Travel Writing

I'm feeling the late night sting in my eyes and a slightly acidic sting sitting poorly in my stomach. I'm trying to decide what travel writing means before I go to France. I think I understand possibly. Under the guise of the same character, bear with the story if it feels sappy, it's a story...

This is travel writing. Travel writing is about the two of us. The proverbial 'You' and the proverbial 'I' are falling in love like in a futile geometry lesson. Perpendicular. We meet at that one intersection and then go our separate ways, thinking that we've met like ninety degrees never to see one another again (think Rhône et Saône, Scève). But in thinking that we were falling in love perpendicularly and at ninety degrees, we were wrong. We forgot to account for curvature.

'I' forget that shared something with 'you' that 'I' can rarely share with others. It was a smile. [...]but it all brings me back to the point that we shared smiles. We shared arching of cheekbones, uncontrollable to the point where our muscles, the ones right underneath our eyes, started to lock up. 'You' looked at me and 'I' couldn’t tell whether 'you' invited a kiss or not. 'I' was tempted over and over again but restrained myself for fear that such a simple and common gesture, the sexual value of which has declined into a formality so that its symbolic value has decayed, would be ill received. I should have given 'you' a damn kiss. But in that moment, the kiss’ value had returned and begged its execution while restraining itself. Fucking puritanical. 'I' left 'you' on that corner that night by that café, and it was the wrong thing to do. The café’s yellow awning laughed at me. Emasculating. Mocking. 'I' walked away, the smell [..a nostalgic smell left on my arm from 'you'...] beckoned like a midnite blue-lit lily and all sorts of flowers stand open all-hours in Paris.
Nearly a year ago, at six in the morning in Paris, paces away from Gare du Nord, still dark and the Christmas air crisp [me, a jew...Christmas air...forgive the cheese], passing by the old church of Saint-Laurent that asked “Dieu, où demeures tu?” [...Saint-Laurent never found the answer, itself too blackened blackened in the grime of an ancient highwater mark (very high-water)...]—Past Saint-Laurent and past Gare du Nord the morning was still dark, it was just after six; 'I' passed that blue-lit flower stall and 'I' thought of 'you'. 'I'’d not thought of 'you' since [...] a year and a half before. My thought was that had 'I' the time to fashion any sort of arrangement and buy it from the flower-shop Greek, then drop the flowers on a still darkened doorstep at six in the morning, 'I'’d drop it off at 'your' doorstep. Little did 'I' know that 'you' were in that same city at that exact moment...dammit how the thought struck me! Sure, 'you' were on a different corner, but not so remote! And it's the proximity that still plagues me!

Travel writing is difficult because the significance of events and smells and sights don’t become apparent, or rather we don’t make them apparent except for several months after. Is it love that’s felt, perhaps sickly, and only in distance? Or is it the want to be freakishly perfected in all aspects of living, the drive for meaning, that forces significance upon our travels? Is it my wanting to feel such a kiss again that leads me to connect that Parisian blue-lit flower-shop to your lips against the yellow awning on the café corner 6.000 miles away