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Carol plunked away at the new screenplay. This one felt different. Words floated off the page, it seemed to her, though the writers’ circle would confirm that impression for her. She thought so warmly of John, Philippe, and Anjali. She felt so much respect for these people who had opened up and revealed themselves through their writing, through their conversations at the writers’ circle.
As she clacked at her keyboard, she looked around La Bibliothèque Historique. People in their early twenties—students—were lined up on both sides of the long tables, staring intently into books and laptop screens. The girl beside her sneezed.
Carol sighed inwardly. She needed to be out writing, not just working in her apartment alone all day. She needed people. But they kept sniffing and sneezing, or the phones laying on the table next to them would bing with incoming messages and startle her out of her dream-like writing state. She really had to download more music and find her earbuds.
Such was life. The good with the bad, she mused. Like being single. Once again she had no partner, she was on her own life. But it was peaceful. She’d seen a T-shirt on a girl in Le Marais recently:
no
boyfriend
no
problems
None except the need to be at the library, among sneezing people, in order to not feel too alone while writing.
She felt different from the French students hard at work around her. They were preparing themselves for the jobs they hoped to land in banking, finance, government.
She was there for a different purpose entirely. She was writing as creatively as she could so she wouldn’t have to get a job in banking, finance, or government. So she was quietly, subversively, working at cross-purposes to them. She was a stranger in a strange land, an older freelancer among duty-bound kids, a Brit among the French, an English writer amongst French students.
She thought of the writers’ circle, where she felt among like-minded people, working individually on unique projects but sharing the common experience of art-making, of trying to tell a compelling story, of being Anglophones in a French environment, of being from someplace else but making their way in Paris.
She felt remorse that she might have caused unnecessary pain with her critiques. She loved the group. And individually, she liked each one so much. Anjali, on fire to write movies. John, so handsome, rich, and gifted at critiquing other people’s stories, but not his own. Philippe, so human, trying to set a good example. And writing about stupid alcoholics and such. Well, she liked him anyway.
She loved that lot, actually.
She couldn’t wait for the next meeting.
