“French Affair” by Caro, Paris

topic: LOVE AND HEARTBREAK medium: TEXT

as read at a PenTales event themed” Foreign Affairs

Into the behemoth I shudder against the sickening whimper of morning’s cold, clods, stuck to my insides. Glancing around, a casual drawing, the passengers simmer as the mothers button up and challenge the world’s gaze. Shudder and gallop, into the blue gray. Pieces of people and their constructions slip away. One is relieved, and chases back, sucked into the sterile, bottled calm. What does he even look like? Breathing through the lines, blurred. Can our time pervade, over the spent, laughed, joined and changed? Into this present I thrust myself, as the plane veers over the eddies of other moments, bottling our own. Bringing our present together passes through this experience, noone’s here and now exists in this eternal limbo. Sun creeps around the tube, nightime breakfast, lunch at Morpheus’s prime hour. Peering through our confused haze, our rituals combine, to sleep to work, Is it possible to maintain our own present? How to join in? How to understand? How can we make our time? The time of paranoia, of flat death, behind us…. Can shared time underpin perennial love? I gaze down. Crests and horses and houses and love and daytime and children. Peeling away below us, a ghost in the sky, we slide past, haughty in our disinterest. Bobbing back and forth, like a snared fish, we strike forth, ensnared by our own progress, across the ocean, as if for the first time. Do YOU remember the first time? Continuity; decision. Peering into the challenge of our present, what MAKES you happy? I wish I could focus, clamp down, pin myself to this perfect present. Passive, we prepare, we are anxious, we are invaded by the mundane. But wait, what lies in this small, short, peculiar time? Sticking and clumping through, our rituals subliming us. Pushing us beyond our politics, past our jealousy and frustration, in this stasis, our actions emerge, our time is reduced to an optimum. Upended. We arrive. Jolted into another present. Quick quick we must join in, we must pick it up. For us? Catch up, reinvent, what was experienced, narrated into abstraction. We try, we try