novembre, salope parmi les salopes, traitre parmi les traitres.
this post is an odd one. the kind that has been brewing in my head for weeks, thinking of what i would say on the day of, something clever and perfect and respectful. something to honour the dead. now, nothing sounds right, of course. i was once told you should never try and talk in the name of other people, that the only person you can ever speak for is yourself. so, perhaps, here we are.
some of you may already know this (though, if you follow me since my the good wife days, i really do wonder what you’re doing, following this trainwreck for this long, haha) but i was in paris on the 13th of november 2015. if you're not french, the date might not mean much to you, or you may have forgotten it. if that's the case, hopefully, this handy wikipedia article will now jog your memory.
for me, though, november 2015 was: my last year of law school, my first year back from michigan. i'd spent a year in the us studying falling in love, and flew back home sad and heartbroken about a boy. i remember that in paris, the weather was wet but warmer than what i'd gotten used to, i'd moved back in with my mum and would take the dog out on walks at the dog park. there was another boy there, on whom i had a strange rebound crush that led nowhere. i wrote mountains of words that i now cringe at. i was young and twenty-two.
so, yes, i was in paris, that day, but i wasn’t there. not at the terraces, not at the bataclan. i had a job interview that night, for an internship with a law firm i kind of liked. it had gone well. i remember cycling home from it and the cobblestones on the way to the invalides glistened under the rain. i was hopeful - the thought of a job after graduation doing wonders. i know that most people remember their uni years as this wild, multi-year-long party, but i just recall being anxious. about what i was doing, what i was choosing, what path i would take. i was coming up on my sixth and last year (yeah, i have two masters, i'm an educated bitch) and in a bit of a pickle. i felt like i couldn’t stand school anymore, everything seemed vapid and pointless. i wanted life (real life) to begin, but couldn't figure out what i wanted it to look like. all of my friends were applying for traineeships in big law. i guessed i should, too.
i remember being tired, deciding not to go out that night. luckily, everyone i cared about was tired, that friday. my best friend from law school (we'll call her naomi) and her boyfriend were supposed to eat out. a little cambogian restaurant down the street from where she lived (yeah, that restaurant). ended up getting lazy, ordering in instead. we spent a lot of time, the both of us after the fact, wondering what would have happened if they had gone out. having now spent the last few weeks reading court transcripts off twitter, through victim testimonies, i think that no matter who you are or where you look, there were a lot of could-have-s and should-have-s and what-if-s, that night.
now, just to be clear, i’m not writing this as a badge of honour. i'm not writing this to paint myself as the victim i am most certainly not. i am writing this to show and explain the impact that, six years later, a single act of violence can still have on the life of a random bystander. the only thing i can claim is: a) i was living in paris when it happened and b), the attacks had a life-changing impact on my life. that's it. i didn’t survive anything, i just carried on living.
that evening, i found out about what was going on outside over a text alert. i was sitting on the couch, watching homeland with my mother. i waited until the end of the episode to tell her. i watched the news until two, maybe three in the morning. she went to bed much earlier than i did. it never felt like she cared as much as i did. in retrospect, i think she’d seen enough horrors in her lifetime for this just to be one of them.
i remember the president's voice breaking on national tv. i remember his words: ‘dozens of people dead,’ ‘hundreds injured.’ i remember facebook check-ins. i remember the police sirens and the ambulance sirens, endless for days and weeks, and what felt like months on end. i remember hugging naomi the first time i saw her again. we were in line for the security checks before getting into uni. everywhere had new security checks, after november. uni and shopping centres, and even pubs. i remember her tears on my shoulder and me standing there, stock still but unable to speak. i remember the makeshift memorials at republique and the crowd panics. i remember wanting to get out, drawing in millions of people in the streets like we had after charlie. i remember not being allowed to, because public gatherings were forbidden in a state of emergency. we hadn’t caught them all, yet, you see?
i remember feeling unsafe. it is a strange day-to-day that is hard to explain unless you've experienced it. i remember my appointment at the apple store that week to get my iphone screen fixed, and the deserted louvre, with all the tourists gone. me and the mona lisa and a brave spanish couple. i remember going in to eat crepes the next day and crying silent tears into my plate. i remember watching, always watching, whenever i was sitting outside at a cafe and a car with dark windows drove by.
that is still there. whenever i am in france, i people watch and always know where the exits are.
i remember nice, a few months afterwards. the truck down the waterfront. i remember the same tears, the same shaking hands. you may call me unlucky but i am from nice, originally, grew up there. by that point, it just felt like the horror was following me. i remember feeling angry - i still lived in paris back then and it felt like people had moved on. life went on and no one gave a shit.
i didn't lose anyone in nice either, so maybe i'm actually pretty lucky.
i remember that period of history feeling like my life could end anytime, any minute of any given day. i remember looking at what i was doing with the days i did have, law school and the job after that, the big law, eighty-hour weeks and the practice area i’d dreamed of, and this recurring question in the back of my mind: what is this all for? i remember finding out about her, this woman at work and her beautiful, eighteen-month-old daughter, and her partner, killed at the bataclan. she got out, he didn't. i remember really wondering, then: what for?
we're not in contact anymore but i still think about her. often.
i remember cycling into work every day and reels forming in my mind: if i got hit by a car, is this what my entire life would amount to? this shitty job and this shitty uni, and this shitty life i didn’t feel like i’d even really started. i remember feeling ashamed, being like this, because i wasn’t a “real” victim. because i wasn’t dead, because i hadn’t lost anyone, because i wasn’t even there.
i stopped writing after that. for a very long time. (until early 2017, as a matter of fact. you can still see the gap - in my tumblr posts, and on ao3. i think about that often, too.)
eventually, i got better. i won't bore you with the details but it is now 2021. november again, six years later, and my main challenge right now is to do nanowrimo. for the record, if you're interested, i have around 8000+ words on the next chapter of castles. i'm terribly below wordcount, but i have high hopes to catch up over the next couple days. so, again, i suppose what i’m saying is: it does get better. in hindsight, it’s easy to say that i was depressed, maybe a little traumatised. that i was feeling uncertain about my choice of careers, about my decision to leave a boy i loved, that i was feeling stuck at home and aimless and terrified. that what happened, that november, was just the icing on the cake that made me lose my balance for a time.
everything is always easier in hindsight, isn’t it? the truth is that at the time, it felt drowning. but: i was young, and i was proud, and i didn't recognise the signs. i thought people who were depressed wanted to die. i was just terrified. i felt like i could die any moment, and that i'd have lived such an unhappy life, prior to it. i probably should have gotten therapy but this was 2015, not 2021, so i just ploughed on. spent eighteen months struggling but finally turned my life around. i stopped pursuing a career and a life that made me miserable, moved to ireland and slowly, i got out.
since they opened in september, i've now been following the 13 november trials religiously. i’ve dialled into twitter every day and read the transcripts produced by journalists of every victim testimony, every cop interview, every summary of the investigation that led to this. i’m okay, now. happy even. some days have been harder than others, but i suppose that's fair enough when you're spending an hour every day hearing the speeches of people who either got shot themselves, or lost loved ones. my life is so much better now than it was when this happened.
as i said, i moved to dublin, i changed work-environments, i’m seeing a boy who’s cute and funny and who i’m trying not push away, and i’m even writing again. and, i’m listening and reading everything i can on these trials, not because i’m a victim, but because i feel like i owe it to them. as horrible as what happened in paris that day is, it was - for me - the wake-up call i needed. what they went through, in an odd string of butterfly effects, it changed my life. and, i owe it to the real victims of this tragedy to try and understand even a fraction what they went through. i owe it to the accused to try and understand how kids who grew up with me, who went to the same schools i did, ended up with kalashnikovs in their hands, executing 130 humans at gunpoint. i owe it to them to never let that happen again.
i have a great life now, and i’m trying to keep being happy for those who can’t.
and, so, it's the 13th of november again, today, but i don’t really have a clever conclusion to come to. i'll just leave you with this: if you speak french, i encourage you to read this speech by aurelie silvestre, whose husband died at the bataclan. it is one of the most beautiful pieces of writing i have ever read. if you don’t speak french, i will leave you with the wise words of one of my favourite artists, lily allen.
"ever since he can remember, people have died in his good name. long before that september, long before hijacking planes. he’s lost the will, he can’t decide, he doesn’t know who’s right or wrong. but there’s one thing that he’s sure of: this has been going on too long."
(and, if you’ve reached the end of this and are wondering: wait - is this what castles is about? then, yeah, a bit. perhaps.)
