I dreamed of living in Paris
Doesn’t every little girl?
One day this little girl grew up out of her childish, heart-twisted and timid ways and stepped into a bigger version of herself in a faraway land.
The magical age of twenty one lit up along the golden lit lamps along the Seine. Of course she would fall in love with the version of her set in this scene. And like most loves, she would endure the alien-ism of expatriates and prejudices of the next 4 years, because love endures. Because she needed it to reach this higher version of herself.
Confirmation bias: every step in her life thus far led inevitably to this point. The films, the pretend airline reservations at the age of 10, the French books before she could read any French at the age of 8, French classes, French Club, French writers and philosophers, pictures of Paris on this very account.
This older version at first committed many of the same wild mistakes as the younger version. Rome was not built in a day. One does not simply wake up one day and recognize the damage they leave in their wake. It is a reflection that needs time, takes its time, sometimes too much time.
The reflection takes many different forms. Most are painful. Some days it was watching black tears curl around her cheekbones in a mirror. Some days it was a stone-like expression (in a black taxi cab at 4 in the morning on the way to not even home, from a sex club, the car manoeuvring a roundabout, Avenue du Wagram, his head asleep on her lap) marvelling at where she had fallen.
It is easy to love the self when the self is at its most divine. There are qualities she could admire. But loving the insidious parts of the self was no easy summit, and this too, may be forever a work in progress.
Things hurt her but not cleanly. It took time to understand that the pain came from her own lack of self (-love, -awareness, -soothing).
Paris is gray, stuck in old times, cramped, bustling, but also green, and gold, and quiet, and shining.
Things are calm and comfortable most days. More mature, cautious, demeure, less frenzied. The cat is sleeping beside her and her man (of course there’s one, for the happy ending) who has just finished watching A Beautiful Mind with her, touches her face and asks her if her beauty is real or fiction. They only speak in French.
Life falls around her now like a well-tailored evening gown slips over the hips. Like the night sky slips over the tops of tin roofs and molds itself to the moon.
Until she decides to break apart the seams and do it all over again.
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