Lost in Space

As the current time zone starts to make more sense, as the pigeon-crapped-stench of Paris evaporates from the laundry, as the jet lag haze wane from my head, all that surface are the vestiges of a trip that looks increasingly non-sequitur by each day. “Vestiges” may actually be an overstatement. The images that Paris has left me are more akin to the precarious memories of aborted dreams, the ones that only last for a minute or two, but have somehow latched on to the consciousness like desperate landslide survivors holding on to fragile pieces of Earth.

This is how I remember my visit to Shakespeare and Company, the bookstore of my Linklater-spun fantasies. I know that I browsed its shelves for a considerable amount of time – on two separate occasions, even – but I seem to remember those visits as one singular fleeting dream. Or our lunch at the Café Des Deux Moulins, the setting of the movie that pulled me together during one of the darkest periods of my life; we took our time eating there and even ordered dessert, but my memory of it falls short. Or the many times I looked at the Eiffel Tower; from below, from the Seine river, from the grass of Champ de Mars. The images stuck in my mind are no more concrete and substantial than those who have only seen it from books and magazines.

I do not think I am being melodramatic or sentimental. I am, however, being truthful. Sensations are bound to be ephemeral when experienced during “visits”. One does not visit a place and establish existence there; your life still springs back to the axis of your origin. It is easy to paint the axis of my existence – Quezon City, mainly, but Manila in general – as disappointing and prosaic in comparison, but I doubt that I wouldn’t be pining for another city had I been born a Parisian. However, the spatial parameters of my life have been set this way. Quezon City is the place of my humid, pollution-drenched waking world; my domain of comfort, where I continue to come to work everyday and disappoint myself. Paris, on the other hand, has always been the place of my most beloved dreams and fiction; the city of Sartre and Camus, the city where Jesse and Celine reunite, where Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s dainty alternate universe exists.

For an entire week, Paris became the place of my waking world. Suddenly the cramped nooks of Shakespeare and Company, the oblique banks of the river Seine, the glimmering lights of the Eiffel Tower were shoved into my prosaic reality. It was jarring. It was exhilarating.

My senses are not equipped to digest all of these in a six-day span, then somehow crystallize them into one hardened reality; none of ours are, I presume. I remember entertaining wild, unreasonable thoughts in my head on the plane back to Manila, of somehow finding work in Paris and living there. I wondered what it would feel like to walk its quiet streets leisurely, not having an itinerary to care about, just soaking in every bit of otherness the city possessed. I wondered if, then, my existence can somehow be refashioned; or at least its coordinates re-oriented. I wondered how a “renewed spirit” could possibly feel like.

Then, I wondered how long it would last.

I did this for hours on end because I couldn’t sleep on the plane. It has taken me a couple of days, but now my biological time settings are back to normal. I have returned home to my axis. And Paris has returned home to my dreams.