Within and without

I am currently stranded, trapped within a void. My house is a multistory affair divided into distinctly separate living quarters. My family owns the entirety of the large suburban construction but due to reasons of finance we rent out all but the ground floor. Due to this arrangement there is a hallway shared by all the tenants from which branches off a locked door that is the entrance to what I can refer to as my home.

After a particular alcohol fueled nocturnal excursion about a year back during which I lost my keys. My mother has refused to provide me with a new set which means I cannot enter my own abode unless she is home. In the rare instance that she is away, since I can politely ask one of the residents in the higher floors to come down and let me into the building its self, she usually hides the keys to our actual section of residence somewhere in the hallway.

Today however, she has neglected her duties to do so, hence I am currently sitting in the hallway. I am typing this on my phone, while draped tiredly over the stairs which lie directly next to the door to my beloved home. My sentiments of misery are only excentuated by the fact that the motion sensitive lights turn off every three minutes, plunging me into the evening darkness thus forcing me to stand up and display motion in order receive the short attention and glorious light of the fickle motion sensitive machine.

To further emphasize this feeling of pathetic depression, my cat has run right up to the other side of the door to venture on a campaign of continuous melancholic mewing and sad scratching. It has stayed with me these past thirty minutes, crying from the other side of the solid impenetrable rectangle of wood and despite myself I admit I am rather touched.

Now I hear the light clink of the metal front garden fence and with it the approaching footsteps of liberation. So ends my actually brief but sensationally lengthy stay, becalmed within the void.

Paris

 After observing my complete inactivity from afar, out of the range of noxious fumes emitted by pajamas worn all day several days in a row, my mother has finally put her foot down. And underneath that firmly descending foot lie all my hopes, dreams and aspirations of spending a relaxing half term. She has decided she will throw me out onto the streets.

 However not out onto any ordinary street but the streets of Paris. She has made the executive decision that I will be spending three days of my half term holiday alone in Paris for no apparent reason. She has claimed that her motive behind this illogical course of action is the improvement of my French language skills but I suspect her chief ambition is to simply get rid of me for several days.

 I can, of course, vividly picture the disapproving faces of the minority of people who read my blog. Shaking their heads from side to side and wondering what on earth I am complaining about. I am to be sent, after all, with some allowance and organized lodging to what could be considered one of the cultural capitals of the world. The center of art, fine cuisine and fashion (as well as racism, riots and right wing power but those demerits are obviously far outweighed by the positivity of a single baguette).

 Though this may, at first seem like a golden opportunity to study culture and fine arts, the one overwhelmingly negative factor is language. I am a being that thrives on eloquent communication, nothing gives me greater pleasure than the beautiful stringing together of an elegant and possibly offensive metaphor. To talk, to tell, to freely swim within the vast seas of vocabulary. To surf on the waves of words or to feel the gentle ebb and flow of a good narrative. To ride on the cheerful back of a pun or word play. These make up about seventy five percent of my will to continue living on this miserable spherical dung heap floating depressingly in space.

 The French however, typical of their generally unhelpful nature, speak French. A language which spans before me as a dry barren alien plain. Filled with hostile shadows, renegade grammatical irregularities and cunning pronunciation problems, all lurking just outside my peripheral vision, waiting for the first chance to strike the damning blow of public humiliation. In French I am a fish without water or to clumsily construct in the enemy language, like a gorilla with arthritis trying his hand at origami, "un poissons qui n'a pas d'eau"