This morning, I took a long hot shower, so hot in fact that when I stepped out of the water and into the salle de bain, I couldn't see-- the room was so thick with steam. My towel scratched against my beet-red skin ad I dried myself off, and I stumbled around the bathroom__ reaching for the door which I knew was there but couldn't see--and then I pushed my way into the hallway, where my body shivered suddenly from the cold. I scrambled blindly to my room to warm up again.

This is how I feel in Paris.

I'm in a fog.I It's December already and I don't know where the time has gone. I don't know what I've been doing to oocupy my days, certainly not writing, and I don't know what happened to my beautiful life in Paris--it seems to be evaporating before my eyes.  First, I suddenly find myself swamped with work which I can't seem to complete because it's in a language other than my own; I'm grappling for the ability to put a sentence together--just a subject and verb please--and I can't seem to arrive at any form of personal or intellectual expression. I can't make heads or tails of my thoughts or arguementation because they all come out in this bizarrely foreign mix of french and english and I can't seem to pin myself down with either language.

I can count the days now until I leave; I can see the hours passing. And, as it is the end of  yet another academic semester, there is a miniscule part of me that is apathetic to the fact that I'm in Paris and just wants to throw in the towel and go home. J'en ai assez. J'ai fini. Je m'en fou. On y va.

And the rest of me feels, just as I felt after the shower this morning: Fresh and clean, renewed, yet trying to hold on to the vapors of warmth and the wonderful feeling of new-ness before they dissipate, before Paris and all that is holds is gone and  I  am out in the cold again.

God, how I wish I could have written that in French.

Back to my Dissertations.

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