I wrote to remember but you could never come close. The writing became a form of reliving, a cheap copy. It was the worst kind of navel gazing writing letters to your future selves. But I would sooner err on the side of indulgence than regret. Both were in short supply and you never knew when it would run out, the writing or the living.

Clouds all day, all week: a film set for the somber. Seeing my days drain down abroad. Finishing a book, my coffee.

When I was in high school we kept a journal for social studies class and at the end of the year we sealed our journals in a package addressed to ourselves and our teacher mailed them to us five years later. I was surprised by how banal and uninteresting it was, but I knew every word and it brought me back to that time as a young man, 17. I hadn’t changed much at 54.

Curling through all those small German towns between here and France. First the autobahn but then the umleitungs (detours) and the maddening speed limits and roundabouts, always the second exit. They all looked the same. Even the countryside drab and banal. Writing put a filter on things.

I would sometimes go back and read these posts after a trip was done to see how well I could remember it but it always ended sooner than you’d think. This kind of writing was a form of curation but it came from a fantasy world, so you had to live there too. The sometimes maddening double lives of the here and the looking-back here, a form of removal that took you out of the present. And why I felt compelled to, to what end.

Lily said her time out with Laurent and Nanou’s daughter Valentine and her French friends was one of her favorite times since she’s been here abroad. That’s because she got to connect with people her age in-country, she craves that. I wanted to connect too, and I think that’s why I wrote. I didn’t have it in me to make things up.

Categories: Diary, Memoir, Travelogues, writing

Tags: Creative Nonfiction, Memoir, writing