Missing

My kid sister, this blog’s number one fan, chastised me at the breakfast table for not updating. She’s a sweet kid, but she doesn’t know anything about the creative process. An artist does not simply pick up where they left off after they have relocated to a different continent, and, worse than that, started working again.

This move’s temporariness has given me license to be negligent. It is only for a month, I say, and then all will be back to normal. I have worked six days in a row, fifty-five hours, not including the three hours of commuting each day, which is not as bad as it sounds, because that’s when I read.

But it leaves me with little time or energy for writing, which I am still young at, so it takes me a good hour or two to prepare myself to do it. Add to that the three hours of writing and the hour it takes to post, and you see how my days are filled when it looks like I am doing nothing. Now that I am doing something—and a lot of it—it is nearly impossible to do all that nothing work.

Remember also, dear readers, that I have left my sweetheart behind. Now imagine that I spend one of my free hours almost each day in composing a love letter to her. And you would object, and say that that is the stuff I should be offering to everybody, even if it is addressed to her, but alas, my soul and hers have not yet been so exhibited and trampled to be calloused enough for your messy, though sympathetic, appetites. Be assured that this is the real me, and if I leave something out, remember that Sancho Panza often remarked that it will all come out in the wash.

How difficult it is to sit and write and not know where to start. I have no time for preparation of these entries, so it is all blind, one sentence leading to another. That’s the thing, isn’t it, what I do? If I am bad, it is all a rambling diary, and if I’m good, well, you wouldn’t notice it.

Here is me: I miss France. I miss my girl. I miss writing. New York is hot and muggy, and Staten Island, my hometown, is still without charm. My family is wonderful, though I see little of them and there are little of them left here to see. The work—the other work, the restaurant work—goes, but of course it does not satisfy. It is nice to talk to people. I have not talked in so long, except to my Apollonia, and that is unhealthy, because people naturally bore of each other and we unfairly resent them for not having anything new to say.

I have another two weeks here, and then all will return to normal. I hope I have not missed the better part of the summer in France.