Paris - A Reflection

This is an older account of Paris past, reprinted with the hope it will not reemerge as Paris present, or Paris future...

Again, I am sitting in my hotel room in Paris, alone, contemplating forgoing all invites for the evening in favor of boozy and confused solitude that has begun to fit like a cozy sweater. Not helping matters much is the fact that the shrew sitting downstairs at “reception” is the very same bespectacled rat from two nights ago, who has become my newest arch-enemy. I am convinced that if I leave this place for more than 45 minutes with a telltale face-full of makeup, that she and her cohorts will surreptitiously enter my room and proceed to deflower my belongings. They will lick my toothbrush with dirty tongues, they will wipe their sweaty armpits onto fresh delicates, they will dip the bar glasses into slightly tinkled-in toilet water and put them back to drip dry, and then they will proceed to take indecent photos of themselves wearing my clothes in various poses in unclean parts of the hotel. This, for me, is the best-case scenario.

I want to be cloistered, cocooned. Listening to the wind whipping the Sunday night air, and the laughter and sounds of motion indicating life, I am suddenly fearful of my place within it. At this moment, venturing forth into the pleasant Parisian night seems as exotic and forlorn as showing up alone and overweight to someone else’s prom wearing your Aunt Ruth’s formal pantsuit that still smells like cheese and 1970.

I am also beginning to believe that these last years of celibacy have caused my vagina to migrate upward and commence closing in around my heart with the urgency of a dying weed. It is not looking to fill itself with child, but rather to aid in filling my heart with love and my body with the reverence of a lover’s touch. It tugs at my consciousness, poking through the fog of over-simplified chastity and fear, begging me to reconsider the death sentence I seem to have delivered to my libido and once full heart.

The rituals of mating seem so foreign and out of reach now, that I can’t imagine what I shall do to invoke them, short of laying myself down buffet-style in the middle of a singles bar. Even then, at my age, how does one feel sexy as the salty beef tongue when presented next to a slab of virginal, trembling veal, the only fresh thing in common the sweet green sprig of parsley between them? And… there it is… self-pity! Can there really be anything sexier than self-pity, insecurity and the tendency to tuck one’s chin into the creation of another chin into a turtleneck?

I think it might be time to rent Belle du Jour again. Seamed stockings! Smoky eyes! Good posture! A steady gaze filled with power, promise and mystery!

Locked up here in this room, Rapunzal style, is no way to go about fixing all of this, but I suppose trying to find a way out is a small achievement.