Grenoble diaries
gab goes, issue 2
why don’t I want to write? what is keeping me from writing on this trip?
I think it’s two things— the things I should write: this is beautiful, my life is so much more than I even dreamed when I was younger, what a privilege to be alive and to see what I’ve seen, done what I’ve done.
But that’s not really that interesting to me. I get that sharing it with other people is part of the joy, but I have a hard time sharing it when those people are not in front of me. I want to share a beer or a pastry with you, or just sit together, and writing is mediating too hard for me right now. Sometimes the mediating is useful, but right now it feels like distance on distance.
The other thing keeping me from writing is that I am verbose in conversation with L. We’ve been able to talk nonstop, to be the backdrop for one another’s consciousness. We’re in a rare moment of silence, both tapping away at our laptops. The continuity of conversation you can have with someone whose body is never far away from your own for more than a few hours. Why should I write something down when I can say it to her?
Tomorrow I go to Zürich to visit, just for a day or so. I anticipate the traveling will make me tired again. After my journey from Paris, I slept for 10 hours straight. L left a note on the kitchen table because she had to leave for an errand. Our entire friendship until last week has been largely over text. We would talk on the phone only occasionally, if something big happened. We saw each other once a year, for a few hours max. Frequently we text as I’m waking and she’s making dinner. The note could have been a text— but it wasn’t. It was a pink, lined sticky note. Later in the day, as we prepared to attend a party at her new beau’s apartment, she wrote some French phrases on the pad for me just in case. cette chanson est nulle! this song sucks. she told me I should say it about every song, just because I can.
This trip is reminding me that I don’t know what I think til I’ve said it; that my commitment to an opinion, a thought, is so dependent on my narration and my narratee. We spent two hours in a bar, nursing American-style IPAs and talking about our fathers and the men who stood in as father figures. I cried lightly and we felt proud of one another, and proud of ourselves, for our honesty. We admitted how much we admired one another, how each of our successes in turn motivated and inspired the other to take opportunities she found daunting. I feel at once sad that I don’t have access to the life L lives in French; the beau, the roommates, her PhD oral presentation; but immensely grateful for the privilege of hearing her narrate it in English, here now and in the phone.
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This trip is also reminding me how terrible I am at being productive while uncomfortable, and accepting in myself the need to be comfortable. I am in Grenoble for two full weeks, the first of which was characterized by an intense heatwave. It’s making everyone in the city miserable. Traffic encounters are tense; we ride our bikes through a green light and get scolded by an old man in an ancient Renault, his mouth wide open with French vowels. Two teens on a scooter nearly mow down a middle-aged cyclist. Everywhere we go, we are subject to mild cat calls— some in languages neither L nor I speak. “It’s the heat,” we say back and forth til it loses meaning entirely.
I originally planned to go to Zürich today, but the thought of 5 hours in a train and then a tourist slog in 90 degree weather, along with the threat of powerful thunderstorms, led me to forfeit my very cheap hostel reservation and reschedule for the weekend. In search of AC, we went to a library yesterday— but neither of us could get wifi. So today, after scouring the internet for cafes that would fit the bill, I gave up and came to Starbucks. It is genuinely chilly in here, a giant iced Americano with a giant iced Americano.
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After yesterday’s triumphant productivity, I am feeling deeply homesick today. I am yearning for my apartment in San Francisco, but I lived there for less time than I’ve been away, hopping among parents’ and friends’ houses, hotel rooms, hostels, and airplanes. I am homesick for my kitchen I’ve cooked and eaten fewer than 20 meals in. I’m homesick for my living room which is still mostly boxes. I am homesick for my own bed. I’m homesick for the cold ocean winds and the fog. I’m just yearning for my own places, I think.
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The trip to Zürich coincided with the breaking of the heat. I put my feet in the clear lake water and read Motherhood by Sheila Heti, contemplating my decisions and those of all my friends in the dappled shade. Elderly bathers eased their bodies into the warm water around me, unsteady on the rocks and then graceful, swimming out into the sparkling water. I followed Heti through her menstrual cycle, amazed at how in tune she is with her body, with her decision. My cycle has a very convenient habit of pausing when I travel. My body has been in a perpetual state of flight since we moved apartments in May. I have no idea where I am supposed to be.
I bought the book in Paris, after L asked me whether I would have children, and I gave her my real answer. Then, that night I dreamt I was eight months pregnant and the baby was coming early. I went to the hospital and the doctors all said, “it’s okay, the baby will be perfectly fine at 8 months”— but I wasn’t ready.
Heti finds every reason not to become a mother, to delay until the decision is no longer her own, and in doing so gives life to an intergenerational story about her mother and grandmother that is genuinely moving. But at turns she is bratty, churlish, rude— about her friends who choose motherhood especially. I don’t understand this impulse of hers, and I feel the book sometimes misunderstands motherhood as a making of the self, rather than an ushering in (or through?) of other selves, of others who become selves. Sometimes those selves belong to the mother, but not all of them, not always. Heti is quite good at making herself over and over, and selling slim, stylish books to women who also want to make themselves over and over. Maybe I am one of them, toting this book around Europe and writing a travel diary.
After nearly two weeks in Grenoble, with my brief pause in Zürich, the state of flight arrested and my cycle returned. Shaking and nauseous from cramp pain, this morning I descended the stairs. L brought me a leopard-print hot water bottle, a banana, and two kinds of brioche.
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Leaving L behind today feels like a breakup. I felt like I couldn’t look at her face this morning when I left the hotel room in Lyon, because I wanted to cry and I needed to not do that. We spent three hours at dinner last night eating like little kings, starting with red wine poached eggs, dark sunset custard a prelude to our Odyssean adventure in pork fat. The café packed us together like sardines. We shared cheese with two other dining pairs, passing the plate around the table like old friends. For dessert, chocolate mousse and fruit salad. We couldn’t finish either one.
A trip like this, it was an experiment, it could have failed. Until now, L and I had never spent more than two consecutive days together. Our lives in college didn’t allow for either of us to maintain robust social lives. We found boyfriends, other friends, coworkers, and despite the mutual feeling of wanting to be friends, it wasn’t until the summer we graduated that we had the time to form a real friendship. Then she moved to France, and we’ve seen each other only once a year since, if that. When we’re lucky, we can steal 3 hours in Allegheny cemetery together. I knew these few weeks coincided with an inflection point in her life, and it’s a joy to sit in front of “Bal du Moulin de la Galette” with her in the Musee D’Orsay for 15 minutes and notice, away from the uncertainty I know she felt, I know I felt. We lived in the world of the dance together, talking shit and drinking lemonade along with everyone else, even if we were sitting side-by-side on a bench inside a museum. There is space opened by friendship that enables new ways of seeing, new kinds of attention. I love that people change each other.
In our journals, we both noted that in three weeks, we never ran out of things to say. Three consecutive weeks of conversation means you can revisit, rethink, change your mind; the other person remembers where you left off and what you said before. We have a whole language of dumb memes that we didn’t have before. She’s coming to California (someday, soon) and we have a long list of things we will do together then. I will forever be grateful to her for spending these weeks with me, sharing her home, her friends, her life in France. Whining about anything together, getting ice cream, cooking dinner, surviving the June heatwave, climbing a mountain, getting heckled by teens, scream-singing Carseat Headrest because boys love to be like “do you know Carseat Headrest?” when yes, we already do.
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I want to end this on a note about biking. I rented a bike in Grenoble for 15 euros. It was yellow and purple. We rode bikes to the movies on a scorching hot Sunday, the streets were deserted. We rode bikes home from the little music festival, three girls pedaling through busy stop-and-go traffic, making fun of the loser DJ who was hitting on L. We rode bikes to the train station and back, along the rushing Isére river. Biking with other girls, going somewhere fun, feels like a kind of freedom I didn’t know when I was a teen, but I wish I had. The freedom to go together, wherever we want to go.
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Photos! I’m really terrible about taking them, please forgive me. Working backwards, temporally.
:') very nice Gabi
this was so beautiful. your love for L reminded me of the wonder that is a friendship, maybe something I take for granted or forget to wonder at enough!