heart like a four-poster bed. heart like a canvas.

leaving is not enough; you must
stay gone. train your heart
like a dog. change the locks
even on the house he’s never
visited. you lucky, lucky girl.
you have an apartment
just your size. a bathtub
full of tea. a heart the size
of arizona, but not nearly
so arid. don’t wish away
your cracked past, your
crooked toes, your problems
are papier mache puppets
you made or bought because the vendor
at the market was so compelling you just
had to have them. you had to have him.
and you did. and now you pull down
the bridge between your houses,
you make him call before
he visits, you take a lover
for granted, you take
a lover who looks at you
like maybe you are magic. make
the first bottle you consume
in this place a relic. place it
on whatever altar you fashion
with a knife and five cranberries.
don’t lose too much weight.
stupid girls are always trying
to disappear as revenge. and you
are not stupid. you loved a man
with more hands than a parade
of beggars, and here you stand. heart
like a four-poster bed. heart like a canvas.
heart leaking something so strong
they can smell it in the street.


-marty mcconnel


i apologize for my absence. blogging has been pushed to the back burner. my weeks are beautiful, busy, but uninteresting: weekly posts seem redundant as i have settled into an immensely enjoyable routine that is fun to live but not so fun to read. my life is surrounded by beauty, i am shocked by how much beauty i see every day. my french is not progressing, while my english is regressing. i am having trouble remembering whether i am thinking in french or in english, i switch back and forth between french and english without realizing it. short phrases are now second nature, whereas long phrases are impossible to form correctly.i am enjoying my life completely, looking forward to the promises of spring and a few upcoming trips and visits. i am still trying to find my yellow bird, although the 101 in 1001 is seeming less and less important as the days go on. my father has lost his job, my mother has stopped her chemo, my sister is raising a child about to start crawling and walking, life in america goes on as it always has but i feel more and more distant and disconnected with each passing day. now i have an added necessity, beyond the need to find something to live for: to come to terms with new feelings and emotions that have arisen in the past six months. it has been six months since i left america, boarded that plane, and took my first steps onto non-american soil. there are times when i barely recognize myself, it is almost impossible to equate the anna i was with the anna i have become. even my name has changed, taken on a new pronunciation. the french have no idea where to put the emphasis on my name. what was ANna in the states, is anNA in france.


the problem with being in a different country, immersed in another culture, is how easy it is to generalize, compare, and despise. i noticed this trend in london. of the large group of americans living in nido, a few of them compared england to everything they had back in america and found england completely lacking. they would allow chance encounters and personal fear to taint their view of an entire country and culture they knew very little about.


i'm finding that in france, with the language barrier, the pull of that tendency is much stronger and harder to resist because it is easier to just give in to the hate than accept the differences. acceptance takes work, and thought, while requiring you to give up a little part of yourself in compromise. in london, it was only a few people who gave in to the generalizations. but, in france, the number has tripled. my roommate in london hated london, but loved the cities she visited. it is much easier to fall in love with a place when you see it through a tourist's eyes. it is very hard to love a place you live, where you don't understand the culture and are assaulted with it every day. but my roommate was the only one in my london group of friends who didnt like london. france is different.


as i type this, i am sat in a room with my two closest friends here and a guest. i am the only one of us who loves, or even likes, paris. my roommate despises it, loathes it entirely. she has a few days where she enjoys being in paris, but for the most part, she cant stand it. like my roommate before, she loves where she travels but not where she lives. lauren, our other closest friend, seems to have a love-hate relationship with it, which has recently been leaning towards hate. dallas, our guest, seems to have accepted the general opinion.


not all of it is culture shock, however. opinions are based on what happens to you, and i feel i have experienced a very different paris from them. the majority of my time is spent being in love, which tends to have a rose-colored glasses effect. even beyond that, removing romain from the equation, we have still had different experiences. for example, last night, we branched off from each other. katy, dallas, and lauren went home. lauren was accosted on the metro by a gang of literal boys, she has bruises in the shapes of hands on her body from the boys trying to harm her and from katy trying to save her. afterward, they spent the rest of the ride home screaming they hated paris and parisians. i had a different experience. aoife and i went to social club, danced to techno, and met two very respectful parisians who bought us drinks and walked us home but didnt even attempt to 'come home' with us.


this is not to say i have not been fighting those same tendencies i am complaining about in others. in fact, i am wondering if i am fighting them too much. it hurts me, and the open mind my parents instilled in me, to base my opinion on an entire city and culture on such limited experiences. i am not a typical american, and i would not want people to base their opinion of america on me. so i am fighting really hard not to do that with the french. i am trying to recognize that there is diversity and subcultures here just as in the states.


but am i excusing too much? am i harming myself by refusing to be anything but completely open? is there such a thing as too open-minded? i feel like i should be able to admit when i dont like something, but instead i simply call it a culture difference and write it off. is that the right way? i am starting to feel that since i am the only one going about things this way that i am the one in the wrong, not the others. but, here just as in london, it angers me to hear how much people hate this city. i end up irritated and annoyed, wanting to shake them and open their eyes to the beauty that is all around. but am i the one with my eyes closed? by refusing to see the ugly, am i being just as close-minded as those who refuse to see the beauty?


i have talked about this with lauren before, and we discovered that by allowing yourself to love a new place, you lose a little bit of yourself. in my attempt to be open, i have lost my self and created a new one, forged by my experiences both here and london. in the beginning, i found paris lacking to london. but i had to give up that part of myself that adored london in order to enjoy paris. i have never had any problem changing, losing, and gaining parts of myself, because one constant has always remained. i am a traveler, through and through. knitting is pretty much universal, and the small changes from country to country only make being a traveling knitter that much more interesting.


but have i been traveling wrong? shouldnt i accept the bad as well as the good, rather than ignoring it? i know these things, but i just cannot bring myself to act that way. every time someone makes a negative generalization, all i can think of is someone i met a long time ago, who was raped by a black male. unable to separate the feelings induced by that one black male and all the unrelated black males, she became racist and bitter. i refuse to be that woman, i refuse to base my opinion of the masses on the actions of one individual. i just cant see a way to let the bad in, without it consuming me.


intercultural dating has the same problems. every time romain and i fight seriously, which happens more than i care to admit, he insists that we dont have problems, our cultures do. each misunderstanding, each odd action the other doesnt understand, each difference between us is chalked up to him being french and me being american. but is that the right way? could the personal differences between us be simply that, just personal differences? but i do the same thing in america. my ex was from oregon and every weird thing he did was 'because he was from oregon'. before my trip here, i never realized how much geography shapes and affects us. its really beautiful to see how changed we are by the places we live and the people we surround ourselves with.


the days here are numbered, each one marks a day lost in the countdown, and i have reached the halfway mark. i am having to decide what to do with myself, where to go at the end of this. it is becoming clearer and clearer that a return to the states, a return to arizona, is almost impossible for me. i am trying not to think about that now, not to make any plans until absolutely necessary, but the end is approaching, and i cannot bring myself to face it. i am having difficulty facing many things lately, and instead am hiding in the bright light of the good. but the dark is always there, waiting on the periphery, be it the bad in people or the end of the chapter. i think it is time for me to come out and face it head on. 

but its hard to stay mad, when theres so much beauty in the world. sometimes i feel like im seeing it all once, and its too much, my heart fills up like a balloon that about to burst. and then i remember to relax, and stop trying to hold on to it, and then it flows through me like rain and i cant feel anything but gratitude for every single moment of my stupid little life.


you have no idea what im talking about, im sure. but dont wory, you will someday. [american beauty.]