Fingerprint Skies

I am sometimes lost in wonder, when the sky looks like quick white paint strokes, half brushed against the blue, like afternoons lost in highways in Denver; that two places can share the same sky.

I have found ways Denver, and Rennes, mold together at night, sharing heartbreaking full moons, and blood red orange sunrises that burn between the trees. The way my host mom and my mother, both love jazz, and sip their wine really slow. The soft way they both listen to me, their blue eyes, their small lips. The way they love simplicity, images, postcards, dreams, beautiful things, placed around their homes, like secrets and treasures. The way I feel when I enter the yellow warm apartment, like when I curl up with mom at night, looking at her collection, as I listen to her heartbeat.

Like on Sunday afternoons, as the sun and I discover my host mom’s stories, her worry stones, paper flowers, and feathers. The way my host mom and my mom laugh, that full face, wrinkled eyes laugh. But my mother claps her hands, and laughs loud, while my host moms is still like a little mischievous girl, giggling at a trick she played on her father. They both are teachers, they both have come from childhoods full of hard men, and need for freedom, parents who smoked and fought. Their strength, both raising families on their own, and trying to give their children a childhood that was better than theie own, a wholeness they have been searching for. The way they both love walks, my mom watching the geese settle over the lake in the afternoon. The way they get lost in books.

This year I have lived like a ghost, transparent, and observant, not quite cut from my roots, but stretching out of them, and untangling myself. I could never leave Denver behind, the mountains, my family, my memories, and I could never leave English completely. As I sit on a bus, surrounded by French, I am secretly writing poetry in English. America is a part of me, and living here, thousands of miles away, I finally understand that.

There is a strong difference between the U.S and Europe, perfectly defined just by space. Here everything is put together, houses like slits in the city. Rooftops rising, and falling, and filling up space, streets so crooked, and small. Sidewalks are crowded with tables for cafes, people walk everywhere, there is a thrum of footsteps. You are lost in the secret spaces of the streets. I can drive for 15 minutes in Denver, and still not be able to hold the sky and land in my hands, but here, just out of Cesson, I am already in the mossy woods and stone barns of the countryside.

In the U.S it is space, roads, and highways, skyscrapers, and country sky. After you loose the cities, you are lost in the sky, there is nothing for miles. Our liberty and hearts breathe, we drive fast, we want to feel the space. We don’t walk, and we are always pushing further out, taking up the space, the sky, we want to discover everything, we are more young and ignorant. But that is what makes us so happy, we are naïve, everything is beautiful, undiscovered, and reachable. In Europe, you take what you have, what space, you are polite, you don’t build skyscrapers to block the sunlight. You avoid eye contact, you love the ones you are close to more than anything: with passion, and respect, everyone else seems to live in shadows, in robots that build and breathe in the city. They are missing the loneliness we have in the U.S. the undiscovered desert, thunderstorms, the isolation of the stars, somewhere lost in the middle of the mountains.

But what I love most about Marie, other than her compassion, and cooking, is her sense of wanting to loose herself in time and space, as I have felt so many times back home. Going for walks for months in the hills and ocean sides of France and Spain, she meets people, and builds a relationship with the sky. Her small exhausted body folding into the bunk beds, full of silence and contentment. The way she has an understanding of old trees, languages, and the need to make new friends, new perspectives. The reasons for why she welcomes students into her home, like opening her door to the world, she says, and I understand as she tells me this that she really believes it. This experience, the exchange of cultures and ideas, is so important and beautiful. Those moments we are completely in understanding of the other, where words slip and fade, and ideas and forms seem to mold together. The way I look at the sky with the same beautiful adoration that she does, even if is soft blue sky reminds me of summers and road trips, and her of hikes in the countryside, we still stand at the glass windows in silent awe.