JOURNAL NO. 16

FICTION PIECE II

I was swimming through the ocean trying to get somewhere. I don’t know exactly where I was trying to go. The waves were huge. So big that every time one came, I would be thrown hundreds of feet ahead. I never drowned though, I never even came close. Water never filled my lungs and I never choked. It was the most confidently I had ever swam. When I was under the water, I could see fish and coral reefs and turtles, sea creatures of all kinds. 

At one point, I came to the surface. Took a deep breath and looked over to my right. There he was. Floating on his back in the water. I realized I was trying to get to him. Every time I would swim in his direction, the current would become so strong and it seemed as though I wasn’t moving at all. 

I went back under the water, under the waves. I swam as hard and as fast as I could. I came up for air and he was gone. Most of the water was gone, in fact, and the shore was directly ahead of me. I swam further and reached the sand. I was breathing heavily, panting. I laid down in the sand. The sun was hitting my body and it felt amazing. I could hear the waves crashing onto the sand and the wind was making the most beautiful humming sound. I heard birds. 

My eyes were closed but I knew nobody was there. I laid, silently, for an amount of time I can’t define. 

Suddenly there was shade over me…I could no longer feel the sun. I opened my eyes and saw the silhouette of someone standing above me, but I was too blinded by the sun and couldn’t tell who it was. 

And then I woke up. Just me. In my bed. The sun coming through my window, hitting me right in the face. 

What an interesting phenomena, dreams. Our brains working on an unconscious level, showing images, making us feel things, smell things, hear things, all in our heads. And it happens when we aren’t even awake. We’re fast asleep and our eyes can see things that aren’t there, our ears hear things our noses smell things and our hands feel things. 

I’ve been trying to write down my dreams every morning when I wake up. And if there are a lot of parts of my dream that I can’t remember, they usually come back to me throughout the day and I write them down then. I’m trying to see what my unconscious brain is thinking/doing/telling me. As I was recalling this particular dream, I was unable to decipher who the man was that I was trying to swim towards in the water. Throughout the entire day, I never was able to remember who it was or what his face looked like. 

By recalling my dreams, interpreting them and comparing them, I think I’ll have an infinitely better hold on what the hell this thing called life is all about. A various amount of cognitive neuroscientists believe that only 5% of our conscious mind is used on a daily basis, and everything else occurs in the subconscious. I want to understand my subconscious. Thats the main controller of my dreams, so I figured if I can figure those out, I’ll have a better chance at understanding the whole thing. The whole subconscious, I mean. 

And, I mean, if the subconscious really does control 95% of our mind — of our actions — I think thats the best way for me to figure out life. Maybe not figure out life, but understand it, you know? Understand why I do things and why other people do things. Understand how dreams connect to reality and vice versa. 

I’m no scientist. I’m just a normal, curious person that wants to know more. More about herself and more about those surrounding her. 

I tried to remember the man’s face from my dream all day long. Nothing came up. I eventually stopped thinking about it. I went down to the beach, and I laid in the sand. It wasn’t the same beach that I had dreamt about, but it was a beach. My body was sprawled across the sand, the sun hitting me, all over. I heard the waves hitting the shore, I heard the wind, the birds and the other people on the beach. I heard an ice cream truck every once in a while. I must have been laying there for at least 2 hours. Dozing in and out of sleep. 

Suddenly, I felt the presence of someone standing over me. The sun was blocked and I was covered in shade. I opened my eyes. It was exactly like my dream had been that night. I rubbed and squinted my eyes, and realized who it was. 

The man standing over me was my ex-boyfriend. I had broken up with him months earlier because he was a piece of shit. A liar and a cheater. I thought, what the hell is this little fucker doing here? How does he even know where the hell Long Beach Island is? How did he find me on this particular beach, out of all the beaches on the island? 

“Hey” he said, “fancy seeing you here, huh?” I sat up, sitting criss-crossed apple sauce in the sand. He sat down next to me. I was silent for a while. “Well you gonna say anything or just stare at me like that?” He said, with a smirk on his face. 

I asked him what he was doing there and how he saw me. He told me he asked my best friends where I was. They told him, reluctantly. He then messaged the girl I was staying with who, the dumb girl that she is, believed that he wanted to surprise me…that he missed me. She told him what beach I go to and what time I get off work. So he got in his car and came on down to the island. Drove to 14th Street beach and saw me. 

What the hell does all of this mean? It drives my mind in circles. I have a dream that I’m trying so hard to get to a man in the ocean but the current won’t allow me, and then before I know it he’s gone. Then he all of a sudden shows up again, standing over me on the beach. Then the next day a man from my past shows up, standing over me on the beach? What the fuck?! 

So I took it as though my subconscious was giving me a warning of him coming to see me. That somehow my unconscious brain knew what was to come and wanted to let me know. I also thought that it meant I should give him a second chance. How else would a silly, naive 20 year old chick take that? So I did. 

And, boy was I wrong. Things were good for a while. Then we fell back into the same patterns. He lied and he cheated, I got even, we fought we made up and fought again. 

I finally realized that my dream wasn’t telling me to give him a second chance. The fact that he was unobtainable in my dream, I couldn’t get to him. I was trying and trying but I wasn’t moving. My subconscious was indeed warning me that he was coming to see me, but also telling me that I can never get him the way I want him. He will never be faithful or honest. He’s unobtainable, in my dream and in real life. 

All this just trips me out now. I think I lost what I was really looking for by writing down my dreams. They are all so coincidental. Most of my dreams have nothing to do with the reality of my life. They don’t make sense and they don’t connect. It was a silly idea to try and make sense of it all. 

The subconscious is subconscious for a reason. I don’t think anyone will ever really understand it. And I certainly don’t think dreams will help out, in any way. 

JOURNAL NO. 15

Hemingway’s relationship to Ezra Pound intrigues me deeply. You see, I can tell that Hemingway has a certain amount for Pound — for his writing, his efforts and his personality in general. 

I get the sense that Pound is similar to Sylvia Beach in some way. They are both extremely kind, and do their best to help others — whether or not they are their peers. I also think that Hemingway loves people like this. He holds them in his heart. But I mean, who wouldn’t? 

There’s something incredibly enchanting about a person who has a big heart and only wants to do good for others. I know that that’s one of my favorite character traits in my friends. 

Not to say that Hemingway isn’t a nice guy, or that he’s a dick, but I get the sense that he isn’t as affable as his friends Pound and Beach. And I can see why that would make him appreciate the two even more. As humans, we tend to appreciate and love the aspects of other people that we don’t obtain. I wouldn’t suggest you quote me on that, but I can imagine the words to be somewhat true. 

Calling Pound a saint, Hemingway is clearly expressing his true opinion of him. By definition, a saint is a very holy or virtuous person. However, I think when someone calls another person a saint they simply mean that the specified person is a good person — someone who has no bad intentions. 

I can see that being very true, when I read about Pound’s “Bel Espirit”. A fellow writer to Hemingway and Pound was T.S. Eliot. In the chapter we read for this blog post in the “Additional Sketches” section of A Moveable Feast, I learned that Eliot was working as a banker in order to make sufficient funds to live. This work at the bank didn’t leave him much time to work on his writing. In order to help Eliot out, Pound got a group of writer friends together and started to save money up for Eliot so that he wouldn’t have to work at the bank anymore. 

This act of solely wanting to help out a fellow writer and a friend, shows a lot about character. Even Hemingway admits that at times he didn’t necessarily want to put his money into this fund, but I have an idea that he was willing to just because Pound was the one who started it. 

When Hemingway spoke about Ernest Walsh, a poet who Pound was friends with, it was just another instance in which it became clear to me how much Hemingway truly cared about Pound. You see, Walsh was a conman, and was insistent on conning writers into being a part of his new magazine by promising them an award. He promised both Hemingway and Joyce the same award, and they kept this a secret from Pound. From what I gather, their reasoning behind this secret was to protect Pound from thinking his friend Walsh wasn’t actually as great and kind as he thought. 

I don’t know if I’m making up too much in my head regarding Hemingway’s relationship with Pound, but this just seems to make the most sense to me. 

As I mentioned earlier, I think it’s common for people to love personality traits that we don’t actually have. It’s clear to me that Hemingway wasn’t as blatantly kind and giving as Pound was. Doesn’t make him any lesser or more than Pound, just different.

As A Moveable Feast comes to an end, I have a bittersweet feeling. This wasn’t the first time I read Hemingway’s memoir, however, it was the first time I read it so deeply and closely. I feel as though I was able to really get up in Hemingway’s head, into his thoughts. I feel like reading it now, 4 years later, 4 years older and 4 years wiser, I can actually compare and contrast my own thoughts/feelings with those of Hemingway. 

I think that if I was around during the time of the Lost Generation in Paris, and I knew all of these writers and artists alike, I would be a Pound or Beach like person. I would be the one to want to help out as many people as possible. I also think I would have a certain disliking for Gertrude Stein — for different reasons, though. I got the sense that Stein and Hemingway’s friendship diminished because he couldn’t handle the fact that she was lesbian. The reason I wouldn’t continue a friendship with Stein is because she is too stuck up and gives herself too much credit. But hey, that’s just me. 

Hemingway is truly an interesting guy, and I don’t think I or anyone else can really, fully understand him unless we actually knew him. I guess its just that reading his words, it almost feels like I do… 

Journal NO. 14

FICTION PIECE

I never thought that I’d want to leave my home. When the time for applying to college came around, I knew in my heart that New York City was where I wanted to be. Why go to a school with 10,000 faces I would never recognize and only have my campus as an exploration ground when I could have millions of unrecognizable faces in the best city in the world? 

My family was both happy and sad about this. You see, my parents wanted me to get out into the world and experience something new. My grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins were all thrilled at the thought because me staying in the city meant they wouldn’t have to miss me. 

To please everyone, I applied to schools all over. Some in florida, some on the west coast, some in Boston, some in Pennsylvania, one in Paris cause why the hell not, and more. 

The only school that I held high in my heart and mind, though, was Colombia University. I wanted to be a lawyer. I wanted to be a lawyer who attended and IV League school in New York City. I wanted my own law firm where I was the boss. I wanted to fight for justice, and so be it, I did everything in my power to get myself there. 

Without discussing it with my parents, I applied Early Decision. This meant that if I got accepted, I had no choice but to go there. I pretty much signed the contract without knowing if the people I was signing with actual wanted me. 

It had been about a month and a half since I applied. Acceptance or rejection letters should be arriving at me and my fellow students doors any day now. As I waited for my letter, I would spend my days uptown on the campus and sit on a bench and just watch as all the amazing brains and people walked passed me. 

Then it happened. The letter came. And, it was a no. “Dear Charlotte, it is with regret to inform you that we are unable to offer you admission to the freshman class at Columbia University.” 

It was as though 800 different emotions went flying through my brain. I wanted to know why. I wanted to know what was wrong with me. I was sad. I was angry. I was disappointed. I was surprised yet I expected it. I didn’t know if I should cry or if I should scream. If I should crawl into a ball and hide in my room or go out into the street and wreck any and everything I saw. 

I grabbed the letter, folded it up and placed it back in the envelope. I walked out my door without saying a word to my mom. I needed air, I needed to walk. I didn’t know where I was going or for how long I’d be gone. I just knew that I needed to get out of that apartment and put what seemed like the 6 million scattered pieces of my brain back together. 

I walked up Furman Street till I got to Columbia Street. Figures, huh, that I’d try to run away from the name that was jabbing a knife into my stomach and end up looking right at it again. Instead of walking down that street, I turned left and made my way up Atlantic Ave. I turned right onto Henry Street and walked and walked. 

It was a gray, rainy February afternoon, so it was pretty convenient that there was scaffolding up all the way down Henry till President Street. It was almost perfect, the sky matched my mood. Gray, rainy, wet, and unhappy. I liked that the scaffolding protected me from getting soaked, but not as much as I liked it when I had to cross the street and the rain would hit my body hard and fast, due to the lack of scaffolding on the crosswalks. The rain cooled my heated and red face, while the scaffolding served as some type of protection from reality. It was like I knew the rain was there, but it wasn’t actually affecting me because I had something to hide under. 

I reached President Street and the scaffolding was gone. I had nothing to hide under anymore. The reality was that it was fucking pouring outside and I didn’t get accepted into my dream school and I had no idea where I was going to go or what I was going to do. 

It all seems so funny to me now, after graduating from college and heading off to graduate school, how purely depressed and lost I felt in this exact moment when I stood in the rain and just cried. And how the moment to follow changed everything about me and my future. 

I was crying on the corner of President and Henry. I went to the side of Henry where there was no scaffolding at all, plopped down on a stoop, lit a cigarette and cried. I had my hand covering the entire cigarette so that it wouldn't get soaked from the rain and go out. It was my last one. Had to make it count. 

I felt a vibration in my coat pocket. Pulled my phone out and saw that I had an incoming call, from Susan, my mom. I took a deep breath, sighed, opened my eyes real wide, and picked up. 

“Charlie,” she said, “You’ll never believe what I’m holding in my hands!” I rolled my eyes, “What is it? The fucking golden ticket? You’re going to Willy Wonka’s magical chocolate factory?” 

“Shit, someone must be PMSing. No you hormonal little shit. It’s a letter from the American University of Paris. You got accepted! They want YOU in PARIS and they offered you a scholarship. A big one at that. Where are you anyways? I wanna talk to you about this. Get home please, Char. This is so amazing I need to squeeze you till ya pop!” And she hung up. 

I was frozen for what felt like an hour but was probably a minute. Paris? Me in Paris? Me not in New York? I didn’t know what to think, or what to do. Then something so cliche happened. Something that you would only see in movies. Minutes after my mom hung up, it stopped raining. The sky was still gray but the rain had stopped. I literally heard a bird chirp. I was waiting to see the sun pop out from behind a cloud, but that would be to unreal. 

I stood up, suddenly knowing exactly how I felt. I had hope. I knew that I would be alright. Paris…I thought. Not a college campus with 10,000 unrecognizable faces, but the second best city in the world with a million brand new faces. 

I’m gonna skip the part with all the conversations, decisions, obstacles, fights and tears that came to follow me in the months after I found out about Paris. I’m gonna jump right to the part when I decided I was going. When I suddenly had no desire in my blood to be a lawyer anymore. When I was walking down Henry Street on an excruciatingly hot August morning and it was my last day in Brooklyn. I plopped down on that same stoop on Henry and President. Looked around, smiled, and started crying again. But this time it was a happy cry, a melancholy one, a bittersweet one. A cry because everything had fallen into place and a cry because I was excited and nervous and a cry because I was gonna miss this stoop and everything else about my home. 

I walked back home, with out any scaffolding. Completely aware of and present in reality. Kissed my dog, jumped on my bed, and left for the airport. I was going to Paris and I was going to write. Nothing felt more perfect than this. 

Now I’m gonna jump to when I had settled into my apartment. Settled into school. Made friends. Had a little bit of a clue as to how to navigate my new home. It had been 2 months at this point. I was loving every second and every minute that I spent in this city of love and life. Since it was still fall during my first few months in Paris and the weather was nice, I made a point to walk all over. Go to every park. See everything that was outdoors while it wasn’t too cold or too rainy. 

My apartment was walking distance to my school. I was lucky enough to only have class 3 days a week. When I wasn’t at school or doing school work, I was outside. I spent a lot of time in the Tuileries and Luxembourg Gardens. I had made my way to the canals by Reublique and to a bunch of different parks. I would walk through Le Marais and Bastille. Sunday morning were spent at the market in the Bastille and then picnicking at Le Tour Eiffel. Some days I would walk through Montmarte and up to the Sacre Coeur and stare at the city below me. Paris was everything and nothing I had expected at the same time. Completely different than New York, but equally as lovable. 

Once November approached, the warmth seemed to disappear and the cold appeared. It wasn’t dead winter yet and being outside wasn’t quite painful. It was the time of year for a hot coffee or a hot chocolate. It was time to take the metro and walk a shorter distance and find somewhere cozy to sit inside. This is when I discovered the passages of Paris. They were walkways that were covered and filled with little boutiques and shops. Like all of Paris, they were filled with history. Many of them have been around for over a hundred years. 

My favorite passages to walk through were the Passages des Panoramas and Galerie Vivienne. It wasn’t until recently that I realized why I liked these passages so much. I just arrived back in Paris and I’m starting Grad school. It’s kind of like starting college all over again. There are still so many surprises in store. I made my way back to the passages and walked through them a bit. Window shopping and people looking. I suddenly had a flashback to the day I found out I got accepted to the American University of Paris. I remembered walking under the scaffolding and escaping from reality. 

Walking through the passages on a cold, rainy day is kind of the same thing, escaping from reality I mean. You get to walk and pass by adorable little shops and see so many different people, with the feeling of walking down any of Paris’s historic streets. But, the cold and the rain aren’t hitting you. You seem to forget that its such a shitty day outside when you spend your time walking through such gorgeous walkways. 

As I walked through Galerie Vivienne, I seemed to forget that I was starting yet another new part of my life. I forgot that I was now 24 and had to get serious about everything in my life. I was that same 17 year old girl I was when I was walking down Henry Street. I was blinded and naive. But this time, it was invigorating. It was exciting and warm. I wasn’t crying at all.