 30 minutes before approaching me.
“Mademoiselle, you cannot just stay here, like this. You need to buy something.”
Sometimes when not-so-great things happen (like missing important trains, for example) I make the conscious decision to let it go. In situations like this I am so busy laughing at myself that I become borderline giddy. I decide to mess with this security guard.
“Oh,” I say, placing a hand earnestly on my chest. “I don’t eat McDonalds.”
He raises his eyebrows. “You have to buy something. A coffee, a cookie…”
“I’m not hungry.”
We look at each other. I relent almost immediately. We walk over to giant menu screen thing that McDonalds have now and he presses the buttons on my behalf.
“I don’t eat McDonalds, you know,” I repeat. He is hardly listening. “I have my reasons!”
“You want this cookie?” he says, pointing.
“Yes,” I lie. I stand at the cash and wait for the unwanted cookie. “Where is my cookie?”
“He’ll bring it for you. You can sit.”
I can’t recall a single McDonalds in North America where they bring you your food. It’s so European I grin. “This is a weird McDonalds,” I point out.
“A weird McDonalds!”
“Yes,” I say. I am North American so I feel like I have authority on this, at least. Maybe not about high-speed trains, but this, surely.
“This is a McCafé, mademoiselle.”
I shrug and pull the cookie from the bag. It’s chocolate. “Woah, woah, woah,” I say, grinning. “This is not the cookie that was pictured. I am not happy; I am going to complain.”
He smiles and shakes his head, resuming his post at the side of the restaurant. While I eat my cookie (happily, because I actually do love chocolate), the security guard and I discuss my being from Toronto and my inability to catch important trains. It’s a welcome distraction after a pretty hectic day.
IV.
On the overnight bus, I try every possible sleeping position until my legs are literally folded cross-legged against the window. I alternate between lying down, sitting up, and wrapping my scarf around my face as a mask and a pillow. The bus jolts to a stop. A burst of cold air and cigarette smoke burst through the door, chilling me to the bone. Why did I choose a seat by the door?
“Excuse me, Madame,” I ask the conductor. “How many stops do we have like this?”
“Every hour and a half,” she tells me.
Nightmare, I think. Nightmare!
I probably look like a character out of a nightmare, too, with my big scarf around my face. That, or a human cotton swab.
I take three sleeping pills and try to will myself to sleep but nothing works. As promised, every hour and a half I am met with a blast of cold air. I stare around jealously at the people who are sleeping, heads lolling.
I watch the sun rise. Then, after 11 hours on the road we finally reach my stop. I have not slept at all and practically fall out of the bus. Salvation!
I realise that, for some reason, I am still 20 minutes out of town. When will it end, I wheeze. I feel genuinely very gross. No shower, no teeth brushed, and when I get to the washroom at the station, the person who stares back at me has her makeup smudged and hair mussed. But she’s made it!
I get back home and collapse into bed—but only for 30 minutes. I still have to teach my class.
I. “Have you heard the news?” I ask anyone who will listen, my voice dripping with sarcasm. “The CAF has processed my application. Can you believe it?” The CAF (or Caisse Allocations Familiales) is…
I.
“Have you heard the news?” I ask anyone who will listen, my voice dripping with sarcasm. “The CAF has processed my application. Can you believe it?”
The CAF (or Caisse Allocations Familiales) is a housing subsidy program that all students studying and living in France are eligible for. You can have your rent cut in half—if you’re willing to endure the weeks of grueling paperwork. Not only did they require my birth certificate, but a certified translation, as well as a bunch of other paperwork not readily available. After 8 weeks of my application being “en cours de traitement,” two emails and a phone call later, they finally respond to say that I have been approved.
“La CAF a traité mon dossier !” I squeal to my French friends. Needless to say, I am thrilled.
“I have a contact on the inside,” a friend tells me shadily. “Mine’ll get processed now too, I know it.”
I am still waiting on a document, potentially the most important one. (The document to rule all documents, if you will.) My carte de séjour, or stay card.
II.
I filled out the paperwork for the stay card in my first week, as I was instructed to.
“Why did you do that?” my contact at the university asks me.
I stare back at him blankly. “I followed exactly what it said on the application.”
“No, you were supposed to send it through the school, I told you.” (He didn’t.)
“Okay,” I say, biting my lip, “but it will still be processed, then, right?”
“Yes,” he says, but I am not sure I believe him.
Now, three months later, the deadline to receive this card comes and goes. I still don’t have my stay card,” I tell my friends, bewildered. “I did all the paperwork when they told me to. I sent it to the right address and everything.”
“You don’t have a stay card? How did you get in the country?” my friends tease.
I laugh, but only half-heartedly. Without that card I don’t know if I have the right to stay here.
III.
I call the visa people and get the answering machine. I press “1” to be connected to their emergency line, because maybe this is an emergency; I am not entirely sure. The lady on the other end yells at me for a solid 5 minutes and hangs up on me. Evidently it was not an emergency. I send two emails on two separate occasions and then finally decide to call another number.
The response is as follows: go to the prefecture. This is not ideal, as it requires a 40-minute train ride out of town to Marseille. I ask the woman on the phone again if this is necessary, given that I did everything I was supposed to, and she assures me yes, it is.
So, I wake up early to go to Marseille. Once in the city, I descend into their metro, walking in the slow, measured way I do when I am navigating a new subway system, eyes darting back and forth in search of signage. I do not know this city and am instantly overwhelmed. When I emerge from the metro, I find myself in a marketplace, and a man is selling spices, saying, Come one and all to see the things you can do with these spices you’ll be amazed it’s just incredible.
At the prefecture, an employee is asking people if they have their passports with them, and if they don’t, he shakes his head and asks them politely to leave. I wonder how one can come to a prefecture to do visa things and not have something as crucial as their passport. I realize I don’t want to be a hypocrite and quickly flick through my documents to see if I have mine.
I don’t.
Is this really happening? Did I really take a 40-minute train here without my passport?
IV.
My passport is in my scanner at home. The employee assures me that in my particular case, I will be okay without the passport. I am stunned at my luck.
I head up the counter and tell the woman what I am looking for.
“And? What do you want me to do?” the woman says.
I wonder why she is already angry. “My… carte de sejour.”
“I don’t know what you are asking me. Why didn’t you go to the OFII office?”
“I sent some emails and called and everyone told me to come here.” I even show her said email which she reads uninterestedly.
“You don’t even have your passport!” she shouts.
I allow myself to be stunned at this lack of communication, on the most basic level, between this woman and the man who is only an arms-length away. “That man just told me I didn’t need it, he’s over th—”
“Where is your identity card!” Everyone is looking, now.
This is a French thing so I hand her my driver’s license instead. “Marisa Cool-ton, is it?” she yells at me.
I nod slowly. You can’t just spit someone’s name like that, like it’s nothing,I think. It’s my name.
“I have nothing on file for you. You will have to go to the OFII office. Here is their address and number.”
“This process is so confusing,” I try to say. To my surprise, tears spring to my eyes.
Her tone softens suddenly. “Calm down, okay?” She proceeds to rattle off a list of 10 things I must do, and I start to take notes, but stop when I realize how convoluted it all is. I leave without a word.
On my way out, a man hovering near the entrance mutters something under his breath when I walk past, which sets the hairs on the back of my neck on edge. I turn up my collar.
When I call the number I have been given, the woman on the other end is hysterical. “This is not OFII,” she says, and a few other things in French I do not understand. I assume she is making a joke, and so I say, ha, ha, and ask for information on my visa.
“I told you, this is not OFII.”
So, they have given me the wrong number. I do a quick google search and find the right one (they have written a 5, instead of a 2) but when I call, it gives me a brief message and drops the call. I decide just to go home and postpone this to another day.
V.
On the train, I fume silently, thinking about how nothing has come of this trip and how I’ve wasted money on train tickets and several hours of my time. I do not know, in that moment, that my stress and lack of attention will cause me to miss my stop and end up in another city altogether: Avignon. I will take another train in the opposite direction, which will overshoot my stop, taking me back to Marseille, where I started. Then, mercifully, I will take a bus home. At the end of everything, I will finally be able to reach OFII by phone who will tell me card is not even ready, making the entire trip pointless.
“When will it be ready, then?” I will ask. “It’s been 3 months.”
“I don’t know.”
“But you did get my documents, right? Does it say they were received?”
“Don’t worry, mademoiselle. You will get your card,” she says, not answering my question. Much later, I will find out that not only were my documents not received, but that no paperwork had been processed at all.
“Don’t worry,” she says, “Just keep calling back.”
That sounds literally awful, I think, but I agree to keep checking back. I hang up.
It is a long day that will get longer. But like all long days, it will end, and I eventually I will be home. I will be a little older, and my skin will be a little thicker. I’ll be better equipped to handle long days to come.
VI.
A lady jumps on the train with a younger woman who is probably her daughter. The daughter is struggling with a large black suitcase, and the mother is helping her move it through the narrow passageways. The doors ping, and suddenly the mother is squeezing past people, trying desperately to get off. As I watch her pushing past, I sincerely wonder if she will make it off the train before it pulls away with her inside. She wanted to stay with her daughter for as long as possible, I imagine. But this is her daughter’s trip, not hers.
The woman makes it onto the platform at the last minute and peers through the window. The daughter is busy with the bag and I’m thinking she won’t spot her mother in time, but she does. The mother taps four fingers against the glass and blows her a kiss, and the daughter returns it.
I find this little gesture—the fingers and the tapping and the kiss—so moving. I am probably still fragile from the episode at the prefecture, but the scene actually brings tears to my eyes again, because I know if it was my mother she would probably do the same thing.
VII.
Your family will send you off into the world with a suitcase in the hopes that you will be able to navigate large cities on your own and that you will not be yelled at by strangers in an unfamiliar tongue. But when it comes right down to it and the train pulls away, all you can do is hope.
I. It’s my second year of university and my roommates do not acknowledge me when I walk into a room. “I feel isolated. I want to come home,” I say to Mum on the phone. “Go to the bookstore,” …
I.
It’s my second year of university and my roommates do not acknowledge me when I walk into a room. “I feel isolated. I want to come home,” I say to Mum on the phone.
“Go to the bookstore,” she commands.
I do. I buy some books and feel better.
II.
My roommates have forbidden me from turning up the heat. “I miss you. I want to come home,” I say, shivering.
Mum is silent. She’s thinking about something.
“When you miss me,” she says slowly, “look at the moon.”
I stare out through the window of my basement room at the moon, hard yet soft, like an eggshell.
III.
My mother is self-conscious of her curls, which have a habit of sticking up in every direction. She has taken to wearing my younger sister’s baseball hats, which say edgy things like “mood” and “antisocial social club.”
She starts saying something but I interrupt. “I can’t take you seriously in that hat.”
“Why?” she says.
I shake my head, smiling, so glad she is there. Hat or no hat.
(Almost) home for the holidays At Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris, it takes 3 hours to get through security, check-in, and customs, because they have put me on a different flight than the one I …
(Almost) home for the holidays
At Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris, it takes 3 hours to get through security, check-in, and customs, because they have put me on a different flight than the one I have booked. In the line, I sit on my hand luggage, and the frazzled American behind me offers me Xanax. She seems unhinged. I politely decline.
She takes another pill. “Oh, this isn’t a narcotic,” she reassures me. “This is just a Gaviscon.”
In the next line, I meet a Chinese girl who is studying in Paris. She is wearing black, thick-rimmed glassed and—despite being older than me—is so small she only comes up to my chin. She is worried she will miss her flight. Before we can say goodbye to one another, we are split into two separate lines by customs. Later, I see her and catch her eye, giving her a little smile.
On the plane, I make friends with the two men next to me, due to my unsettling habit of engaging strangers in conversation as though we already know one another.
The guy on my right is a white guy coming back from his son’s wedding in India. “Wedding took two days! Very traditional! Took us four hours to get from Pune to Mumbai! Or maybe Bombay! The Indians say Bombay!”
The guy on my left is actually from India.
He uses the interactive map on the back of the seat in front of me to show me India’s different cities. I listen, rapt.
“I am from the North. I work here, in Bangalore. If you are going to travel India you will need a few months. You will start here, where the tourists go, lots of nice beaches.” He does that thing that Indians do with their heads that means neither yes or no. “This is New Delhi; it is very polluted, but you should visit. Every 200 kilometres you have a new language and culture. Traffic is terrible. It would take you weeks to cross the country. Then you go up here, this is Kashmir, it’s snowy.”
“I just studied Kashmir for my exams,” I say, thrilled. “The course was on the whole Indian subcontinent, actually. What brings you to Toronto?”
It turns out he is moving to Toronto, today, to do his master’s. I decide to brief him on the Greater Toronto Area, using the map. “This is downtown Toronto. This is where I’m from, further North. Here is Niagara Falls, Buffalo… cheap shopping there. You should visit Montreal, it’s 6 hours from Toronto, and then you should see Quebec city, 10 hours. New York City proper, also 10 hours. Rent a car or take the train. This is where you are moving to. There is a large Indian community there, actually.”
“How cold is it, there, now?” he asks. He sounds uneasy.
“The pilot said -1 C. Don’t let the cold scare you, it’s not that bad.”
As the plane begins its descent over Toronto, his eyes are glued to the window.” He is looking at the city in the way I am sure my parents did, over a decade ago, eyes wide.
“Lots of immigrants?” he asks.
“Lots,” I tell him. “This is one of the most diverse cities in the world.“
The plane lands. I pull on my woolly headband and gloves. “You’re just at the beginning,” I tell him.
At the carousel, I spot a China Eastern Airline booth. (Peculiarly, it is staffed only by Jamaicans.)
I yank my suitcase off the conveyor and treat myself to a hot chocolate from Tim Hortons, which I haven’t had in several months. I wonder about my Indian friend, but I know he’ll be okay. This is Toronto, after all. I step out into the cold with my suitcase in tow, and wait on the curb for my family to come get me. I’m home.
When things go right
My professor allows me to sit an exam earlier than the rest of class so I can go home to Canada early for the holidays. Before I start, he gives me back the grade for an exam I had written previously for one of my courses with him.
“You did very well,” he tells me. I don’t quite understand the marking system here but, looking at the grade, I think he is right. “You really seem to have understood the texts.”
“Uh, that’s reassuring,” I say in French, flattered. “Thanks so much.” I think back to the exam, where I was flicking through my massive English-French dictionary, trying to express myself in a way somewhere near to how I would in English.
He turns to leave, but then says, “I didn’t mark you as an exchange student. I didn’t have to. I marked you on par with everyone else.” I wonder where he is going with this.
“Yours is the highest mark I gave,” he says, almost as an afterthought. He leaves the exam room.
I sit there for a minute in shocked silence, then a smile splits out over my face. I move the pages around a bit in front of me for no reason. Then I open my enormous English-French dictionary, and flip over the exam booklet.
I write, urgently, desperately. I want to show him what I’m made of.
Get yourself a friend who —
If I can recommend anything to you, it would be to get yourself a friend who will run with you for the train;
Who will come to your apartment unannounced to help you in your last-minute panic;
Who will wash your dishes for you because you didn’t realise you’d have no time to do them before you left;
Who will tuck snacks into your suitcase for the ride while you are not looking;
Who will haul your suitcase across town, because they know it is too heavy for you;
Who will be there for you when you least expect it;
Get yourself a friend who will run with you for the train.
Travel tips from an un-traveler
I must learn to be a better traveler. Not only do I miscalculate the time I have to get to the train station but I go to the wrong one. I hail a cab in desperation.
“I have to make a train at 1:11pm. Can you get me there?”
“It normally takes 20 minutes or more to get to that station,” he says.
I check my watch. We have 15 minutes.
“Let’s try,” he says, and I toss my stuff into the trunk. The taxi driver peels across the highway at 140km/h, and I am sitting on the very edge of my seat wondering whether I will survive this.
Once there, I practically throw my debit card at the driver. “Thank you!”
“Good luck!” he yells, as I dash into the station with a minute to spare.
It turns out the rush was totally unnecessary. The train is running late and is nowhere to be found. I should have checked that. And on top of the everything, I realise left the nice lunch I had packed in the backseat of the taxi. (Much, much later I will realise I have left my keys in the same bag, the second time I have lost them this month.)
I tally my losses. I no longer have my good tupperware. I have wasted almost 50 euros (75 CDN) on the cab, a cancelled Uber, and now an overpriced, not-even-that-good sandwich. This does not even include the price of the train ticket. Why don’t I just set my money on fire? I fume.
I climb onto the train, exhausted. This journey would normally take 10 hours by car but will take only 3.5, because if there’s one thing Europe has mastered, it’s public transport. The train whisks me to Paris at 300km/h, cutting clear across the country.
I place my head against the glass and eat my terrible sandwich. I must learn to be a better traveler.
Anywhere
At a Vietnamese restaurant in Paris, I eat with a Canadian friend I have not seen in quite a while.
Sometimes, I like to think about all the complex moments and decisions that led me to the present. We are far from home, I consider, sitting in a restaurant we chose at random. Surrounding us are faces we will probably never see again. Young and ever-mobile, she and I have spent the better part of the last year tucking ourselves into the forgotten corners of large cities.
She is now doing a master’s at one of the best universities in the world for International Relations, which is what we both study. The intensive program requires her to do an internship abroad, anywhere in the world. What a daunting task, I think. To have the entire world at your fingertips!
“Where are you thinking of going?” I say eagerly. Conversations like this inspire me. With so few obligations, we could work and study anywhere in the world.
“Senegal. New York maybe,” she says, smiling.
Later I meet a guy from her university, a Belgian who is confronted with the same predicament. He says he is thinking South Africa for his placement. “Where would you go, if you could?”
I raise my eyebrows, and sip my iced tea, ever-present in my hand despite being in France, the world’s wine capital. “I’ll have to get back to you on that one.”
But he is not done with me yet. “What do you think you’ll do afterward?” he asks.
I set down my bottle, and steel myself to answer these questions. “A master’s, probably. In a big city. New York or London,” I surprise myself with how set I am on this, given that this is the first time I’ve said it aloud. “But I need to take a break. Living abroad is exhausting! Bank accounts and making friends and everything.”
“So,” he says seriously, “Will you do Columbia or NYU? Or the London School of Economics?”
The fact that he turns, immediately, to some of the best schools in the world, makes my heart soar. I grin back at him because it’s possible—it’s all possible.
Bilingue?
How does one gauge fluency? I realise I must set some sort of goal for myself, a way of knowing if I have gotten enough French out of this trip. If not, I may never be satisfied. In theory.
“You are bilingual,” says the Belgian.
My eyes shoot up to my forehead. “What? Really?” I am skeptical, but I suppose I should trust him, given that he is French.
“Yes.”
“But. I still get mixed up with expressions,” I attempt.
“Yeah, but.” He shrugs.
So this is it, then. I am fluent. Bilingual. I realise I do not mind this label at all.
I realize I am happy with my progress, and that perfection might not be necessary, or even possible, here. Near-fluency will have to be enough.
Inventive concept strong scenes strong voice cannot publish but made it to final tier and was widely discussed need to show not tell piece seems like it wants to be part of something bigger scenes …
Back to where we began I. I spend a weekend in the French Alps with a friend. When I studied here last year, for a month, it was summer, and now it is much colder. A bitter wind nips at my collar. …
Back to where we began
I.
I spend a weekend in the French Alps with a friend. When I studied here last year, for a month, it was summer, and now it is much colder. A bitter wind nips at my collar.
It was a lifetime ago—long before I knew I would have the opportunity to study abroad for an entire year.
II.
Grenoble is nestled at the bottom of a valley and is ringed by mountains. A year ago, my friends and I climbed up into the Alps to picnic or stargaze or just stare out at the city. I remember how, at sunset, yellow and pink was tossed into the air like confetti and the buildings below were reduced to pinpricks of light. Coming back, the city is just as I remember it, the mountains visible at every possible perspective, like a protective shield around the people.
(I think it is important to rewind, to go back to important places and walk along familiar streets. You will marvel at how quickly time passes. You will realize how much you have changed.)
III.
“Where are we going?”
“To a friends’. I just have to pick up something quickly.”
My friend and I drive up to a house that looks more like a cottage, with vines growing over its face and lush green trees spotting the yard. Inside, his friends are dressed in knits with abstract prints, looking like a Robert Frost poem. We venture into the depths of the home and I admire the woody smell and creative architecture; in the living room, the couches are half-level below the floor, creating a sort of nook. Books with a layer of dust line the walls in the basement, and I am a sucker for a house with books.
They are eating all together in the French style, with an abundance of cheese and bread spread out on the table, and a big, lightly-dressed salad in the middle. We drink coffee and spiced tea hand-made by one of their friends. I try to follow their French and do okay. Before we leave, my friend picks up what he came here for: a generous crate of vegetables that another one of his friends has grown.
I am hesitant to leave and cannot help but wonder what it is like for them here, in a house with a view of the reds and oranges of the autumn mountains. A stubborn cat spread out on a chair. Tea brewing. Off the grid but not quite.
What they don’t tell you
I. The inherent, seemingly insurmountable difficulties of learning a Latin language when you speak a Germanic one.
II. That mastering a language may involve moving countries.
III. That language-learning is costly, both physically and mentally.
IV. That speaking English not only inhibits your learning of the French language, but can also jeopardize the quality of your French. (Speaking in English for prolonged periods actually means that any French I speak after that is lower quality. I become confused, and start speaking a Frenglish not even I can understand.)
V. That immersion is an active process; that you must construct it expertly around you, using movies and people and speech.
Here we go
My French is getting better. A few days ago, I was able to keep up a coherent conversation with a classmate about our courses. “We’re not getting enough context,” I
was able to complain. “You have to establish a base. Then you can speak about more specific topics.”
I was able to write a full lecture’s worth of notes that were coherent enough to study from. My personality is peeking out from behind my French mask: I can finally use the language to show who I am.
(If, when I leave this country, I am in fact fluent, it will have been the most rapid, most obvious, most effective acquisition of a skill I have ever experienced. This will be both incredible and jarring.)
To make a home
I have said it before, and I will say it again: I am consistently stunned by the dynamism of human beings. I am fascinated by the way we can adapt to difficult scenarios; the way we can make a home out of anywhere.
Sometimes I see apartment buildings and want instantly to cut them in half.
I want to see, in the style of a cross-section, the way the people live. I want to see what they have done with their small pocket of mankind.
And I think this is why I tried so hard to make a home out of my little studio apartment, shocking myself with my own military-like precision. I bought stick-on hooks to make up for the lack thereof; I took my cutting boards and cut them in half so I had multiple; I took down the greasy shower curtain and ordered a new extra-long one of precise height and width online that kept the rest of the washroom dry; I bought drawer organizers and over-door hooks despite not knowing the terms in French; I stared at my suitcases for days trying to figure out where to put them, and discovered a shelf above the front door, but the shelf was too small, so I left the suitcases alone, then I had a eureka moment days later, realizing I could fit them in there if both suitcases were exactly three-quarters shut; I had another eureka moment, and created a chain out of leftover shower curtain hooks from which I hung my shower caddy; on my father’s suggestion, I freed an unessential screw out of the bookshelf and drove it into the wall with a small hammer, and from this screw I suspended an overpriced hanging plant.
And in all this, I wondered whether I was trying to create a perfect space not simply because I felt like it, but because outside the apartment, out in my new world, I had no control, and was at the mercy of the country and the language and the people.
One day, in an apparent rush of mania, decided I needed to wash my windows. I borrowed a squeegee from a friend. It was harrowing—I nearly fell out the window in the process—but at least the windows were clean.
Slow down, you crazy child
I.
My young English student and I discuss the song “Vienna”, by Billy Joel.
“Vienna?” my student asks.
“Vienna, the capital of Austria. Autriche.”
“Ah, Vienne,” she says.
“It’s a metaphor for everything the girl is looking for. He’s telling her that there’s no rush—how would you say this in French?”
She sticks out her bottom lip in the French way, thinking. “Il n’y a pas de feu.” There is no fire.
“Right.” I try to save this expression to memory. “The song is a plea to get her to slow down. Everything will still be there when she’s ready.” And I wonder exactly who I am talking about; the girl or me.
II.
Sometimes I wake up and my heart soars with the sheer potential in the world. No word of a lie, I actually feel this in my stomach. I am completely overtaken all the things we can see and do and be. I imagine the vastness of the globe, and its people, living in infinite circumstances and scenarios: residing at the base of a mountain, for example. Squatting in a forgotten slum; crunching over snow; sipping lukewarm soup.
In a burst of inspiration, I once peered over at the world map on my wall and spotted an island I had never noticed before. It was off the coast of Antarctica, and had been previously discovered by someone, surely, but only very recently by me. Sandwich Island.
Other days I am not as hopeful, and find myself overwhelmed by the task we all have to create our own meaning in the world.
When I was younger I decided that the meaning of life was simple: loving and being loved. Now, I add a slight amendment. There needs to be something else, a forward momentum.
Kant once said: “Rules for happiness: something to do, someone to love, something to hope for.”
And this is true, especially for someone as restless as myself. That I cannot stay in one place for long is a veritable blessing and curse. Even here, in France, I quickly catch the travel bug.
I came here for a change of scenery, to be inspired, and I am. But still I have the insatiable desire to see things unlike those that I have ever seen, and—inexplicably—to visit places that are extremely hot or extremely cold. I want to be moved! I am drunk on what appears to be endless youth.
Underneath a chair in a hotel room in Ottawa, Ontario On the floor of my room A hardware store Underneath a cushion at the office The trunk of a car in a 3-hour rideshare from the French Alps to Mi…
Underneath a chair in a hotel room in Ottawa, Ontario
On the floor of my room
A hardware store
Underneath a cushion at the office
The trunk of a car in a 3-hour rideshare from the French Alps to Milan, Italy
Before I leave Europe for good, I quickly tour a few cities I have been meaning to see.
My friend and I miss our bus to Prague and take an endless detour through the German cities of Erfurt and Dresden. Once in Prague, we wander around and take in the charming architecture.
Next, we stop in Berlin and take part in a walking tour so moving that by the end we are both on the…
My Little Client It is not long into my exchange that I realize I should try and find part-time work to fund my travels, groceries, and other things. One of my friends suggests I post an ad on a Fr…
My Little Client
It is not long into my exchange that I realize I should try and find part-time work to fund my travels, groceries, and other things. One of my friends suggests I post an ad on a French website called leboncoin, which, for you Canadians out there, is essentially kijiji.
I draft the ad and have two French friends read it over, and it is something along the lines of, “My name is Marisa, I am Canadian, I can teach you English, please hire me.” The accompanying logo is painfully cheesy: I have added a google image of a French flag crossed with a Canadian one captioned by the words, “EASY ENGLISH”.
Quite a while after I post the ad I receive an email from a woman who is looking for someone to help her daughter with English conversation. I am elated. I call her back, trying desperately to come across as professional even though I am very aware of my accent and have rehearsed the conversation in my head beforehand.
My little client is 14 years old, adorable, and extremely dedicated to the language. I decide instantly to only teach her relevant things, to make sure she can get by in a store or restaurant or meeting a new friend. I dive headfirst into our courses, drafting a lesson plan and conducting role plays. We analyze scenes from “Friends” and “Forrest Gump,” we discuss the lyrics from John Lennon’s “Imagine.” We do read alouds and rehearse the elusive “th” sound in English.
I make sure she knows expressions I wish I knew before coming to France. One of our first role plays takes place in a store.
“If someone in a store asks you if they can help you with anything,” I point out, “you might say, ‘I’m just browsing, thanks,’ or ‘Actually, yes, do you have this in my size?’ or ‘Do you have this in a small?’ or ‘Do you have this in red’?”
On the way back from my first lesson, I message my mother and tell her: “Teaching is rewarding but so difficult. How do you do it?”
“Of course, it’s not all perfect,” she says. “But the kids make me laugh. It’s never boring. Never the same.”
Before I came to France, I did not know I spoke English
Well, part of me knew, I guess. But like most people, I didn’t think about it on a daily basis. When I put pencil to paper in class, I didn’t say to myself, Here I am, about to write in English. I would simply think, Here I am, about to write.English has never really been a language to me. It is, rather, a way to exist. It is the words I speak and the songs I sing and the books I buried myself in throughout my childhood.
And now I am extremely aware of the fact I “speak English.” I am aware of the absurdity of words like “crosswalk” and “milk”. I am aware of English’s strange intonation.
A language is a lot more than a language. It is culture, it is music, it is art. And in learning French you assume parts of this French identity; the people, a way of seeing the world, and to a lesser extent, the wine, the cheese. I try to impart this information—which I feel for some reason is crucial—to my little student.
Look at All the Cats
I meet one of my closest friends while taking out my garbage. He is standing on the step, smoking.
“So many cats here,” I try in French, just to make conversation. I am attempting to point out the unusually high number of cats that populate the residence complex.
“What?” he says. My French was not clear.
“A lot of cats,” I try again. “Many cats.”
“What?”
“Cats,” I relent.
We get to talking and then suddenly we are friends. He is from Morocco and speaks four languages—Arabic, French, English, and Spanish—fluently, a quality uncommon where I am from but apparently extremely common here. We drink sweet tea and discuss this country and the language and the administration. Soon enough, another one of his friends joins us. I am telling the two of them about one of my proudest purchases here, a microwave that doubles as an oven.
“This one here bought the worst oven you’ve ever seen,” he says, pointing at his friend.
“Yes,” his friend sighs. “It can only hold—how do you say in English? Deux tiers of a pizza.”
“Two thirds,” I say.
“Right. Two thirds. But actually, this is great.”
“How?” I ask.
“I try to reheat my pizza and it doesn’t fit. The remaining third goes back in the fridge. Better for my health,” he says, grinning.
I smile. It is student struggle at its best: celebrating when things work; laughing it off when they don’t.
Mareezah
I pronounce my name, in French, now, when I introduce myself to people, but it doesn’t seem part of me. In the works I have studied, the writings of Eva Hoffman come to mind.
She recounts in her memoirs the impact of the Anglicization of her and her sisters’ names:
Our Polish names didn’t refer to us; they were as surely us as our eyes or hands. These new appellations, which we ourselves can’t yet pronounce, are not us. They are identification tags, disembodied signs pointing to objects that happen to be my sister and myself. We walk to our seats, into a roomful of unknown faces, with names that make us strangers to ourselves (Hoffman 105, Lost in Translation).
European English
An unexpected result of my time in France is my acquisition of English English, because most of the people I spend time with are from England.
Instead of saying that something is a good idea, I want to say, now, that it is a “good shout.”
Instead of the “washroom” I ask for the “toilet.”
I live in a “flat,” now, not an “apartment”.
Recently, I wanted to say, “the store closes at 8:30,” and felt, on the tip of my tongue, “the shop shuts at half-eight.”
Are you Chinese or Something?
To get to my English student, I must take a bus 20ish minutes out of town. A group of elementary schoolers filter onto the bus and occupy every free seat. Two little girls crunch into the seat next to me.
“It’s okay, there’s enough space,” I tell them in French (or what I think is French.)
One of the little girls cocks an eyebrow at me. She has a brown, curly ponytail and is probably around four years old. “Are you Chinese or something?”
“No,” I laugh. “I’m English.”
She gives her supervisor—a lanky guy who can’t be more the fifteen years old—the side-eye. She says to him, “Because I didn’t understand anythingshe said…”
Her supervisor is visibly cringing, eyes wide, placing a finger over his lips in the hopes of getting her to quiet down.
“It’s okay,” I tell him, and it really is.
When I get off the bus, I am smiling. I say, “Merci-aurevwah,” to the bus driver, the same way I’ve heard French people saying it when getting off the bus. “Thanks-goodbye,” as though it is one word.
The People You Meet
A French friend once told me she loves this blog, but that it seems I have had many bad experiences.
I wouldn’t call them bad, actually. I think every experience is interesting—and I like the neutrality of this word, ‘interesting’.
At its best, the exchange has me dancing in the living room of my friend’s apartment to the pop-funk of Amadou and Miriam, a blind, middle-aged Senegalese pop duo. At its worst, it has me shaking with anger at the front desk of my residence, because the concierge has seen me, but has not greeted me, letting my uneasy “Bonjour” hover between us like stale air.
The exchange is rife with mild frustrations. In the first weeks, I bought little desserts when I really wanted yogurt, an indoor broom instead of an outdoor one, pillows that were too big
for my pillowcases, strange cheese that was too strong, and finally, citrus tea instead of black how I like it, just because I did not know what the word agrumes on the package meant.
If I had to describe this exchange, I would say while it is sometimes bad and sometimes good, it is always interesting.
There is one thing that is missing in this blog, and it is the people. I keep them faceless and nameless so as not to offend them, but the reality is that it is the people who populate this exchange. It is the people that make it exciting and tense and different. Sometimes I feel the urge to write about my friend with the flared jeans and studded backpack; my friend who wears paisley print pants and believes that everything and everyone she meets is “just lovely”; my red-faced professor who swore that anyone who turned in their project 10 seconds late will receive a fail grade, no exceptions; my friend who shares the same deadpan sense of humour I do, and always makes me grin without fail.
Every time I meet someone amazing (as so many of them are) I experience a small heartbreak, like small cuts on your hands that you don’t realize are there until you run them under hot water. Because I know that for every good person there will eventually be a goodbye, because I am not from here, and when I leave, I may not be back for a while.
The Rental
My first ever rental car is a white Toyota Yaris. It took much time and effort to get my hands on.
After having been turned away from nearly every rental agency at the Marseille airport, my friends and I write a list of all the requirements we have been presented in order to find the one company that will rent to us. The list is something like: do we need an international drivers’ license, is there a young driver fee, do you need my passport, do you need my credit card, will you rent to me if I am only 20, how many years do you need to have on your license, do you have five-seaters, do we need to fill up the gas before coming back, how much is that total?
We reserve a car and I realize, at the last possible minute, that Europeans tend to drive standard. I can only drive automatic. It is too late to get refunded and I have already paid 44 euros (around 60 CDN) for a car I cannot drive.
My friends and I are determined. We go to the agency and very nicely ask them for a refund, which we actually manage to get. Then we go next door to Europcar, who has automatics and will rent to 20-year-olds.
The car is an electric and makes no sound when you turn it on. Once behind the wheel, I panic, and wonder if I will remember how to drive, but of course everything is fine. The roads are narrower than I am used to and I drive well below the speed limit, but when I hit the minimum speed, 110, 130—I feel like I am hurtling down the road at the speed of light.
I tell myself to calm down and keep driving. To slow my heartrate, I try to think of how proud my father would be that I am doing this, that I am driving somewhere I am not familiar with. My younger sister is one of the most intuitive drivers I know, so I pretend she is next to me, telling me, “It’s alright, Mar.” I pretend she is standing outside the when I park, easing me into the spot with clear gestures.
I remind myself how similar the roads are to those in Toronto, (aside from their narrowness and hairpin turns, of course.) This is not so different, I tell myself.
At the Beach
When we finally get to Port Miou at the Calanques, I stumble out of the car in relief.
We wade into water that is blue and clear—and freezing cold. “I’m from the Caribbean,” I point out to my friends, grinning. “You call this a beach?” I ease myself into water anyway. The saltwater taste on my lips makes me feel like I am home.
It is only later, when we are sitting on a wall high above the sea that we realize the trip was worth it; the views are stunning. We toss pebbles down the cliffside so that they can reach where we cannot. We watch men fish at the base of the hill and wonder how they got down there. I know, then, that when we drive back I will be more comfortable and that things will be better, and they are.
We wave at unknown sailors on a ship turning into the quay. They wave back.
“I love people,” my friend points out, vaguely. “Two sets of strangers, waving at one another.”
Far below, the water collides with the cliffs, creating white foam. This extreme display of force holds my gaze. I look out at where the ocean blurs into the horizon, feeling like we are on the edge of the world, straddling the fine line between order and chaos.
We are flying down the highway. My father is at the wheel, and my mother in the passenger seat. I am sitting in the back, panicking aloud about something, as usual. My sister her headphones in, sta…
We are flying down the highway. My father is at the wheel, and my mother in the passenger seat. I am sitting in the back, panicking aloud about something, as usual. My sister her headphones in, staring pensively out the window.
“You never stop talking,” my mother interrupts, her tone gentle. “Take a breath.”
I do.
Now, it is my mother’s turn to speak. “Where does it come from, all your stress? I wish I could take it away from you and put it on my own shoulders. Give it to me.” She is holding out her hands.
I place my hypothetical stress in her cupped hands.
“It’s mine now,” she says. My mother makes a show of winding down the window, holding the stress high above her shoulder, and tossing it out onto the highway. “There, it’s gone.”
I look out at the road, at my stress receding into the background, and wonder at my mother’s love.
You cannot ball up stress like a snowball. You cannot shrug it off like a coat. And you cannot take the stress of another person into your own hands. But I know that if you could, my mother would, in an instant.
This realization overwhelms me, so for the rest of the ride I am quiet. I wonder at this love.
