LISINSKI: L’automne Honnête

While away on vacation, something finally close to autumn back home arrived in Paris. Unfortunately — and to my surprise — the changing season is driving a searing knife of sadness into me.

For most of my life, late spring has been my favorite time of year, but something about New England has started to warm me to the autumn season. There’s something exhilaratingly clear about the crispness. It is better weather, I think, for being pensive (and for writing). I’m extremely partial to the flavors of fall, too, with all of their homey, nurturing comforts. Give me anything with butternut squash, and I’ll be a happy man.

Perhaps it is just that homesickness sets in after nine weeks, but the fall atmosphere makes me yearn for both Long Island and Boston in a deeper sense than I have experienced thus far. Something feels different now than all of the bad days toward the start of the semester. This tristesse is not a straightforward sadness, but instead a feeling that as much as I settle in, I am still out of place.

Returning from fall break had an effect. I “came home” from vacation to a place that was familiar enough, and I confidently navigated from the airport to my homestay without so much as a hesitation. And yet coming back here, I felt off: this place is functional, but with something inherently, unshakably different.

I wrote a crummy little French poem for class about how autumn is the most honest season – L’automne Honnête. Perhaps that faux-poetic prophecy reflected something in me: that in autumn, it becomes clear how much I miss what I already had.

What am I even homesick for? The achingly dull suburbs of Long Island? Being surrounded by thousands of bright-eyed freshmen in Boston? I don’t have the answer for that, but I believe I’m learning the subconscious power of place and identity.

Everything about the Parisian November feels strangely familiar enough — the tiny gold flakes of sunlight behind quickly graying clouds, the crinkled leaves clinging on desperately for just one more day, the wind that smells clean and cold. But because it is familiar, it is also saddening. Paris is asymptotically approaching places that are a deep part of me, and I cannot help but know that I am apart, elsewhere and separate.

I’m sure I was warned about this as “part of the abroad process,” but like most cautions, I ignored it blithely.

Now I am caught in limbo. Fall break was vacation, so everything was thoroughly new and exciting. Home is static, a recharging constant to which I can return when I need to sink into the fabric of my past for a weekend or two.

Paris, though, is neither. Presently, this city occupies a space between two distinct dimensions but not wholly part of either. I feel jammed into a murky ether between the two, as if I suddenly became my dearest pen, the one I have used since high school, and rolled into the impossibly tiny crack between two desks.

Here is now too familiar to give me a nonstop sense of wonder and stimulation — and trust me, nothing fills me with more self-hatred than being uninspired by the Eiffel Tower — but I am still too much of an outsider to let down all of the walls and be comfortable.

The sheen has worn off. At the start, I could push away the tiny voices by telling them this is a beautiful city full of lights, a new adventure, “a city for writers.” But now it just feels like any other city: full of its own nuances which should certainly be appreciated, but a city where leaves die and creeping winds sneak into the insides of my bones and night comes far too quickly.

And do not mistake me: this is not a terrible fate by any means; I do not intend to bemoan my fortune. It is simply that the process of growth, with all of its challenges and surprises, has become most clear at this crossroads. What was it Britney Spears said? “I’m not quite in America / But not yet a Parisian…”

So, in another cosmic concurrence, it is in autumn, season of change, that I realize that places lose their luster and evolve. I can only hope Paris is still warm enough for me in the long winter.