hybrid flash nonfiction by ren k.d.

DISPATCH FROM LE DÔME

​I’m in Le Dôme Café being decidedly quiet. I’ll take the long afternoon, I think, looking out the gaping glass windows for omens amidst the moody Paris landscape. Absorbing the atmosphere, the violinist in the corner. The air has a thickness to it, like an incoming damp. She’s dressed in her thoughtful gray-blue hue, overcast, and in that respect we match. Something about the low-light sharpens my knack for finding meaning; I can’t help if the Sun always feels like it’s shouting at me. I sip a perfectly smooth café au lait while admiring the sugar cubes and debating whether or not everything is art, or this is just France. 

​I’m a beautiful nineteen and I have everything in the world a person could possibly want. All this except for the fact that I seem to be terminally insane. I can’t stop wanting to die. Can’t stop flaying myself open at Life’s sacrificial alter. Can’t stop anything at all. I don’t just attract chaos, I seem to radiate it outward. The call’s coming from inside the house. 

​I’m alone today, friends are busy working. It gives me time to let myself be haunted by all the minds and musings that’ve walked through these doors, sat at this table, looked out these windows. I’d have absolutely no idea who I’d be without this fatalistic-sentimental cloud that hangs above my head. “Highly-strung” or “tightly-wound” or “intense,” whatever you want to call it, really. I just think of it as paying attention, being moved, caring about it all. 

​It’s just that everything is beautiful, everything is disgusting, and I want to have noticed it all. I want to have taken it seriously or be crushed trying. My father has two permanent lines between his eyebrows, they mark the ritual desire to further understand. I imagine I’ll get them too. Readjusting my posture I remember to blink; sometimes I get so lost in thought I forget to do that. 

​The Neuroscience lecture I’m midway through at Sarah Lawrence has been top of mind while visiting this eternal city. All its homage to feats of man. I’d spent all morning at the Louvre, considering the compromise of consciousness: masterful works of creative power and beauty tucked into the embodied genesis of all war, famine, suffering. When I return we’ll be doing our first brain dissection, with the goal of removing the amygdala. I think that mine must be small, given that I seem to have such little patience for life. For how it actually is. 

​Rain starts to fall, though gently, on the streets of Paris outside Le Dôme. I’m grateful to have a robust tolerance for caffeine and order another café au lait while I watch the landscape turn reflective. It’s my favorite thing about the rain, coming from a place where it never does. Even the street picks up the light: spackled with headlights of cars passing by and the glow of neon shop signs and rhythmic blinks of traffic lights. Everything bouncing off of everything else. There’s something so right about that, neurologically speaking.