the other day—i forget if it was during dinner or during one of our walks—one of my parents turned to the other and said sadly: the flowers are blooming too soon.
it makes me sad, thinking of the flowers that bloom out of time, like they’ve woken up too early, dreaming of spring. it makes me sad, too, to think that it’s because of global warming, but i haven’t stopped thinking about these tiny flowers since, so maybe it’s more than just the thought of our impending doom. daisies and forget-me-nots, delicate things, i see them sometimes when i go on walks by myself. i smile at them and let ourselves pretend it’s spring, that they weren’t confused by the rise in temperature that’s uncharacteristic of the january winter. i try not think of what happens when all the other flowers wake up in time months later. like. would these daisies and forget-me-nots be dead then?
my friend G, from work, who recently resigned, bless her, tells me of the neutral zone during our last call on the company zoom account. it’s from a book she’s reading. “it’s like when you’re ending something, but you haven’t begun yet, and you’re in the space where you’re grieving things. i’m sure the author said it in a nicer way, but that’s how i interpret it anyway.” i don’t think she could have done a better job explaining it to me.
it’s funny that i’m in switzerland now, famously neutral, and it’s been twenty four days since i arrived in my parents’ home in a small swiss-french village. i have fourteen days left before i pack my bags for home. a few more days before i navigate the administrative flurry of pcr tests and quarantining and the general mania of being in transit. i was just supposed to be here for christmas and the new year, like i usually do for the holidays, but my boss kindly encouraged me to take the opportunity to work from home here.
i did the math, even plotted it out with pen and paper, the time zone difference, but nothing compares to the lived experience of waking up at two am (or earlier), so i can be on time for manila. to say that it was a whiplash is an underestimation, but i am quite chuffed to be managing it well-ish.
back in august, when we were planning for our trip, i had hoped to spend some time visiting the rest of europe—paris, in particular. it always makes me feel embarrassed when i say that i love paris, especially because so many others feel lukewarm at best, and disappointed at worst about the city. how typical of a romantic like me. but i do, i do love it, have loved it since i stepped out of charles de gaulle and into a disappointingly grey maze of streets and grimy buildings back in 2014. i’m still learning to own my own joy, because it is that same joy that keeps me dreaming of paris. that bite in the mysterious chocolate bread i brought from boulangerie alexine in montmartre, the one where the lady pointed out at my bright yellow dress with cartoon characters all over and said: “ce moomin!” i don’t normally remember places, i can’t even tell you where we went skiing a few weeks ago, but boulangerie alexine, i never forget. jardin du luxembourg, where i met the old man who took me for coffee. rue danton, where he lived.
no plans have been made for paris, because switzerland is strict about pcr tests, and i doubt that my french is good enough to navigate the bureaucracy that will let me take a pcr test in one of their pharmacies. the thought is stressful enough as it is. my stepfather gently reminds me over breakfast, however: you still have time.
it feels a bit sinful to talk about this in the middle of a pandemic surge both in europe and in manila. when i found out that the cases were steeply rising in manila, i was surprised to feel that same caged-in, crazed, and consumed feeling, as if my body remembers the last time it felt that way when manila was doing badly. cases are still rising, but doctors from the company say that there is a reason for cautious optimism, because the numbers are showing a trend of milder cases, and the country’s hospitalization capacity hasn’t reached the hilt yet. the feeling settles deeper in my stomach. and so i continue checking up on everyone, as some of my loved ones had had covid back home, but apart from that i can’t really do much.
i know that i am here in switzerland so i can spend time with my aging parents, making the fugue state of being in between time zones completely and utterly worth it. i revel in the domesticity i rarely share with them, indulging in role of child in the household, which i rarely get to play.
so these days i wake up at two (or one or three or four) in the morning and go to work looking forward to the sunniest part of the day later in the afternoon. i’ve been taking french lessons, scheduled twice a week on thursdays and fridays, with a breton man called olivier, who has the same fluffy and kind appearance as mon petit-ami, arby. i warm up to olivier immediately.
<i would insert an image of olivier and i, except i get so shy to screenshot haha>
for one hour, we just chat. no structure or lessons. my french was bumbling the first thursday, i introduced myself so: je m’appelle vicky. j’habite á manille. j’ai vingt-huit ans. alors. hold on, olivier, J’AI VINGT-HUIT ANS?! pardon, olivier, the last time i introduced myself in french i was saying j’ai dix-huit ans, oh my god has it been ten years? oh my god. i was eighteen, and now i’m twenty eight, wow. woof. *blows raspberries* *shrugs* anyway. uh.... j’aime le pain beaucoup?
after talking about how much i loved bread, we talked about why i was interested in learning french. how do you say in french: twenty years ago, my godmother from quebec gave me a berlitz book for children on how to speak french, that i played the accompanying cassette tape on loop, and i have been enamored with the way the words looked (sœur was a favorite. sister.) more so the way the words sound. l’école. bleu. so i asked him: comment en dit ‘sound’ en français? how do you say “sound” in french? le son. j’aime le son de français. i love the sound of french. and then we talked about french culture, and he was surprised to find out that i loved the french new wave director eric rohmer, and that one of my favorite movies of all-time is le rayon vert. the green ray. godard and truffaut, i do not understand, but rohmer. rohmer felt like home.
“why do you like it?” he asked me. how do you say in french that i saw myself in the main character, delphine, as she meandered listlessly, a romantic looking for something, someone to cling on to. “how do you say in french, ‘he made me feel seen?’” “what does this mean? we do not really say this in france. you can say that it was profond.” profound. it really is profound to feel seen through space and time by eric rohmer and marie rivière, the actress who improvised the entire script.
i feel uncharacteristically energized after my french classes, so that’s when i do my work-outs and my meandering walks. i’m happy to report that i’ve continued my exercise program with my coach. it’s become a habit after a year, and when i don’t do it, my body feels ravenous. i exercise outside, under the sun, so i can get more vitamin d. apparently, dandruffs can be caused by lack of vitamin d, and i have been plagued with white flakes falling like snow from my scalp over the last few weeks. since i’ve gotten more sun, the dandruff situation has become much better.
i’ve been rounding out more and more, and i try not to get bothered by seeing my double chin return. my cheeks are fuller. undoubtedly, even as my mind and my heart are foggy at best in such a liminal space—the neutral zone—my body feels uncharacteristically settled with itself. it feels safe, perhaps because now i am being taken care of, as opposed to in manila, where i am one of the women of the household. i told my mom today, “it’s weird. my period came on time. i even got a notification from the app saying so and congratulating me.” “it’s because you’re not stressed.” maybe i have been underestimating the stress of the last two years trying to run a household by committee. trying to stay healthy. trying to stay sane for the sake of other people. i didn’t even know i was doing that. i didn’t know that my body was clenched, holding its breath for two years. i really thought i was okay. by all accounts, compared to everyone (frontliners, people who got covid, those who have lost a loved one, uncurable extroverts), i really was fine.
but now, without that fixation, and the accompanying need to distract myself from that fixation, i feel out of time. like a spring flower reaching out to the sun at the wrong time. it tickles me to think that one of my favorite pop stars felt the same way at some point: don’t know what i’m doing, am i living this right? why am i the only one in a different spacetime?
i am in between an ending and a beginning, and somehow the strategist and the project manager in me are hibernating, dead asleep. sometimes they blink their eyes open and panic about long term plans, about next steps, about the numbers in my financial spreadsheet. but usually they lie dormant, probably adjusting to the time zone. wide awake is the dreamer, happily exploring bridges and winding roads leading deeper in the forest. wide awake is the inner child, happily receiving and just being.
but where is the part that is supposed to be grieving? i don’t understand this. G says that’s part of being in the neutral zone, the grief of transitions. of change. perhaps that is what i am going through now. i see my friends taking advantage of the momentum of the new year: G herself kickstarting projects on top of a new job, H taking steps towards a new hobby, and i so badly want to be where they are. but a larger part of me truly cannot be arsed.
i haven’t even been capable of hyperfixating, not even on bts, and while french is fun, i wouldn’t say that’s a hyperfixation either. i haven’t binged on any series or shows, either. and yet, no matter what time it is, when my head hits the pillow and my body settles in my bed, i fall asleep within minutes, which never happens.
recently my openness to ambiguity has been the topic of conversation between my stepfather and i. he’s not so convinced that i am open to ambiguity, given my fixation on job descriptions. i argue my case, saying that i happily travel to a foreign country with a foreign language, and he says, sure, but it’s not the same thing. i don’t tell him that it’s my precise intolerance of ambiguity that makes me learn a new language so quickly, the same way i did when i learned portuguese in a month when i traveled to brazil six years ago. it’s this intolerance of ambiguity that pushes me to act, because it irritates the living daylights out of me when things aren’t clear. when the next steps aren’t defined. i’ve been told that i see things as too black and white at work, and i always reeled against that accusation, but perhaps i am being humbled to admit that they are, unfortunately, malheuresement, right. and i am wrong. *shudders*
i hate that i don’t know what my next steps are. that while the strategist and the project manager and the executive in me lay sleeping, the machinations of my mind are undoubtedly programmed to their rhythms. i like to appear wild, brave, offbeat (ha!), but in reality i have difficulty living up to that image of me that marches to the beat of my own drum. the universe is forcing me to march to the beat of my own drum, and part of me can’t stand it.
but then they say, one of the stages of grief is acceptance. what is there to accept?
that i spent 2021 in a mode of magical thinking, distracting myself from decisions that needed to be made. that i am a romantic who loves paris, a romantic who wants and wants and wants. that perhaps it is really time to pack my bags and move on to my next big thing. that i am afraid of being a flower that blooms too soon, and misses out on springtime. that perhaps i am meant to be a flower that blooms out of time.
i don’t know. i really don’t know. the thought of my whole life ahead of me feels me with despair, and i’m not going to lie, sometimes the thought of disappointing myself, of not doing things perfectly, of not living up to my own potential, whatever in the hell that is, makes me want to jump off a cliff.
whenever i feel that way, i try to remind myself of my favorite björk quote that i’ve wanted to have tattooed on my forehead since i discovered it. territorial hope affair.
and so. we try to dig a cave, even if sometimes it just looks like we’re trying to dig holes in the ground we can bury ourselves into. i’ve taken to cataloguing little moments of joy recently. like today, my stepdad called out from the living room to my mom and i, who were in the kitchen. he said: “uh, ladies, earlier today i got a notification from alexa for a reminder to ‘talk dirty.’”
hahahahahahahahhahahahahaha what? i’ll leave on this note, as my uterus is pleading me to return to bed so we can go back to reading fan fiction.
bon courage mes amis, or, as the koreans will say, fighting!
all my love,
vicky
what are tiny moments of joy that you’ve wrestled from the world recently?
also: do you read fanfic? dude i’d love to hear it.
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This was a nice essay to read. I also suffer from the disease of strategy brain. We can wean ourselves off with practice