Paris Gothic
You’re late! You’re always late! Run to the metro and pray to God that you get there in time. Your card doesn’t pass correctly the first time; anxious, you steal a glance at the ratp man in the window, who only offers a closed-mouth smile in lieu of help. You get it on the second go but you feel rushed, harried. You know you haven’t made it. You down down the stairs and see that there are 8 minutes to the next train. Ther is someone on the other side of the tracks, but their train is due in one minute. You begin to panic.
When you first arrived, you were confident that you could pull off color, sensible tennis shoes, and shorts. You wonder and scoff at those impenetrable Parisien ladies, with their jet-black outfits, jet-black hair, jet-black eyes. You, furious and scared, make a point to wear anything other than black. People stare at you in the metro, on the street, in the boulangeries. Ratp workers refuse to acknowledge you, cashiers ignore you, waiters never bring you your water, you are always getting lost. In two months your wardrobe has become monochrome.
All the screams are so gauche. You think they’d at least have the decency to respect the atmosphere of the city.
Your biggest fear, everyone’s biggest fear, is rushing too quickly down the metro stairs. You must make it, yes, but you must not go too quickly. Those stairs are steep, and they are sharp. Late at night, or early in the morning, when you are the rare voyager down those stairs, you feel them anticipating, and swear they get more slippery.
There are, it has been said, people who take the bus. They rave about how large the windows are, how roomy the seats are. “Oh, it’s so much more convenient than the metro!” they say. But you have never seen a bus pull up at a bus stop; you have never seen a bus station display a wait time of anything less then 10 minutes. Who are these people? How have they ever managed to get off the bus in order to extoll its virtues to you? Why won’t they stop?
Apparently they feed the pigeons specially modified bird food to make them sterile. You don’t know how long it takes to work, or why the numbers never seem to go down. What you do know is that they are less afraid, every day, and more threatening. Now, often, the pigeons are missing legs, or eyes, and their feathers are continually ruffled. Maybe they have found something else to eat, you think, watching in a lazy haze as they approach a tourist foolish enough to encourage them by throwing some bread crumbs. You’re not too lazy, though, that you can’t turn your head when they get too close.
“Pardon,” you mummer as you rush into the metro car (always late, always so late), bumping into someone. “Pardon,” you announce, clearing an exit through the crowd to the door. “Pardon,” you hiss at the woman who is blocking the stairs. “Pardon,” and “pardon,” “pardon,” “pardon pardon pardon pardon.” You cannot remember having said anything else other than this one word since you have come to France. And you cannot remember when you came to France.
The sky is grey. “It’s the pollution,” or “it’s the clouds,” or “it’s winter,” people explain. The sky is always grey, and no matter how much wind or how many trees are planted, it is always grey. You hope it is the winter, or the clouds, or the pollution, but it is now June and there has been no rain and it it still grey.
There are a surprising amount of gardens in Paris. Small ones, huge ones, little squares, it’s impossible not to find one. Old women with knowing smiles tell you that, if you stay long enough, you can always find what you want in one of Paris’s gardens. But the gardens seem to think that all people want are growls and darkness and haunted, screaming eyes, and you don’t think you’re ready for that yet. Not yet. Maybe later, after a couple more months of grey sky and women with their jet-black clothes and their jet-black glares, hissing “pardon” at you in the metro.