Trois mois

When we were sixteen and seventeen, my Xavierites and I dreamed of expatriate life. I longed for it. Even thought I might be meant for it. In those days, to me, it meant England or Italy. I'd been to both, albeit briefly, and liked them. Even so, as we wove our shimmering, fragile collective dream, something always nagged me: the anxiety, even the belief, that I would always be too scared to take the plunge. That I wouldn't have enough money, or wouldn't find something besides pure caprice to bring me there, or that people would talk me out of it and I would listen.

Of course, in the end, we wove a different web, casting out to different coordinates of the country. Of all of us, I'm the only one who ended up moving abroad. It turns out that reasons to become a foreigner don't find you; you must find reasons. There's a whole host of reasons people don't do this. It's hard. It's frustrating. It's expensive. You lose your identity; you regress; you reforge; you metamorphose into something quite different. No one warns you about how lonely it is, or how humiliating. And when folks back home ask you, how is Paris? is it wonderful? you don't want to spoil their lovely, shimmering candy-floss dreams. You say, yes, it's wonderul, it's amazing, it's everything I dreamed of. Because it is. It's also everything I feared, and many things I neither dreamed of nor feared.

Now, mes amis, it's official. I have been here for three months.


Recently, I dug back to my earliest entries. It's true, you know, what they say about the inverse proportionality of confidence to competence. I boarded my plane in Phoenix believing I would get along fine. I landed, dizzied, overwhelmed, and spent my first few days in a haze of shock and loneliness for which I scolded myself as being too old, too mature.

I left believing that with enough practice, I could become something like an insider. I realized, relatively quickly, that even should I spend my whole life here, I will always be an outsider.

In the United States, I am smart, adult, quick, competent. In France, I am childlike, timid, slow. I am stupider than the children who chase one another and cut me off on the sidewalks. I feel like a flower bathed in sun when offered the slightest compliment or kindness.

Whereas I learned a tense a week in America, filled index card boxes with thousands of memorized words and irregular verb conjugations and relative pronouns, here I find myself buried in everyday situations in which I either don't know the words or am too nervous to produce them in order. Last month, when I was looking for a cookie sheet that would fit into my toaster oven (full-sized versions are uncommon here), I ended up asking a very patient man for a "flat metal thing that one uses to cook small cakes, one that is small and can fit in my little oven."

Sometimes, frankly, it's hard to believe I've made any progress at all.

But then, I go into a shop to buy books or a tradition or eggs or a sandwich without the least hint of butterflies. Or I jump into a business interaction, or make a phone call, without feverishly rehearsing my first few lines. I can now, given a little time, relax into French conversations without translating. I can listen in class and understand my professors in real time, without missing the sense of a sentence for want of a few key elements. I understand what people are talking about on the radio. I can eavesdrop on the Metro. I can go grocery shopping without consulting a dictionary.

Best of all: I can pick up a book--any book--and read it. I mean, actually read it.

Paris is not mine. It will never be mine. I am too old to be adopted. I will always, always be a foreigner, an américaine.

But we're dating now, and despite our rough patches, it's going pretty well. Too soon to say whether we'll settle down. And there's no denying that she looks achingly gorgeous in white.