2023

I/Your going back to the future. New year in the sky.

This was a Facebook message I got from my Dad on December 31st as I was waiting for my flight from Buffalo to Dulles. (I always make it a point to text loved ones before I take off, as a show of courtesy to my existential anxiety.)

Four hours beforehand, my life had changed decisively, unexpectedly, and over the phone, although my father didn’t know that.

My Mom held my hand as we pulled into the airport. We’d just spent the entire week inside the house together during one of the worst blizzards in Buffalo’s history. It’s hard to describe a natural disaster, but to paraphrase Langston Hughes, birthing is mean. For days on end, nothing existed outside the townhouse, just alternating sheets of black or white, and a constant terrible low hum that made the walls vibrate and drowned out the TV. I spent most of the time alone in my room, going through old teenage writing, waiting for a sign or at least a text message. On Christmas Day, the storm suddenly stopped, and the sun came out. You could see grass on the parkway as we drove to the airport.

I called the next-closest confidant, a friend in LA, from the single terminal of the Buffalo-Niagara Decidedly Not International Airport. “What do I do now?” I remember asking her. There’s really only one answer to that question, and my father gave it to me. I don’t remember a lot about the flight from Dulles to Roissy but I do remember asking the stewardess for a white wine top off, winking like a woman in a movie, “Because I’m on my way home to get divorced.” (1)

I never said I wasn’t going to enjoy it.

Introduction

Every time things go south here, I turn back to the romantic. Often, we make an intellectual distinction between the romantic and the real. This story takes place in one of the few cultures in which they don’t, and so I would come to realize after eight years of asking myself whether the life I was living in France was my “real life” that the question had been misplaced the entire time. The memory of being drunk on white wine and brokenhearted on a flight to Paris carries enough narrative panache to make a romantic story, and unfortunately, all the embarrassment of the very real. 

But in the tradition of the 30 under 30 genre, the purpose of this piece is to celebrate the personal success of the relatively youthful. And spending the past 8 years asking myself whether the life I was living was “real” or not is without doubt a success. Everytime things go south here, and they do, I also start running the numbers on plane tickets. That there was once a months-long period during my time here that I didn’t know where my passport was seems now unimaginable. What a privilege, after all, to design a life with a built-in escape hatch. To separate want and need in such a fundamental way. All of it could be thrown away at any moment, and isn’t that delta precisely where luxury sits?

Now that so many years have passed, and the dust has settled, my family has come to acknowledge this duality as our shared reality. In 2009, when my mother first sent two and a half daughters (foreign exchange student) to the other side of the world on a trip to Paris, I don’t think she imagined that in 2023 she’d be leaving one here, writing genre-pastiche personal essays about turning 30. Or another one back and forth to Zurich twice a year, or herself in Paris and Europe whenever she pleased, all of us having our own personal geographies of memory mapping the landscape.

Who are we all, and how did we find ourselves at this common destiny? It would be tempting to say that we’d opened a Pandora’s Box as a family with that first trip but in fact the roots are much deeper, and they lie in the most fundamental aspects of our personalities as we’d shaped them through and against each other over the past 30 years of familial relationship.

I can’t speak for them, so I’ll speak for myself. The first ingredient is a perpetual dissatisfaction which can be described as either ambition or tenacity or entitlement, depending on which way you turn it. Perhaps this is the root of the initial question itself: some nagging sense that I was living a life that was superfluous, undeserved. Luxury as waste. The second ingredient, however, is an unflagging commitment to pursuit of the romantic for its own sake. Luxury as artistry.

II/In Rome

On New Year’s Day, I went out for a walk. I sat for a long, long time on my favorite banister in a tucked away corner of Montmartre. (The worst things that have ever happened to me are still pretty good.) I tried to figure out what the next step in the rest of my life would be, now that I’d checked off going outside.

When I got home, I got an unexpected text from Pepper, the person I think about when I look at the ocean. We never speak, we just find each other every once in a while. And I don’t necessarily believe in signs, but when I was sitting on that banister, I was sure I could smell spring in the air.

“Come see me,” I remember telling her, and she did. 

I’d spent the past eight years walking through Departures gates, an experience I’d always relished for a sensation of freedom. It turns out there’s also something very nice about waiting at Arrivals. Pepper’s landing in my world forced me to hold a mirror up to my current state of affairs and find that they weren’t so terrible. Further, it was evidence that this was all real, a life someone could just show up in by getting on a plane. 

Thus early March, sitting together at midnight in opposite trees under the Colosseum. Love Among the Ruins. Rome is a city that embraces decay. All of the rotting and crumbling parts both exist with and inform the new and growing parts, a sort of actor-network theory of mind. Here, the real cannot exist without the romantic. Every single person that I had ever been flattened and converged. Everything that had ever happened to me brought me there, to sit in a tree and stare at the moon.

 Zoom: A brief overview of formative experiences that should be considered in this analysis

A. In the beginning, there were Sloane and Pepper. They were born at a party in Bushwick in 2013. We were walking towards a bar when some Parsons kids yelled over from a row house porch. We stood together on the roof and looked cool and aloof so we didn’t have to talk to anyone. “Let’s be Sloane and Pepper,” was a moment of shared vulnerability that would mark us both permanently - and literally, with tattoos, some years later. At first, Sloane existed adjacently to me. I was her shadow self; I eventually absorbed her. Sloane and Pepper! May they live for one thousand years!

B. In 2014, I took a solo trip across Europe for the summer. The first delusion took place on a jolty TER, crossing salt flats between Narbonne and Carcassonne. I’m eating the very first jambon-beurre of my life. I feel a satisfying sense of complete self-sufficiency, which I conflate with a sense of personal freedom that I had been chasing my entire life until that point. Then, driving past midnight through the empty fields between Milan and Lake Como. In Paris, I’d fallen in love with a French man, and here he is in Italy. “I want to spend my life with a girl like you,” says the radio, and I think that I will spend the rest of my life trying to maintain this happiness, no matter what it costs.

C. 2016 - 2019, rue d’Alésia, avenue Claude Vellefaux. For a few years in my twenties, I spent a lot of time trying to play a character. Every time I acknowledge my visible malaise during those years, everyone always assumes I mean “closeted” or “pretending to be heterosexual” but that wasn’t it. I could no more have allowed myself to be homosexual than I could have allowed myself to live differently. In fact, I was living a life that I did not feel I deserved. I’ve kept myself from those days, but the character is gone. I barely remember her, so don’t ask me about it. Sometimes I see her at the grocery store, and I duck into another aisle, so I don’t have to talk to her.

D. March 2019. I got mugged once, coming home from a party. I stopped to fumble with my headphones near Gare du Nord and some teenage boy saw an opportunity. He punched me in the face and grabbed the strap of my purse, and when I fought back, he shoved me to the ground and ran, breaking my tailbone in the process. When the police dropped me off at home, I walked past my boyfriend and went into my room and closed the door. I took pictures of myself throwing peace signs in the mirror with blood splattered all over my white t-shirt. I felt brave and proud, like a boxer. The primal scream of pushing myself back off the side of the van: I became a different person after that. Birthing is a violent act.

E. September 2019. The first time I ever kissed a woman with purposeful, romantic intent, I still had a boyfriend. I left him hungover and asleep and slipped out on a Saturday morning to meet her coming off a train outside of Gare de l’Est. It felt like 100 degrees that day and her upper lip was sweaty. I can still remember how it tasted; I saw fireworks.

F. In November 2019, I’m on a date with a woman ten years my senior. We’ve just closed Le Coq in the Marais and now we’re at Le Pied du Cochon. She orders a bottle of champagne, pig’s feet, foie gras, oysters. She asks me if I’ll come home to her apartment, rue St. André des arts. I have an apartment so small the shower sets off the smoke alarm. She has a bathtub. In December we’ll spend a week watching her friend’s apartment rue St Croix de la bretonnerie, the one with a collection of Caesars. She’ll order down to Eataly for every meal. I crossed a threshold that night. Everyone thinks I’m lost, at rock bottom, wasting my life. I’m standing on top of a mountain in the bathroom of a Chatelet restaurant.

G. Sometimes, the apocalypse works out in our favor. In Summer 2020, we’re more-or-less living together in that bright studio, rue Marcadet. The entire structure of our lives has just been erased, and I spend most of my days at home writing while you start going back into the office. One night we’re watching a thunderstorm over the Sacré Coeur when we hear a chorus of female voices chanting hymns from somewhere we can’t place, carried by the wind. Every night we eat well and hang out with your cat and fall asleep clinging to each other. I’d forgotten until just now how the whole world was being reborn, back then, and why I’d remade it in your image.

H. (1) Marriage? Yes. That part is very real: we spent three years and six months to the day bound together by the administrative and financial structure of lawfully-wedded wifedom. Was it romantic? Dykes are practical people. bell hooks, love as a verb, etc. What else do you call a love like that?




((2) Foreshadowing: in one of the wedding photos, someone walks in front of us with a Pizza Hut box.)

I. The Springs of 2021 and 2022 I refer to as the Vivaldi years, after the Gerald Stern poem. For two years in a row, I spent hours staring out the window into the garden. I knew all the cats; I knew the bells of the Sacré Coeur. Everything was bathed in a soft purple light. This was the realest my life had ever felt. You can understand that I was in Eden, then. “Giving myself up to poetry, the everlasting life, the true world without end.”

J. On the night everything began to fall apart, I looked over at the shoe rack and realized for the first time that I’d been living a life in which someone else lovingly, neatly re-laced all my shoes. I broke down: no one would ever love me like that again. It wasn’t until many months later that I would realize that this was a good thing. Too much happiness can become a tomb.

Continued: 

III/Fertility

I spent January running the errands necessary to keep things afloat. One of them was a visit to a doctor’s office on the rue Saint Honoré, chosen because I worked constantly, and he was the only specialist I could find with Saturday appointments. 

This was good foresight on my part, because I ended up waiting for about three hours. The waiting room was small enough to force eye-contact with the other patients. Two couples, excited and making nervous jokes. A woman alone, reading to a little boy while rocking a stroller. Another woman alone, very angrily grading a stack of papers. A girl who looked younger than me. 

I felt like everyone was staring at me, like a punished teenager. I pouted, I sighed heavily, I put my combat boots on the chair, I didn't take off my hood.

On the wall, there was an oil painting of a clown (?) selling ice cream (?) in the woods (?). The two round metal scoops looked like breasts. It still upsets me to think about it to this day.

When the doctor finally called me in, he told me he only took IVF patients on Saturdays. I realized, for the first time, that this is a fertility clinic. I was dealing with a man who primarily operates in the business of growing life.

Ironically, I was also pretty preoccupied with keeping something fragile alive (myself). 

Unfortunately, we were there to discuss baby’s first brush with decay. It looks like I’ve planted the wrong seed. They said it had likely been there for years. Interesting to note that this wasn't punishment for any recent sins. I wondered if he’d hang a picture of it on the window next to all the sets of multiples. “I’m not even 30 yet,” I remember telling him indignantly. He shut the door very tightly and lowered his voice, and from then on I’d follow his lead and tend to all my wounds in private.

IV/Flight

I had surgery in early April. I spent most of the month bleeding heavily.

Before they wheeled me in, I made friends with a girl a few years younger than me. Jail rules apply in pre-op: neither of us would say what we were in for. When I woke up, the same girl was next to me in recovery. We made eye contact and laughed, both relieved to see each other on the other side. You could see the seeds of the rebirth: six months before I would not have been the type to make a new friend during an operation. 

The anesthesiologist was also younger than me. He held my hand and set his phone next to my ear. I requested Washed Out’s Paracosm album, which is what I listen to during take-off when I fly.

The official recommendation for this kind of intervention is to return to work the next day. Having had surgery on the Thursday before Easter Weekend, I asked for two days. 

This ended up being a wise move because medical best practices had neither accounted for complications nor exactly how long and uncomfortable my recovery would be. But I had to keep moving forward, so I just did everything while bleeding. I went on dates bleeding, I went to work bleeding, I was not allowed to run or swim so I walked aimlessly for miles around Paris, bleeding.

I didn’t know the full extent of what had been taken from me until I got the compte-rendu in the mail on the last day of the month. A list of things that were lost in April: three centimeters from my cervix, another aunt, most of the furniture in the apartment, about 8 pounds, custody of the cat.

V/New Moon in Aries

Wait, let’s be clear - I’ve never been one to waste a good crisis. In the middle of all of this, things were getting very good. I had short blonde hair, a six pack from swimming, and I was having an absurd amount of fun. 

On the Tuesday of the last couples therapy appointment, I walked two streets towards home before changing my mind. I texted a woman I’d been talking to and asked her to meet me at a bar in a half hour. I kissed her, ate a pork bun on the street for dinner, and got home at 2 in the morning. I let older lesbians tell me not to be afraid. I never slept over. I journaled. I called my mother. At work, I’d found the freedom to operate with creative purpose. My projects were exciting. I was a new person every time I walked into a room. 

VI/Blood Red Summer

The summer began in early June, both because the heat came in and because I kicked it off abruptly by pulling an emergency break on the frenetic rhythm of springtime office life in France. I took a few days off of work because I was suffering from a yet-unnamed affliction in which I constantly felt like I was about to pass out.

I sought medical attention but the problem evaded diagnosis. I'd eventually find a solution by chalking it up to something between panic attacks and blood sugar problems. Until then, I spent most of the early summer very seriously concerned that I was about to die. That first day off of work, I sat in a café and found myself writing the Introduction (above) on my phone. 

Considerations on the romantic and the real: I had become a dying woman in a Victorian novel. It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. I privately called those the Grey Gardens days because I was living in a very beautiful and very empty apartment that I could no longer afford. I owned two houseplants and subsisted mostly on arugula salads and frozen cordon bleu patties. In addition to feeling like I was going to disappear, I also suspected that my material surroundings would be gone at any moment.

The upshot to this situation was that, having resigned myself to the idea that everything about my life was temporary at best and absolutely meaningless at even better, I began to really enjoy myself. I’d spend nights lying on the living room floor, wrapped in a blanket, smoking clove cigarettes out the window and listening to Air’s Moon Safari album on repeat. I wrote poetry; I had very good sex. Most importantly, I became assertive and decisive in a way that comes with the realization that you are going to have to hunt to survive.

In late August I went to Japan. By the time I got there, I had more or less accepted that my problem was not imminent demise but debilitating anxiety which, unlike death, can be managed with medication. 

I spent most of my time in Tokyo walking. I would walk for hours across the city to some museum, some point on the map, see it, and then set off towards the next one. I filled every one of those days, fueling up on protein milk from 7/11 like an obsessive athlete. I woke up jet-lagged at four in the morning and went out dancing. I sat at a pond outside a temple and cried. I’d arrived thinking I’d be wearing the same cosmopolitan city mask I did in Paris, but ended up looking like a sweaty, scruffy backpacker. 

One day, towards the end, I went to Mount Takao, which is an hour outside Tokyo. It still made me nervous to be outside of the city. (For repatriation reasons, in case I died.) I rode Japan’s steepest funicular up the mountain. When I got off, I stopped to buy a pin and a cookie from the souvenir stand. From there, you had to go up another hill, pass a very disappointing monkey sanctuary, and then climb a long set of stairs to the temple at the top. I sat there in the temple clearing at the top of Mount Takao. I looked down at Tokyo and thought, “This is it, I did it. All by myself. I finally walked all the way to the other side of the entire planet.”

Then I turned around, went to an onsen, sat in the hot spring, and ordered gyoza and a cold beer before taking the train back to my hotel.

VII/I have been the same person my entire life

“Dear jurnal, I know I’m a bright girl and all, and I’m the kid in the class that’s been to Disney World, but it seems so sad. My lifes a big negitive!”

VIII/Let’s see, what have I got?

I am, if nothing else, an informed consumer. And as a consumer, I am a scholar of Russell Belk. Back in 1988, a date I have memorized, Belk wrote a text called “The Extended Self” that would lay the groundwork for Consumer Culture Theory studies, or CCT - the branch of sociology in which I once began a PhD. Belk argues that the nouns that surround us - people, places, and especially things - become foundational bricks in our understanding of our very selves. In his opening arguments, Belk references Sartre’s having, being, and doing - the tendency to conflate what is mine with what is me. 

No one arrives at their scholarship by accident. I’ve been doing this my entire life. I tend to fall in love with people I’d like to collect. (Venus in Gemini). There was an important gap in my sense of self, and I tried to fill it with erotic lesbian Japanese photography books, a vintage Givenchy windbreaker, German art posters purchased at auction, a photograph of my great-great grandfather, a 90’s IKEA couch from le bon coin, pictures from trips to Istanbul, London, New York, Tokyo, and Rome, a new girlfriend who referred to herself as model-adjacent, a new job, a new life. With the right moves, you can collage your way into a perfectly functional assemblage of the self. Praxis!

IX/Is that all there is to the Circus/How will you live now?

Perhaps the most significant difference between the romantic and the real is the tidiness of the resolution. 

Starting in October or November, things began to settle into a rhythm that made me feel both excited and twitchy. I would get up early and walk to work in the sun. I got invited to important events and confidently shook all the right hands. I was dating someone who felt like a very close friend, with whom I would leave parties early to order Pizza Hut (2) and watch bad movies. I went across the street to get Korean food for lunch everyday. I planned a trip to Korea.

One day on the way to work I found myself enjoying a song that had torn me open in the early days of January. I was disappointed, angry even, to find that the emotional intensity gone so quickly. I spent a lot of time that winter charging at windmills, trying to impress people that weren’t looking and winning imaginary arguments in my head. I was constantly discovering sharp new contours and edges of my personality that I didn’t know how to file down yet: pride became self-importance, ambition became ruthless competitiveness, comfort became restless boredom.

I went home for Christmas. There was no snow that year. Going home marked my survival: I had done all of the things I knew I would have to do when I let go of my mother’s hand and got on a plane a year before. 

I returned to Paris at the New Year but didn’t find the easy glide of new January. My windows were covered in scaffolding and my apartment was dark. I came down with a cold that didn’t go away until I got my wisdom teeth out in February. The roof leaked. It felt like the person I was dating and I were in two different relationships. I was lonely and we fought.

In March, I went to Texas on a work trip. Considerations on the romantic and the real: this was the first time my French and American selves would be one and the same. I told my story again and again and was surprised to find the narrative so cohesive. On the first leg back, I sat next to someone famous who complimented my hair, told me how cool I was, what a life, what a job, I’ll look you up when I’m in Paris and we’ll do drinks next time you’re in New York.

When I got to the lounge in Atlanta, I realized I’d lost my mother’s childhood bracelet somewhere over the course of that conversation. (-1 self-extension, Belk 1988). To cite Joan Didion, whose influence here cannot be overstated: it is all real, and it all costs something. 

VI/On Luxury

I began this piece a year and a half ago with a metaphor about luxury. At the time, I used luxury as a stand-in for success. By all accounts, I was really not all that successful: I was 29. I was completely stuck in my job. I had no furniture, and I was about to lose my apartment. I was constantly faint and had no idea why. There would be no "30 under 30" articles written about me. Yet there I was on a Thursday afternoon, sitting in the sun at a café on the Boulevard Saint-Germain. That sense of absolute freedom made me so happy that I used the word "luxury" to describe the undeniable privilege of living a life structured by choice. If it wasn't good, at least it was interesting. I was enjoying the experience. 

Luxury is what I do. It's my career, my craft, and my calling. I'm often asked why that is. I have a variety of stock answers. All of them are true, depending on the context of the question. For example: it's a fast growing industry, predicted to reach 400B revenue by 2030. As a one-time scholar of the sociology of objects, I'm fascinated by craftsmanship and the nobility of perfection. And I'm attracted to prestige, I always have been. I love excitement and drama. I find it interesting, and my brain is built in a way that makes it hard for me to do things that I don't find interesting.

This brings us back to the Introduction. Can you call something a success if it's not a choice?

Suppose you interviewed my mother for some "30 under 30" piece. My mother is great. She's very proud of me. She'd probably tell you that I owe my success to tenacity. ('Everything I've ever let go of has claw marks on it.') Then she'd tell you the Freezie Pop story.  Once, when I was three or four, we got locked into an argument over several hours because I refused to exist in a world where we were out of green Freezie Pops. This is very common pre-school behavior. She still brings it up all the time. Apparently, I haven't changed. According to her, the great challenge of my life is the reconciliation of that tenacity with the acceptance of the conditions of material reality. Therein lies my weakness and my strength.

Mother, I would counter it this way: I owe my success to the fact that I've spent my entire life operating in a frequency in which eating a green Freezie Pop is conditional to my very survival. I will stop at nothing to get it, and once I have it, I will want another one. Extend the metaphor as you will.

My greatest desire has always been to see what's behind the uncut hair of the willows. "Something so marvelous and dangerous that if you crawled through and saw you would die, or be happy forever." I've spent my entire life looking for the hidden door, the magic book, the incantation. 

When I was a kid, I used to narrate my life in the past tense. ("I woke up to the sound of my alarm, still tired from the night before.") I mostly stopped in my teens, but this led to a semi-compulsive need to a build a life with narrative structure. I began to look at objects as costumes, props, and material archives. Things didn't have to be beautiful, but they did have to be meaningful. I wanted to live a romantic life. 

As an adult, this kind of constant reframing - straddling a position between the recent past and unfolding future - would allow me to actively construct my life in a way that was both malleable and material. This was both the route and the destination. 

Can you see now how I followed a plot line to the other side planet, stayed for 10 years, and ended up making a living on the trade of telling stories about objects? How I did this despite myself, and often to my own detriment, and at the greatest emotional cost? "He had signed nothing, vowed nothing, not even to himself. Why, believing as he did, that all human obduracy was susceptible to common sense, was he unable to turn back?

Everything costs something. Luxury is the pursuit of craft for its own sake, even to its very end.

Considerations on the romantic and the real. I was expelled from Eden and landed on the Boulevard Saint-Germain. I had to rebuild myself from the ground up. To get where I was going, I'd have to learn to carry all the selves I'd discarded on the way. Sloane, and the phantom I see on the Avenue Claude Vellefaux, and the person sobbing at the bottom of the stairs. All the decay would have to be part of the tableau, all the broken furniture, an actor-network understanding of self. This would be my masterpiece, my greatest act of artistry.

I was already enjoying it. One day, it would all be funny. 

Epilogue: Horse Funeral 

Recently, I attended a funeral. Everyday on my way to work, I cut in front of the Bourse de commerce (the worst things that have ever happened to me are still pretty good.) Since the Bourse de commerce opened a few years ago, there has been a silver horse statue in front of the building. The effect was very realistic: it looked like one of those street performers who paints themselves silver and stands outside tourist traps. I assume people often tried to mount it. You kept waiting for it to move. 

For weeks, I had been making a wide loop through the plaza to accommodate the metal gates that had been put up around the horse, which I now realized were in preparation for its removal. I arrived to find a crane, an open truck, and a small crowd of people gathered in the middle of the plaza. At the center of it all was the horse, suspended in the air, covered head to tail in a black shroud. They’d covered its eyes with thick blinders, but not its mouth: it might have cried out. We all stopped and stared up at it. It swayed gently.

It was 9:25 AM and the sun lit from behind the building at a soft angle. For several long minutes we all stood there, looking at the horse. Me, the guy operating the crane, and the one with the clipboard. Two security guards, a caterer walking to the side of the building, and a handful of people also on their way into nearby offices. We all stared at a beast that could not stare back, blinded and vulnerable in its suspension. A few of us took pictures. It wasn’t curiosity, it was reverence. That morning in late May, we watched a statue transform into a monument. We are gathered here today. 

Considerations on the romantic and the real: I was barely on time for a meeting that morning because I was participating in a horse funeral. Every day there are things that begin, and every day there are things that end. This is the price you pay for a romantic life - it’s all real, and you agree to feel all of that. No grand gesture goes unpunished. 

I walked into work that day a triumph. What an accomplishment to witness such a thing, after all, and at just 30.