off the map

I'm writing this from Paris, where I seem to have found myself for the past several days. This has felt like a vacation completely outside of time. Unmoored from all schedules, all responsibility. In the profoundest sense, I have felt for the past week as if I don't exist.

Travel agencies often talk about vacations as "escapes," but they often don't feel like them. You're full of enthusiasm to see the sights, to get to know a place or to go out eating and drinking. I haven't been doing much of that. I've been to Paris two times before and I guess I didn't realize how much I'd already seen, how familiar with everything I'd be. Absolutely no inclination to return to the Musée D'Orsay or to go inside Notre Dame. No inclination to do much of anything really except to spend some time with David and Mike. But time spent mostly tracing paths around the city, not going anywhere, not even spending much money at all. Haven't had too many big special meals, haven't really even painted the town red.

It hasn't felt so much like I'm in Paris, more like I'm nowhere. It's fantastic to realize that no one back home knows where I am. I feel like I've disappeared. The "real" world of my life in New York feels completely gone, infinitely distant (even though I'll be returning there in about 48 hours). There's an Emma Thompson/Antonio Banderas movie coming out in Paris this week that was never, to my knowledge, released in the US (it got terrible reviews in international festivals). The title is "Disparition." That's me. Disparu.

There's a primal thrill to this feeling, like that moment in Tom Sawyer when everyone thinks he's dead and he gets to watch his own funeral. I hadn't realized what a burden my life had become until I was released from it, released from everything. Because even all of the things I treasue - my job, my theqter projects, time spent with my friends, New York nightlife - they possess a cumulative weight. How fantastic to sneak out the backdoor of your life (a life that could hardly be much better than it is, frankly), to sneak out and really be gone.