Empty flat phase is over!

α² moved in last night with the furniture and a black cat so the flat looks messy/grown up now. New chapter starting as we went from 2 people (α + me) to kinda 5 (α + α² + α²’s ex boyfriend β who comes in and out + me + cat). Loads of fun ahead!

Today, I want to pay a tribute to my long-time friend and soul mate α, who is the main reason why I fled to the Big Apple to recover from the hard times of 2013.

I met α at Brighton University in 2006, back then when we had baby faces – but we are both aging very gracefully. She came over from Kansas City Art Institute for a semester alongside 2 awesome American chicks (α³ and ε) who are still my core friends – we elegantly go by the name of ‘Whore House’. α landed in my class, the random self-proclaimed ‘Dance & Visual Art’ department.

At first I found her weird with her nose ring, red hair and name-that-doesn’t-exist, and she didn’t like me cause I was making fun of her American accent. I was still an arrogant French prick and she considerably helped me sink in the American kindness and good spirit. After a failed first impression, we embarked, her & me, on a very strange trip to Wuppertal, Germany, to see ‘Kontakthof’ by our Master and Goddess Pina Bausch. It was our bounding experience because we discovered that Dance-Theatre was equally not just a passion but a philosophy of life for us both. She flew to Wuppertal with only a small backpack and 3 blonde wigs in it, “just in case”.

Following the Wuppertal trip, I fell in love with her original mind and arty-metaphysical questionings such as: “What would happen if all the human beings were jumping at the same time?” We ended up doing all our university works together – we often had a third partner in crime, µ. We created a few cult and unjustifiably unrecognized pieces, like ‘At 5 in the Afternoon’, a low-budget-off-Broadway style musical, which we performed in Brighton Museum dressed as tennis players and for which we got very poor grade and bad feedback. But we discussed it this week and we both sense a masterpiece in that performance. It will probably get famous after our death. It is one of the reasons why I dropped out of Uni. The second reason was because the Whores went back to America.

During the Brighton era, I ended up living with the Whores most of the time – we were often 4 or 5 in a double room. So much laughter. Today the Whores are all over America – that’s 5 of us in total cause I only became friend with H in 2013 – but I still manage to see them more often than some of my Paris friends. α moved to NY about 4 years ago and now studies to be a yoga teacher in a studio that has as a motto ‘I Sweat Glitter’. I help her do her homework and we shot a fabulous one minute movie assignment on Thursday. It felt like the good old times when we were art students. We had costume issues till late. Ten minutes before midnight she was like: “Maybe I should wear a cape?”

Since 2006, α and I had uncountable adventures and creative experiences in a variety of places. We shot short movies on the streets of England, in a church in the South of France, on a mountain top in Colorado.  We almost died together on the roads of Iceland, broke into a disaffected herrings factory in Djupavik, met up a few months later in a cabin in Illinois to improvise a contact-dance in the corn fields.

Every time I leave her I never know when and in which context I am going to see her next. But our little planets align all the time and a few months only after I gave her a giant hug at Kansas City train station, I am again her unexpected flatmate in Brooklyn.

When we were 22, she was saying all the time: “We have awesome lives!” and she taught me to believe in magic. And now, look at that. We are turning 31 this year one month apart and we have beyond awesome lives. It is only getting better.