Paris Diaries: Yodeling Into the Abyss
The day before the trip I couldn't keep food down. I kept breaking off into crying fits. I didn't really want to go, did I? No, that's why I waited until ten days before the trip to book a hotel. I was hoping something would happen. A strike. A horrible storm. A technical glitch. Air France is really sorry, but we forgot to actually process your payment. The dog ate your ticket. You can't fly to Paris. So sorry.

But no catastrophes occurred. I was going to Paris. Whether I wanted to or not.

Never Ask a Jew for Pep Talk

Ariel, in the most misguided attempt ever, tried to assuage my guilt by telling me an epic Parisian horror travel story. When he got to the end, after detailing his insane attempt to get onto a packed train with a large suitcase on christmas eve and finally aborting the trip and opting to stay in a hotel room before scrapping his trip altogether, I looked at him and said, "How exactly is that supposed to make me feel better?"

"Well, because it happened to ME."

I'm still not sure how it was intended to make me feel better, but I wasn't going to think about it.

The Doberman was far more effective in his technique promising me that if we went to Paris together he would dress up as a Hunchback and dance around in front of Notre-Dame. Which, in a way, also made me glad I was going to Paris alone. Because I didn't really feel like bailing him out of a French jail every other day.

But still, I call him, the one I promised, the one who blames me for all my wrongs and his. Terrified. Hoping he will pick up with phone. And then, hoping for what?

If I was only a bit as heartless as he thought, and he was a bit as brave as I had hoped then he might have picked up the phone and we might have been able to have a conversation. But no, we stick to the old pattern. Whether I reject him or he rejects me, he gives me the silent treatment. And me?

I wait and I hope and I wonder and I forgive. And all the while he thinks I'm playing a game.

But I'm not the one who is playing.

That is if he thinks of me at all. Which he doesn't. Or he wouldn't have ignored that weeping phone call. He wouldn't have let me yodel into the void hoping for an echo and hearing nothing.

Nothing.

And for the first time I realize that I really am going to Paris alone. And that's what I'm so terrified of. Being completely and utterly alone.


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