romanticize at your own risk

Hello,

There is a very specific and terrible sense memory that I love and that I’d forgotten about until this week.

I love how cigarettes taste at the end of a nasty cold, when I’m all congested and coughing already. I’ve missed the way it hits the back of my throat. It takes me back to April 2022. On the same day that it randomly snowed in Paris, a fever took me down for two days, and the cough lingered until I went home in July and my mom fed me amoxicillin until I shut up.

None of this was healthy in the slightest, I know. But also during this time, I would whittle away afternoons in cafes and parks, roll cigarettes with half my torso hanging out of an apartment window, spend nights drinking corner store whiskey, and fall in love with people, places, and things. Some things tend to stick with you, like a bad cough.

This week, I also remembered that while I was sick in April 2022, my friends managed to organize a grocery delivery for me, even though they were in the US. It made the two days of pathetic, feverish wallowing a little less lonely. As part of a catch up with this same group of friends, we had made powerpoints to show what we’d been up to in the year that we’d graduated college. I had titled mine: “Life in the most ‘romantic’ city in the world: the joys & sorrows of romanticizing your life.”

I haven’t looked back on it until recently, and I was struck by this bullet point: “Paris has become a cornerstone to me, and I don’t know if I’ll ever love another city quite like this.” It’s interesting because I’d convinced myself that I didn’t really come to appreciate Paris that much until I went back again last year. This year, I had managed to convince myself that I didn’t miss Europe at all until I went on a work trip to Brussels last week. Memory is, and has always been, more of a weather vane than a compass.

Romanticization is a faulty lens, but sometimes that’s what we want. It’s an important component to the whimsy of life, which I so love to harp on about. At its core, it’s merely a potent combination of nostalgia and escape. By virtue of that core, we don’t really romanticize periods of our lives until we leave them behind. I worry that this means that we’re missing lives that we didn’t really live. I say, ‘faulty lens,’ like a pretentious asshole, when really I just mean a cliche that already exists, ready for use—rose-colored glasses. We hold an infinite power to impart mythos into the mundane. Some might even say it’s a natural, human affinity for meaning.

I suppose, the interesting notion that follows is: what are the things we consign to oblivion? In a patchwork of things that linger like a stubborn cough, what are the things that we simply get over? And how does that patchwork change over time?

Our memories are one of the more fascinating studies we can embark upon because memories are impermanent, malleable. My memory is no more the truth than yours, and yet we make pearls out of them.

M Train by Patti Smith

What a well-formed memoir. That’s the best way I can describe it—well-formed, perfectly shaped. It’s not chronological. The short chapters aren’t even situated within a concrete timeline. But it gives you a complete sense of this emotional time in Smith’s life when her husband died, and she was left to navigate the memories they had together and where she went from there. What struck me was the throughline from this memoir to her debut, Just Kids, and how she captures this wonder towards life. In Just Kids, she writes about a Persian necklace that came to represent her first love and all her young dreams about being an artist. In M Train, she writes about visiting French Guiana to procure rocks to give to Jean Genet, who wrote about the prison colony extensively but never managed to visit. She has this knack for imbuing mythos into objects.

As always, I hope the universe remembers to treat you with gentle hands,
Jessie