I was sick for four months, but it was not the kind of sick I was used to: it was a numbing contagion. Under darkened skies, I coughed up the particles of illness. I looked at the walls that had nothing on them but a letter from my mother; I looked at the small refrigerator that held rotting arugula; I looked at the pink flannel blanket that only sometimes trapped my body heat. I thought about the life I was creating, its intricacies, the way I walked in a straight line to work and diagonally on the way back, the way the tissues in my bag were always soiled and often frozen, the way solitude wrapped its smooth fingers around my brain.
As the days grew colder and darker, it turned so gray in Paris that you could see the gray in every other color of the city. The white bricks that lined the rich neighborhoods turned gray in their abstractions. The red awning of the tabac turned slightly grayer, more maroon. In turn, my mind reflected this grayness. I felt like I was living on the very top of a mountain covered in fog; I was searching for a view and finding nothing. I gave this life and this feeling a name. I called these months my fog life.
At the doctor, I said things like pour huit semaines, j’ai mal à la gorge et mal à la tête. I was prescribed antibiotics and a cherry liquid that left a thick film on my taste buds. The antibiotics in the small yellow package didn’t work and neither did the syrup. I called a friend who was far away and said Last week I was sick in the mind, and this week I am sick in the body. She responded: Isn’t that how it always works?
At my job, I earned five euros an hour reading manuscripts written by an uninteresting man. I worked through his thirty-six biographies of French artists that were full of run-on sentences with no voice, just facts. Each day, I went through a dilemma: to tell or to not tell the truth. I thought of sending an email that said something along the lines of these manuscripts are shitty and they sound like AI. Instead, I made comments in the accepted format that sounded something like the wording of this sentence could be more direct. The truth was, I wanted to be a good worker, a good employee. I wanted to have a purpose that I could name like good at my job and not just good at noticing when gray takes over all the colors of Paris.
At my desk, I drank coffee incessantly, and sometimes I slept with my forehead on my hands. On the days I woke up shaky, instead of working on manuscripts, I googled models of atoms on my work computer. I stared at my desk and then at the stack of papers I had to read and then back at my computer screen. I stared at my hands, at the places where cigarettes had burned my skin. I thought of how each of these things—this desk, these papers, this body—no matter how complex, were broken down into something small, something so small that not even our human eyes could see. I asked my colleague for the word atom in French. He laughed and said l’atome.
The world existed in a language that was only partially mine. I comprehended it with effort and energy, and when I was tired, I did not comprehend at all. In my head, I mapped out the structure of each sentence before the words took their form. On the bus, I counted the number of people I knew within fifty miles on two hands. I imagined dying there on that bus, falling onto the charcoal floor, bending into two distinct halves as the bus rounded the corner.
Four weeks in, the big boss came to the office. He showed up in sunglasses, sat at the desk next to the coffee maker, took confidential meetings with the door closed. After our lunch break, he told us all that the company was fucked, that it was losing money because people were stupid these days and didn’t want to read academic texts. Plus personne ne lit he repeated ferociously. That day I invented a new game. I held steaming hot espresso in my mouth until my taste buds tingled and the coffee cooled. I repeated this until I could no longer taste the comfort of the bitter darkness and could only feel the texture of the liquid. I was able to become invisible at the conference table, to think of nothing but what I held in my mouth.
We had three smoke breaks a day. At 11:00, 13:30, and 16:00, the young workers and I stood outside and discussed the stupidity of the company, the way quitting smoking in a world so fucked seemed foolish. We talked about what we did on the weekends, the new socialist mayor in the city across the ocean, the concerts we were going to in the next month, the rise of fascism. The cigarettes gave our eyes the blood flow to continue reading, our hands the shake to continue typing, our brains the numbing buzz to continue sitting. In the afternoons, I listened to podcasts about quantum physics and about Buddhism. I wanted to know everything about how people dealt with the mess of the world. I thought about time, its nonexistence. I thought of my body, its inability to heal. I tried a new thing where I lived my life as if I were not sick. I went out in the cold with no jacket; I walked five miles as my fingers shook with weakness. It was something I was taught about energy, that the energy we live with controls our present and our future. I did not want the energy of sickness lingering in my cells; I did not want the body that always held something unresolved. So, I imagined a life without it, and I lived that life in my mind.
The second to last week of December, we sat around the conference table, and the small boss gave me a chocolate. She told me to place it on my tongue and to wait for it to dissolve. I did just that, and as it dissolved, I was punched in the face with shocking liquid. I made a face of disgust, and as I did, my coworkers started laughing. They had given me a chocolate with a shot of whiskey inside. I started coughing. I ran to the bathroom, coughed up my lungs into a paper towel, coughed up air and then mucus, mucus that was gray from the smoke lining my lungs, mucus that filled my mouth in large chunks.
The metro was closed, and after work, I walked two hours around the city. I wanted to find the people wearing all black tagging the old sculptures. I saw a building on fire and cracks in the windows of stores. I saw trash cans burned to the ground and the remnants of pepper spray: red eyes and red noses, the energy of a place people had just fled. In Paris, the protests against the prime minister were violent, and I watched the police shove a teenager to the ground. In Paris, the smell of the revolution lined the street corners and the ceilings of bus stops. In Paris, the political party of young socialists met next to the dried-up fountain in La Sorbonne. Ils contrôlent le gouvernement, mais la ruse nous appartient, they shouted, fists in the air. Macron degage!
I met young people at the library where I wrote in my journal and at the green bookshop where I read translated philosophy books. Ella spoke like she was reciting a winter poem, and the two of us communicated through literature. She told me to read Van Gogh’s diaries, said that her friend who often did not want to live found them worthy, found them true. I asked her if she had the impression that I didn’t want to live. She laughed lightly and told me that she didn’t know, that I was hard to read. Iris had unkempt curly hair that went unbrushed. She read fantasy novels and lived with an old woman and a blind chihuahua. When I visited her apartment, I taught her to play the guitar, pressed her fingers into the shapes of chords. Ella and Iris went to the forest without me on a day my immunity shook with weakness. They sent me pictures of the trees they climbed and of their fingertips reddened from the cold.
The three of us left for Berlin on Saturday night and came back Sunday night. We had no hotel; it was five degrees. I drank four espressos in the airport, and as we emerged into the freezing darkness, my body shook with a reckless abandon. We shared a bottle of vodka on the sidewalk and bought fifty-packs of Camel Blues that were shitty. We bought drugs from the man next to the lamp post; he gave us a small vial he took from his long black socks. We tried the drugs while we waited in line, and the familiarity of the metallic taste helped my body find stillness. We put stickers over our cameras, followed the smell of the smoke, did drugs on the dance floor, moved wildly from the energy. I fucked a girl who was eight years older than me; she looked better in the darkness than in the light. I felt the freedom I had once craved, to be anonymous, to move with feeling, to be just on the edge of consciousness.
My friends knew sadness as distant and fleeting; they knew their days as their days and their nights as their nights. While I slept for entire weekends of brightness, they looked at modern art, walked over small bridges, tried on smoke-stained leather jackets. When they called me to tell me that they were on my side of the river, I coughed into the phone and told them I was ill, a partial truth. They did not understand the side of me that was often existential, stuck somewhere in the dark. They did not know of the way I danced on my toes each night trying to feel the entirety of my body, the way I laid on my linoleum floor palms facing the air searching for any kind of movement. They did not know of the way I woke up each morning and chose to fight off darkness, the way I had to become stronger in this choice each day.
At the bistro on a Thursday, a man followed me to the bathroom and told me he wanted to fuck me. He pissed with the door open and gave me ketamine on a key. I was in a dream state and the beer tasted like the piss. The man was an electronic musician and probably a drug addict. He looked like a bunny. I told him that, and he brought his knuckles to his lips and made chomping sounds. For the rest of the night, we communicated with our hands to our mouths, chomping on imaginary vegetation.
At the end of October, I went to the club with a girl I was beginning to love. She made me feel restless. I chain-smoked for an hour while she stood next to me. She held my hand as it shook. We talked to men who were DJs and men who were on drugs. We talked to a man who was almost six feet tall. He put a pill in my palm and told me I looked like an artist. I turned to her, gave her half the pill. There was the time that passed and the smaller room with the three TVs, the way in that room our bodies became one body. The lights were green, neon. I wanted to kiss her. I didn’t. The pill made me see the end of the world: it was right there, past the four stools and the room with the mirrored trees. I walked over to it, walked right to the edge of it, and I smoked a cigarette.
The next weekend I kissed her against the graffitied wooden door, and I took her body in my hands. She gave me this look, this look where her eyes and mouth searched for stillness but could not find it, and she told me she had never been with a girl before. I touched her hair; I kissed her again. In the afternoons, I held her, and she asked me to make sense of the world. There was so much she didn’t know, so much that I could only gently whisper to her, her tranquility eroding as she cut her hair a bit shorter, as she was the one to kiss me first, as she retraced her mind with a new language of selfhood. Would you call yourself a dyke? she asked me one night over the phone.
Two days before Christmas, I left work for the final time with a book in my hand. I went from work to the bar and from the bar to another bar. At the second bar, she called me four times. I picked up the fourth time, and she slurred her words. Abby, I need to see you. It might be the last time I see you. In that moment, with the beer in my bloodstream and the smoke in my throat, I was completely there, completely aware. I told her that I needed to pack. I hung up the phone. I took the bus home, paced the hallways until the sun rose, left for the airport. This life, this gray, this love, this body, this was only temporary. I realized it as she spoke to me, as she asked for me for the final time, as she could not reach me.
