Mom called. She told me to stop letting others dictate my plans.
So on May 27th, using up two hundred in United credit from a delay in Tokyo, I booked the cheapest flight to Charles de Gaulle. The next morning, I was in Paris.
…
I had forgotten how beautiful the airport was.
Metal escalators with glass ceilings emerged from brutalist walls, ferrying passengers through a storm of concrete. Taxis orbited on roads marked by thick pillars on one side and softened by patches of grass on the other.
I adjusted the Holga around my neck. Much lighter than last time.
…
I was traveling with Mom then. Terror attacks in Brussels had St Pancras in panic, but she managed to convince our way onto the last train from London.
Dad’s old Nikon was heavy. Its strap would dig into my neck, but I didn’t mind. I loved admiring the homeland of the Spider King through its viewfinder, trapping the Louvre and d’Orsay neatly into a 16GB card.
Yet my deepest impressions went unrecorded: green apples in the Sofitel lobby, mussels I measured against my hands, and a high fever resolved by Tamiflu and acutely expensive sashimi.
…
Nearly a decade had passed since then. I thought about revisiting the museums but found no urge to go.
What else is there? Why am I here?
I did not come for the lush greens of Renoir but to share in the abject grey of Camus. I wished to see the Montmartre that birthed Meursault. I wished to savor the city where a “heart could lean on nothing.”
…
I adjusted the water bottle holding up my charger a few more times before giving up. The wall port was simply too loose.
The table was a tiny fold-up in a crevice shared by the room’s twelve inhabitants. Still, I was very grateful: I had booked the wrong night and was lucky to have found a room at all.
I still viewed hostels through the rose-tint of “backpacking.” This was far from the truth—I rolled in a large checked luggage and planned to buy another tax-free—but I did learn a few lessons before the romance dissipated:
Bring your own lock. Don’t assume lockers come with locks. Or that there’s enough for all of you.
Arrive early to pick your bed. Don’t pick the bunk closest to the sole bathroom, it’s empty for a reason.
Pack slippers. And a change of earplugs.
I didn’t have much luck finding a companion either. Hostels, I assumed, were chock full of freewheeling youth, but save for Leo, an energetic father from "the country of Messi," the room was quiet. I thought about inviting him for lunch, but judged from his half-eaten thermos of rice and beans that he already had enough.
…
The 18th Arr. is nothing like the 8th.
There’s no Champs Elysées. Nor Seine-side strolls. Instead, as soon as I stepped out of the hostel, I was greeted by textile hawkers, spinning doners, and an oddly chic Popeyes. To feel so at home in another country was a true blessing.
I broke my day-long fast with an espresso under a rainbow awning. The rain kept beating down, so I ducked into the first restaurant that caught my eye. This turned out to be the best decision I made in Paris: Bordeaux and razor clams cure all afflictions.
…
Haussmann was a fucking unit. I mean that with the utmost respect.
The arterial roads of London curve to avoid the richest areas—eminent domain is expensive, after all. But Haussmann kept the Boulevard Saint-Germain axial by condemning the backyards of the elite instead. Geometry knows no class.
I took the 4-train down to Étienne Marcel to admire his Boulevard Sébastopol. When I arrived, my first thought was:
Wow! It’s quite plain.
I wasn’t sure what I expected. It’s a wide road, not a tourist attraction. I kept myself entertained by imagining Haussmann as a cute little beaver razing neighborhoods and inspecting facades.
Still, traffic was still a mess. Paris would need another Haussmann or three to survive the Summer Olympics. Or perhaps a Corbusier.
…
One can only walk and eat so much.
Soupe à l'oignon on Rue Dauphine. Palestinian flags and broken glass at the University. Pretty pixel graffiti. An antique district with no restrooms. A salad niçoise to sit and rest my feet.
What do people do for fun anyhow?
I took the metro back to charge my phone. I tucked two Balzacs, scavenged from a closet-sized bookstore, into my luggage before heading back down.
The lady at the reception replied that the left side was livelier, so I headed out to walk around and eat something.
…
The rest of the night blurred together:
A steep staircase lined with gorgeous graffiti. Two couples in sidecars wheeling down the cobblestone. Another crying on a park bench. A pair of brown boots hanging from the telephone line.
A poem was glued to the wall behind me:
Inside of us there is this crying child. This crying child that we were and who is dying.
Dying in a world that is going too fast and too strong.
We no longer take the time to look up and admire the beauty around us. We gradually lose our ability to love each other, to tolerate each other, to respect each other.
Inside of us there was this crying child. This crying child that we were and who is dead.
Tell me, where did the spark go in the back of your eyes?
I didn’t know. Somewhere along the line, I stopped living for myself. I no longer believed I could find a reason to be. So I passed the baton to everyone else.
I’ll want what you want. I’ll be you who want me to be.
…
There was a terrance bar on the butte. I pulled out a metal chair, sat down, and looked around. A young man in a blue suit was talking shop with a grey-haired man in a black one. An old couple enjoyed blonde pints side-by-side in comfortable silence.
To answer one poem with another:
2 am: moonlight. The train has stopped
out in the middle of the plain. Far away, points of light in a town,
flickering coldly at the horizon.As when a man has gone into a dream so deep
he’ll never remember having been there
when he comes back to his room.As when someone has gone into an illness so deep
everything his days were becomes a few flickering points, a swarm,
cold and tiny at the horizon.The train is standing quite still.
2 am: bright moonlight, few stars.
I longed for this serenity. I wanted to taste what Meursault felt at the guillotine—to find tenderness in the world’s indifference.
…
A gin fizz. Then pinot with salmon tartare. The sun was setting. The sky was pink.
A girl came by with a tin for the Red Cross. I gave her my coins, and she put a sticker on my hand. I paid for my meal and stumbled down the hill.
A gin and tonic or three. An Asian couple behind the bar. They looked happy. I stumbled upstairs to a urinal covered with stickers. Then stumbled back down.
Rue de Martyrs, what a name.
The corners of my eyebrows dropped. I could almost trace the lack beneath my heart and sit on it. Is that so wrong?