I am conflicted.

My wealthiest lover is currently holding over my head the possibility that he may be planning a trip to France several months from now. He’s doing this in part because he wants to travel more as he approaches retirement (though he must do so always in the company of his brother, left very dependent on him due to an obvious mental affliction including but not limited to paranoia and schizophrenia) but also I think because he resents the currently exhausting work schedule I’ve had to take on owing to a lack of other profitable prospects and large looming debts. And so a man who could in five minutes and with no difficulty completely pay off all my debts is now flinging in my face the choice between missing two entire weeks of work, almost certainly without monetary compensation from him, and missing out on a serious chance to see my homeland for the first time.

There is however also to consider how bothersome it would be to go to France with the two of them. Despite numerous protestations he does seem to understand or care that this would be no mere vacation for me, that I’m not going to be taking selfies in front of the Tour d’Eiffel wearing a beret and holding a baguette (which are eaten by New Orleanians all the time under the name French bread, so they’re not even exotic here) or something equally stupid. Paris was the glittering impossible dream that drove my provincial ancestors to cross the Atlantic and come to this festering swamp in the first place, to endure hurricanes and tropical diseases and indolent slaves and prudish Anglos and a climate truly worthy of some circle of Hell all in the hopes that they or their descendants might one day join the ranks of the society of our capital. Even though it’s changed drastically in the intervening centuries that is the Paris I want to see, not the fluffy tourist version – or worse, the one conjured up in the minds of these two Trump-loving old men, with Muslim terrorists around every corner and a weak and ineffective government because fervent US patriots are still somehow riding off the high of the end of World War II. 

I also want – and have already demanded it as part of the itinerary should I go – to go to Gascogne, to see the land of my patrilineality (because it would take me months to see every corner of France that comprises my full lineage). I don’t care if that region gets comparatively little tourist traffic; if anything I prefer it as it would give me a greater sense. Besides, there’s a sort of strange pride in knowing that there’s a village and a nearby ruined château with my name on them, and that I might actually get to see them. I’d have to tempt my lover with a trip to Toulouse (he heard from a former lover some twenty years ago, a part-Arabic boy who’d grown up in Paris and lived in Nice, that that city has the best food in France) and perhaps Lourdes (site of the famous Notre Dame de Lourdes, venerated here as well) to get him over to that part of the country, but I’ll do it if I have to. That all depends on if I go at all, of course, but as I’ve yet to think of a way to travel to France with my own resources I may have to swallow my various irritations and ignore my debt. I’ve thought fancifully about taking the offer and then escaping from them at the earliest opportunity – as I’m the only one of us who can read or speak French even imperfectly I could get around far more easily than they could – but without somewhere definite to escape to in what is *sigh* technically a foreign country I imagine I’d have very few options and little hope of just being able to remain there.

At least I have a few months to think about this.