a sense that more than lonely / I’m finally where I want to be / but I’m on my own
On My Own — Kate Diaz
Journal entry — 02/11/19, 11:52 PM
No one prepares you for it. No one said this is going to feel this way — like a death and a breakup rolled into one. The end of a love affair, with a city? A feeling? A person? I guess all of the above. And the death of who? Me, I suppose. The me I was there, all caught up in the middle of it. The girl still sitting by her wide window watching the sunset, waiting for… magic.
She found it. She lived it. She loved it, drowned in it, chased it. Swayed to it in late morning sun feeling another’s heartbeat against her own. She strolled with it, down more narrow streets than she can count or remember. She relied on it. Craved it. Depended on it to make her finally feel alive, finally feel herself. She was blessed with it, through people and places and so many instances of spontaneity and serendipity. She was a master of it, creating her own magic on command. She ran the streets with it late at night and declared the entire city, the entire world her own.
I don’t know where she is anymore. I don’t know how to be her, how to reclaim that part of myself. Because she is still there.
Dancing in that bright white apartment, riding the metro, braving the streets, laughing and yelling in dark bars. Stumbling, drowning, fighting her feelings. Giving in to soft touch and kind eyes, being scared. No, terrified. She’s still somewhere in that apartment. 6eme etage. On that street. Rue Montorgueil. On line huit on line douze on line quatre, on the RER B, climbing the steep streets of Montmartre, reading in that funny library, freezing on the walk home at the end of the night, learning new sounds, new words, tiptoeing through gallery after gallery, grinning widely at the tall girl behind the camera. Putting on a face, a persona — Je m’apelle Amelie… Emily…
Je suis whatever I want to be, nothing of consequence, nothing but everything, the whole universe and every feeling in it coming in the breeze that pushed open my window and fluttered my curtains, the clothes out to dry. So independent, so liberated, so… alone. But with — with him, in my elevator, in my kitchen — with them, in decadent classrooms, in the smoke-filled cafés, in lurching metro cars — with myself.
The part of me I’ll never recover. But that’s okay. Because she is still there.
Everyday Escapes 