120/100

I must be PMSing. That or I'm going through some kind of third-life crisis. Apparently this is what happens when people turn thirty sometimes but I'm already thirty. I don't even care about being thirty. Or thirty-one. Looking ahead has never freaked me out. It's the looking behind that does.

Or maybe it's just some hormonal shit I'm dealing with. The babies are eight months old now which means they've been in the world as long as they were inside me, which in the past served as a reflective time. There's something poetic about the shift, when the time between conception and birth becomes shorter than the months they've been on the outside, growing toward a new kind of sun.

Those are the only reasons I can think of this morning's breakdown on the way to drop-off. An old Pete Yorn song came on and BAM, it was eleven years ago, and I was on a train, somewhere between Paris and London, headphones on, sobbing because I assumed that traveling alone would be this idyllic thing. I assumed that I was a young adult on an adventure! Except. I found, after about six hours, of wandering the streets of Paris alone, that I was not an adult. Not really. I was not the twenty-year-old-Henry Miller-with-a-vagina that I thought I was. No matter how long I sat in front of Shakespeare & Co chain-smoking Gauloises, reading Lawrence Durrell and Sartre.

I told Archer all of this, by the way. I told him that when this "CD" first came out I was traveling around Europe and the UK by train and I was alone and I was frustrated with myself for feeling lonely because being on a train by myself was EXACTLY where I wanted to be! It was exactly what I wanted!

I wanted to be alone. I didn't realize how lonely it would feel. 

"... and now I'm listening to this song, remembering how it felt to be on that train and nothing really changes. Everything is different now but nothing much has changed."

It's kind of like how I never stopped feeling thirteen. I never stopped feeling twenty either. I never stopped wanting to be Henry Miller with a vagina. I never stopped wanting to smoke cigarettes. I never wanted to get off that train. 

And yet. I didn't want to stay on the train either. I couldn't wait for my fourteenth birthday. My twenty-first... I'll always have a soft spot for HM, but I like being Rebecca Woolf. This is where I want to be. Embarking on a different new decade. Without the train and tobacco flakes loose at the bottom of my purse. Not that I even carry a purse anymore. Purses are too small for today's life. Just like some songs are too big.

120. Life on a Chain by: Pete Yorn

GGC