"I am an insane woman for whom houses wink and open their bellies. Significance stares at me from
everywhere, like a gigantic underlying ghostliness. Significance emerges out of dank alleys and sombre faces,
leans out of the windows of strange houses. I am constantly reconstructing a pattern of something forever lost
and which I cannot forget. I catch the odors of the past on street corners and I am aware of the men who will
be born tomorrow. Behind windows there are either enemies or worshipers. Never neutrality or passivity.
Always intention and premeditation. Even stones have for me druidical expressions.

I walk ahead of myself in perpetual expectancy of miracles."
Anais Nin, House of Incest

Paris affects me strangely when he isn't here; it reaches out and invades my body, the strangeness of Paris,almost palpable. Takes over my legs as sure as it takes over my mind and directs it towards whimsy. As if love were a barrier against life ecstasies, a terrifying conclusion that merits further examination, eradication. There should be flow between both, always flow. Walking ahead in this city which asserts itself in parlours, cafes, living rooms. I have several things to wash away in this rain. I am not sure how, or why, but I lost the levity in my life some time ago. I had to work so hard to survive this new reality, make it mine, that everything else but raw vital energy was discarded. I lost a considerable amount. I became a slave to sentimentality. To loving a man and resigning myself to womb statuses. I fell asleep. And I'm in the process of trying to reconcile my core, marrow, marrow, locus, with what happened in the meantime, to take over again. While dodging autocratic egos. Also leaving behind the importance of outside perception or recognition for time being. I am only I in creation. Le rêve éveillé. Adjustment periods. Efficiency as a means to enjoy action, movement, progress.

Exciting Paris nights! I love this city with such a strength, it overwhelms me at times. When I came here two years ago, with no designs on Europe to speak of, it did not shock me, strike me, impress me beyond it's deviation from what I knew. I was relatively unimpressed until the night, New Years Eve, where I got separated from my friends at the Eiffel Tower and wound up in a seated collapse in a cold, unlit Parisian alley. Dressed in evening clothes without a coat, freezing to death. I remember looking up at the greyness, that strange opaque sky specific to this city, laughing and smiling, thinking "Paris, you SOB. Beautifully egotistical inacessible city." It got my attention, loud and clear, issuing a challenge. I took it then and there. It is a city for pain, beauty, destruction and reconconstruction, a human city. Humane. Kicks my ass most days, but when I need it most, warm, round, comforting. I believe at the end of my life, I will look back and feel Parisian, having lived most of my life here, and feel that it chose me, and not vice versa.