I took a train to Gstaad today. It was three and half hours from Geneva. I left at nine fifty one in the morning and arrived back at six in the evening. I stayed in Gstaad for one hour and fourteen minutes. I ate a lunette à la vanille, a beignet, a tomato mozzarella sandwich, and a cappuccino. I bought a post card and one sunflower.
My day was mostly filled with moving scenery. Most of my days are. I haven’t lived in one place for longer than nine months in over two years. I lived in one place for one year before that. That was the longest I had spent in one town in four years. Two people in the last week have asked me why I move around so often. I told one of them it’s because I’ve been trying to find my forever person, and I told the other that it’s because I’ve been trying to find my forever place.
The second person asked me do you think you’ve found your forever place? I’ve traveled a lot and I will continue to do so in my lifetime, but I have always been torn between two desires. Dirt stained hands and stinky shoes versus unpacking my suitcase and hanging pictures on a wall that I don’t have to worry about the paint coming off if I take them down.
What I realized today, as I watched the moving scenery and sat inside the panoramic train to Gstaad, is that I want my forever person to be my forever place. I have been moving around trying to find something still, but that is like bombing for peace and fucking for virginity.
What I realized today, is that I want a place of my own where taking the pictures down from my wall isn’t in the foreseeable future. Where it’s worth hanging them up because I will be there long enough to hang around and look at them.
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I took a train to Gstaad today. I bought a post card and one sunflower. The post card was for a woman named Claire-Lyse. She lives in Geneva. She is ninety-one and moved into an elderly home this past month. I looked around at her new home and thought about how hard it must be for her to have went to sleep in her forever home one night and the next night be in a new one.
Her forever person lives far far away in Cameroon. When she was younger, she had the same dream as me, and she didn’t know her forever home and forever person were going to be two different things. Now she has lived seventy years in love and yet separate from this love. How strong her heart must be to have lived this life.
She has kind eyes. The kind of eyes where you know that they would never judge you even after they had learned everything about you, the good and the bad. She has soft hands and they hold yours with grace when you sit next to her. She has a collection of miniature perfumes lined alongside her bed and photos of her grandsons everywhere you look. You can tell she is a proud woman. It makes you wonder about her family, who they are, what they are like. They must be just like her.
I took a train to Gstaad today. I bought a post card and one sunflower. The sunflower was for a woman named Veronique. She has kind eyes. The kind of eyes that see into you rather than through you. Her son has similar eyes. I have known these eyes and felt the same way. They have a way of making you feel seen and at home. She moved her mother into an elderly home this past month. Her mother’s name is Claire-Lyse.
Veronique put her flower in water that night and the next morning it bloomed toward the sun. The post card arrived to Claire-Lyse shortly thereafter.
And so what I realized today is that I hope I live my life so fully that when I am the age of Claire-Lyse, my eyes are kind as well. I hope to have met so many people and heard so many stories and created my own as well. I hope to have a collection of my own little perfumes, a table full of photos of my own grandchildren, and a wall full of them too. I hope to have a family of my own that I am proud of and who are proud of me. I hope my eyes see into the hearts of people and make them feel at home.
What I realized today, is that I want my forever person and my forever home to be one. And waiting for me when I return home there is always sunshine for our sunflowers to bloom.