paris feels like sugar to me now.

like sugar. and like glitter. and i don't really know why. and it's a little disconcerting. it's like the last 6 months have been crystallized in my memory, it gets less real every minute, and more real at the same time? i wonder where this ends.

i was thinking yesterday. surprise, surprise. but really, i was thinking about me, and the people i know here, and the people i know from paris, and my family, and my friends in isla vista, and my high school friends. and i was thinking that i'll be going home in a few months, like really home, in a way i haven't maybe ever.

i haven't gone back to california with no solid plans to leave in a long time. when i go home it will have been almost a year that i've been "exploring", in DC and paris and here and everywhere else. and i was thinking that maybe now i understand how it was for my friends in paris, who were really going home last december, when i was going-on-vacation-from-living-outside-the-states. it's a strange feeling. and it interests me that there are people here like me, who all of us are going to come back. and it's different than paris, because i want to go back to paris. i wanted to. and in paris, when we talked about coming back , it was that we wanted to. together. to see it again, in a different time and place. but here, we dont want to; we are going to come back. maybe that has something to do with jordan itself, as a place? as a choice of places to go? i mean far fewer people go to jordan just because they felt like it, really. you go because you have to. we came because... well, we just did. we study arabic because... well, we just do. we're coming back, we're living here because... because we just are. we just will. we are what we are.

and it strikes me that we live in strange ways.

i was thinking yesterday that i miss people, and places, and all the etceteras, differently than i used to. differently. 

and what strikes me are the emotional paradigms i’m getting myself into, the patterns i’ve established already. to miss someone is unpleasant; to miss a whole other way of life is worse, and maybe the hardest is to miss another time, when life was different and you were different. and i am setting myself up for all of them.

i was thinking about my friends from paris the other day at hollywood cafe. i think i might miss them most being here, because they’re the first ones i ever lived our of the states with.
and stumbling around familiar streets we don’t know the names of, hearing everyone around us speak in a language we don’t understand, blowing off studying to go for a walk because seriously we didn’t come halfway across the world to sit in our apartments, all of it feels a little different without them. it would be like going on a wagon train re-enactment without my mom or fighting over a nintendo with someone other than my brother—it just doesn’t make sense to me.

and i had a particular moment- of wow i miss them. and wow i miss paris. god i should go back to paris sometime—and then it hit me like a brick-filled piano that i never will. i can’t. i mean, i can physically go to the capital of france, but that’s not paris to me. paris is late-night aepp dinners, and tiny parisian alleys where no one ever goes, and too much nutella, and being able to sit on the grass and watch the eiffel tower glow blue without feeling like a tourist. and disgusting sausages, and writing poetry on the seine, and wishing that cameras could see notre dame like i could, and chris brown, and impromptu dance parties, and the jonas brothers, and swiss chocolate, and long, long talks long after everyone else had gone to bed about the universe, and us, and blurry lines, usually induced by readings due tuesday for gerard. and american music trivia, and go-go dancers, and matthew mcconaghuey, and thinking monet’s garden was the most beautiful thing i’d ever seen until i saw his paintings. and the trees that line the boulevard on the seine river, and never taking the metro if we could help it, and the bastille in the morning, and chicken nuggets, and the lights on the champs elysees, christmas or not, and our stupid gray phones, and dr. scott blair, and getting my wallet stolen, and my ipod stolen, and my passport stolen, and never giving a shit about any of it. and the longest 10-minute walk of my life, every day from hotel de ville to class, past all the shops where no one is allowed to buy anything and sunglasses come in packs of 250. and paris is goodnight upstairs, goodnight downstairs, and watching certain adorable someones fall asleep in line for her favorite ride at disneyland, and american boy, and never having any idea if the franprix was open because it was tuesday and for some reason this caused confusion. and wearing dresses with boots, and long island ice teas, and la duree, and the ferris wheel, and the louvre once a week, and thinking 4 euro for a coke is normal, and hot chocolate that really is to die for. and the crepe guy who taught me how to say “cherry,” and watching our french teacher “pretend to” hit on the only boy in the class, and other boys with similar names peeing on our floor, and wandering the marais late at night looking for a bar just like the 3 we just deemed unsatisfactory, and chocolate eclaires, and arbor day, and red wine, and white wine, and no such thing as bad wine. and hide and seek on the grounds of that gorgeous chateau, and ghost stories in the field, and thinking we heard iris laughing in the woods (which is still really creepy), and life without furniture, and that adorable little old man in the shop next to aepp. and patrick’s (“good morning”), and “ill trust the OED as far as i can throw it/him/Him”, and bad chinese food when the kitchen was locked, and pouring our hearts into a thanksgiving dinner, which was worth it after watching french kids eat leftover stuffing on november 28th. and living an hour ahead, and starbucks and love letters to make it through our 3 hour fashion lectures, and sock races in the hallways, and spanish parties, and musee d’orsay, and a massive comprehensive overview of marxist/anarchist ideology in lenin’s era, and watching the sun flood like a thousand tiny flashlights through paris clouds, and feeling unexpected tears on my cheeks when barack obama made a speech at 6:30 am. and paris is sangria, and sneaking up and down the stairs of aepp without the guard ever noticing our friends, and staying up all night every monday because we had reading to do, but we just couldn’t miss american music trivia. and walking around hazy and delirious in normandy unable to speak we were so full of everything, and then laughing when an a cappella group appeared and sang “lean on me”- could life be more perfect? and paris is everything i own in a pile, and postcards of a fat man in a flower hat, and faidherbe-chaligny, and the american chip we only took 3 weeks to get off our shoulder, and the luxembourg gardens in fall, and spinning outside at midnight catching tiny snowflakes. and dreaming of freebirds, and griping about parisians, and pajama parties, and daisy asking people on the metro 2 inches from her face if they could understand us- because we were talking about candy underwear. and paris is all the ridiculous dances and hand motions that i now am compelled to do, and all the words no one here understands because they’re either french or just abbreviated to the point of ridiculous, and the fact that my brain still giggles to itself when i think of never d’accord alone.

paris was a perfect storm, of all the people who happened to be there when i was there, who i now love more than life, and of all the things that happened while we were there, and of all the things i needed, all the things i got, and all the things i hated, and all the new things i loved and lived and became while i was there.

you can’t ever go back to that.

and it struck me yesterday that i miss paris, as i had paris, and that that place doesn’t exist anymore except in us. and it is strange to me that i will miss, for a long, long time, a place i’ll never ever see again the way i saw it then. and here i am, again, doing the same thing. jordan to me is heart-shaped cookies, and massive amounts of irony, and scraping dead sea mud off my boots with a butter knife, and trying to catch my breath at the top of the stairs of doom. it’s beautiful. and i will miss amman when i leave, and it will become exaggerated and crystallized in my memory the way paris is, and i’ll realize later on that i love amman because of what i loved in amman, because of what i was in amman. i’m setting myself up to fall in love with lives that i know will only last a little while, and to feel both a little emptier and a little fuller later because i have to live without them. i don’t know if people usually do this on purpose. maybe this is normal. maybe it’s not. but i’ve been thinking about it.

like i said, we live in strange ways.