I was sitting and reading in front of the Center Pompidou and waited for people I didn’t know and didn’t like.
She had dark brown eyes and fluffy hair. She asked me if I spoke French. She apologized and I was touched by her nervousness.
We started talking, and I knew immediately why she was talking to me.
“T‘es très mignonne”
I accepted her invitation «boire un verre»
I gave her my number and she disappeared between the grotesquely inflated pigeons and the round tourists. The others came and all evening I just wanted to go home. I longed for my loneliness and hardly took part in the conversations.
Albert Camus and Celine.
I was actually very interested, but the combination of the dim light in the dark room and the professor’s never-ending monologue made me sleepy. I finally wanted to go out and live. Maybe studying literature wasn’t for me after all. I burned for the screeching words that melted, disintegrated and turned the world I knew into ashes. I loved pathetic dramas, ambivalent heroes who scratched the abyss of existence and the unspeakable transcendence that was only revealed to me in perfect poetry.
I wanted to discuss, feel and experience. And not sit in a room in silence and let the gentle drizzle splash on my face.
I left the Sorbonne building and began to stroll through the Latin Quarter. I had found a bookstore here a few days earlier. It looked like the Paris of my dreams. Heavy, old stone walls enveloped the cosmos of words. You stepped in and you were surrounded by the smell of old paper and my grandmother’s room, everything up to the ceiling was full of books. Many of them had spent endless years on the shelves of the city and were here now. The pages were yellow and delicate. You squeezed through the narrow gallery and fell deeper and deeper into a paradise of language.
Full of curiositiesI walked through vintage shops. I liked these clothes, they were full of stories which I would never know.
Maybe I was standing in front of a blouse which she wore on the day they first kissed, or the shirt which he wore when his mother died.
I bought a red top with the inscription “Russia” on it. I thought of St. Petersburg, of Dostoevsky, and of my wish to explore this strange land.
I walked on, read while I was walking, and sat down in the park beneath the Louvre.
There I lay, on a park bench whose paint was peeling off, under the shorn round crowns of the Tuileries. The music flowed through my body and I couldn’t tell the difference between the gentle gusts of wind and the melodies who were sliding into one another. The glowing sky was speckled white and the bright rays fought their way through the leaves matted by the exhaust fumes. I thought of the French girl with her rolling eyes, the one who showed me the songs that flooded me. (The playlist was called Angst, she didn’t speak a word of German, and yet I understood why she used this strange word to describe the music.) She had spoken to me when I was sitting on the ramp in front of the crowded Center Pompidue.
My heart was pounding, but it wasn’t her presence that was making me feel bizarre. It was the feeling of being surrounded by a crystalline dome and finally understanding what my existence was. The quiet madness clouded the answers that I could not express. I knew that something had happened in me here and now, that the sunlight which was soaking the Louvre and the Grand Palais in depth, the empty human shells that slowly turned into warm beings in conversation at the stuffy metro stations and the healing loneliness, had changed me.
I began to love a game whose I was. Like a yo-yo I was tossed back and forth between the intense passionate nights with strangers and my beloved solitude. Back then, I wanted all or nothing. First I cut myself off from my humanity and then I fell into an adventure of conversations and physical encounters.
I didn’t understand the love that danced up and down on screens or filled the lines in books. I didn’t love anyone in addiction. I was in love with life itself. In love with the girl who was reading at the traffic lights in front of the Opéra Garnier, in love with the old man who stared into the void of the city in Montmartre and in love with the naked never-ending nights in the vaulted white rooms of Paris.
Life would go on, I thought, nothing stops. And yet the idea of timelessness got me high. I thought I felt infinite perfection in these seconds.
I went on, ate pasta with too much cheese, and was excited about the evening. I didn’t know what she looked like anymore, only that she attracted me just as much as she repelled me.
In the metro I read Peter von Matt’s writing about poetry. An indescribable mixture of ecstatic madness, “fine frenzy” as Shakespeare described it, as well as the sober craft at the desk.
I thought of my own writing and realized that the former determined my creative world. Young as I was, I could only be driven by otherworldly forces. I wrote in a trance, so foggy and confused by the music, the drugs, the lights and my surroundings that I understood everything.
My human mind had to get lost and lost in order to understand the world beyond things.
That’s probably why my poetry wasn’t good. Too much frenzy, too little work.
But what should I work for when life was at my feet, scribbling up and down with my fingertips.
Sex, Techno & Girls.
As usual, a book was in my hands. I leaned against the cool gray wall in front of the park’s entrance. People buzzed around me like small, brightly colored dots.
Aline stood in front of me and laughed at me. She wasn’t particularly beautiful, instead she was real. I wanted to get to know real people. I was interested in the numbing feeling that hangs between the ropes of the big questions. I wanted to know who she was and what touched her. Different passions fascinated me. We were trapped in the void, there was no meaning and no hope, just us, the others and our restless minds. Many people floated through the salty sea like dead fish. On the surface they slowly slid back and forth until they dissolved and nourished others. But there were others too; Eels, sharks and turtles who dared to dive into the depths of the sea. They were all drawn by an indescribable driving force.
So what was behind Aline’s olive skin?
Sometimes I wondered if I really wanted to know, or if it was just a romanticization of the person in front of me.
We walked around undeterred, bought beer and sat on the lawn of the open-air cinema. I didn’t like beer, but it suited her.
We smoked cigarettes and raved about the dark techno clubs in Berlin. She loved Berlin as I adored Paris.
She had studied law but that was too cold for her. She was at a film school and made music. She ran her hand through her curls and talked about her indie band. She lived for music and couldn’t exist without her guitar. A dreamy artist in Paris. She had a lot of hair, on her arms, below, on her face, on her legs and above her lips. I didn’t like it.
Her big eyes looked at me uncertain and hopeful. Her family had come to France from Syria, her father was very conservative and knew nothing of her identity. Her mother wanted to keep it from the father. She fascinated me in the way modern, grotesque art fascinates you. She wasn’t sexy or pretty. But there was something special about her.
The film started but I was somewhere else. I wanted to kiss her, but the nervousness numbed me.
On movie screens, kisses are slow, you look each other in the eye and you wait.
But in real life everything is different and fast, you catch yourself and press your lips together.
I didn’t want to see her, just feel her. We went dancing and I was happy. The Techno Club looked like a concrete block from the outside, inside it looked like an old prison. Small metal cells in which people drank poison and smoked smoke. The hall itself was surrounded by bars. We were moving and everything seemed to rush with the beat.I’ve been to better techno clubs, but I was happy and free. Free in a grid cell.
The men stare at us. We hold our hands and they gaze at us, they take everything we have. They want to be with us and ask us disgusting things.
Jean is particularly respectful, he asserts that he is different. He says he supports us and is unobtrusive. He’s a friendly Frenchman, a Jean. He asks if we are together and we laugh. Aline goes, she wants to buy a beer. He comes closer to me, asks me if I only like women. I stay silent, signal a nervous yes. I am lying because I am already scared of him sexualising my identity. He tells me how attractive he finds me and that he wants to invite me. Everything in my body freezes, I feel uncomfortable and I want Aline to come back. He touches my legs and tells me how he would rape me, how he wants to fuck me straight.
Aline comes back and I pull her away. We dance for a bit and take an uber home. We climb the fence into the park where my building lies. She’s naked and I’m on top of her.The next morning I wake up, and tell her goodbye. But there is a tiny difference between “au revoir” and “adieu”. You can guess what I said.
