Heat Waves, Tidal Waves

Stepping outside after a fresh rain, I am taken back to numerous occasions in other towns where I have done the same. I recall playing video games during the fall in Davis while it rained, smelling the wet pavement and the damp trees in the cluster of dormitories we lived in, feeling that still new, fresh feeling of living on my own, of sharing a room with a someone. I recall taking the bus in Bordeaux down the boulevards to the tram stop which I would take to Pessac to school; walking across the deteriorated campus; the reflection between the cobblestones. I recall similar mornings on the way to the train station in Nancy. All those places seem so far off and unreachable that I currently doubt I will now ever go back. What’s the use of letting the rain send me into a nostalgic state when I am in such a beautiful neighborhood myself. I am sure, somewhere down the line, be it in France or California, I will recall a similar morning when I stepped outside after a fresh rain, smelled something like celery, wet bark and pavement and walked to the coffeeshop down the street. The walk has become, by now, iconic. There are usually people on the corner where I turn on Cumberland, by the two adjacent bodegas. I walk past the French Quarter styled building with its white columns and never-used porch, past the brownstones. I look down Lafayette to see a wave of cars behind the stoplight one block away, and as I scurry across the street, they are just behind me as I step onto the curb. Then the park comes into view. On a day like today, it is empty, or, maybe a few joggers brave the chance of a second morning’s rain. During hot days, the bespectacled bald man—who occasionally is seen talking Spanish to neighborhood friends, but usually sits there silently—sits shirtless on his stoop. His pug dog, leashed, yet sleeping sits on the lowest step. But today it’s too early and not warm enough. Is all this good enough not to take my mind off the prospect of far off countries? Why can I never enjoy the neighborhood I am living in as I can enjoy the ones I once lived in?

It makes me wonder whether I need to move to France again. For what though? I could see myself studying there again. It would have to be some southerly township, if not Paris. Do I need to burrow into foreign cities, further repel myself from the familiarity of California and that which I’ve developed here? It’s as though my mind is propelled toward a foreign country during times of hardship, like the farther I am from the source of my sadness, the less apparent it will become. 3,000 miles is still not enough.

In the mornings I tend to wake up listless. I imagine when school starts, I will feel better about the mornings as I was when I first moved here. I need projects first and foremost, then I will start cleaning more thoroughly, maintain an orderly desk and kitchen. I will probably start waking up earlier when school starts. But as of late, these mornings I wake up with little reason to do so. Why not keep sleeping in, I think? Job applications will be there when I wake up. But I’m no longer tired. I had been dreaming of Oliver (the cat) and perhaps pigeons—I remembered this just before stepping out as I spied a white pigeon from my window: I decided to take this as a sign of luck, or of good things to come. I live closely with the pigeons, for they commune on the roof outside of my window, and in the early morning, I can hear them through gauzy dreams and they enter my consciousness without my seeing them.

The cicadas: I have been aware of them ever since seeing the Japanese play at the Lincoln center with mom. To set a scene, the first sound heard is cicadas, but then they quickly fade away. The implication is that it is a summer month, and that it is hot. I was fascinated with something I hadn’t thought of before: that a sound indicates a temperature. What’s more, you literally felt the heat hearing the hum of those insects. Well, every now and then a cicada can be heard from my window, or on my walks down to the coffeeshop, and I will think similarly of all the hot climates I have been to in addition to this one, not to mention the heat waves.