Monday and Tuesday have been filled with cleaning up the attic. While I was refilling cardboard boxes with even more books – one day I shall have my study room with a wall-to-wall library, and everything will fall into place – my mind wandered off to my new story. The one about Luxembourg, that I’m thinking up a plot for.
Cleaning up like this is a wonderful way of realising the wealth of one’s own past as a possible source of stories. I came across a lot of memorabilia of that period, that I had forgotten all about. From 1994 till 1996, I lived and worked in Luxembourg-city, and while going through my boxes in 2010, I couldn’t help but dive into my past.
It was an interesting place to live, in such a small and wealthy country. Where more than 60% of the jobs are being held by foreigners – Americans, Brits, Irishmen, German, French, you name it, they’re there – and where the Luxembourgian people themselves are living in a very secluded society. Where most people make lots of money, and have rich and productive lives. They are great consumers too: they all drive big cars, eat in the finest restaurants, want for nothing. Yet this pretty green little land faces one of the highest suicide-rates of Europe. It’s a place that has an obvious beauty. And one where you can walk around from morning till evening, without being spoken to by anyone: not while entering a bus, ordering a coffee, or paying for groceries in a store.
I have set them aside; the maps and guides to the town, the letters I received from friends, the diaries and notes I took there. I’m looking forward to going through them. I found a video-tape back, that my friends made for my thirtieth birthday, and that I thought I had lost. If I recall it well, that one has a lot of clips from my apartment on Rue des Celtes, and down-town Luxembourg on it. I will have to get that one digitalized, and see myself back then. There are many small shreds of stories that spring to mind, and I’m taking them down on cards. But I have to let it all simmer a bit longer. The plot needs time to take a shape.
The most important thing I know already; this will be a story about feeling utterly lonely in a place of such great wealth.
Maai’s Creative Portfolio 