11 years later

I’ve always been careless with my memories. I drink too much and never take pictures anymore. When I was living in Paris, I had a blog. It racked up to 9000 views a month. It was called ≪peau lumineuse≫ as I have an obsession for my own skin. I strive for softness, it hurts when I hurt. There’s an expression in Spanish, tener piel con alguien, to have “skin” with someone, when two people have chemistry. I always pay attention to that. My blog was about my experiences in Paris, an oniric time of going to film school, speaking French (the most pompous language), living in a quintessential seizième apartment. I was very lucky, my college somehow granted me and 23 other girls the opportunity to live there for one year, and with a limitless NaviGo, too! My posts were usually brutally poetic, I received messages every day from people who read my ramblings, praising me for my honesty. I wrote every day. Some months later, back in the US, or in Uruguay, I don’t remember, I deleted it all. I was angry at myself, as I am prone to be, for something or another. My self-esteem isn’t very healthy. I don’t know when it started, but it’s all I remember: guilt and self-hate. I also felt that the future was not real, I didn’t plan to be alive, let alone nostalgic, this long. So, from time to time, I had a desire to burn everything in my wake, to renew myself, to start over. Thus, I was very bad at archiving. I have not saved any of my writing; college papers, poems, essays, blog posts. I don’t have any pictures from my youth either, because I deleted my Facebook page in 2017 and did not save anything. I deeply regret this – as I regret so much more. It is a shame because I am such a good writer, too. Present day, neglect and sloth have me only writing tweets and club and restaurant reviews on Google Maps. That, and a script for a movie I’ve been working on for years, but can’t get past the research stage. And so, I find myself writing this, a sample of what I can do with a keyboard. I need work, as my gallivanting, self-destructive years seem to be over. Despite my lacking self-image, I intend to live a lot longer. It would be a dream to write for a living. Currently, I teach business English online, and I have to spend all day talking to people I have nothing in common with. I am exhausted, yet I have too many hours in the day because I am bored. If this seems desperate, it is because I am. I have squandered many opportunities, but here I am, asking for another one. The difference this time is survival. Youth is cruel, and the young do not deserve it.