Comfort Zone Cafe

So here I am in my cafe..the one with Emile the waiter, with 2,80E Kir Mûre, the one on Place de l’Hotel de Ville—Brasserie de la Mairie. It was recommended to me on the first day of class. I tried it out, liked it for its convenience, friendliness and cheapness. Now everyone calls it “my” cafe.

People said I’d have “my” cafe in France, my patisserie, my bar, my boulangerie. I thought they were joking. I mean, in America, you don’t have “your” anything; no matter how often you’ve been to it, it’s still just an impersonal locale, a place to get things done. But here, you really do get to claim your spots and form bonds with your businesses.

It sits uneasily with my tendency to avoid comfort zones. I would rather be miserable all my life, and fail at everything I ever risked doing—than succeed and know, in my deepest ashamed heart, that I never really pushed it as far as it could go.

But I say that, and reflect:  pushed it how? Yes, I’m living in France…but I drink at “my” cafe, go to “my” bars, buy my food in the same shops where I get that familiar unsmiling nod. I may have spent last Thursday night chasing tequila shots with Guinness, ending up on a cute guy’s lap…but I went home alone, and watched a movie. Am I hiding from life?

It’s so strange, to live in such inescapably bombastically hardcore times, and know it, and be forced to spend my days on minutia—studying the slightest choice of lines in a painting, acquiring bread, playing whack-a-mole with various health symptoms. I know what’s going on in the world. But I’m so happy here, sipping my Kir as the Provencal air grows cold, typing my thoughts and listening to some odd world music on the cafe speakers.

I’m settled enough, finally, to not feel continuously exhausted, threatened, and in upheaval; but I know also that I can’t take anything for granted ici. I have my little don’t-fall-down-the-loft-stairs and don’t-spray-the-curtainess-bathtub routines down pretty well; but I’m not fooling myself. I know I’m always in danger of encountering an impossible or humiliating situation here. I like that. The likelihood is hight that, were it not so, I’d already be bitching about being bored.

The deeper I live, the farther from the rut of the normal, the more sharply profound, the wilder, the better.

Related Posts

• Au Revoir, Provence
  I leave Aix-en-Provence, France, for Edinburgh, Scotland, on December 6. I'll be staying with my friend who's a student at the University of Edinburgh. Ever since my decision to switch majors and...
• Mon Seul Desir
  Hanging out in my little French bedroom. It’s pretty cold and windy today, so up here in my loft, under my duvet, is warmest. I can’t believe I live here. I look around this studio apartment, and t...
• Distance & Resistance
  I just broke down and downloaded Mozilla Firefox onto the ancient Dell computer provided for our use here in the great room of the farmhouse in Giverny, France. It had been running some furiously o...