This is it.

Glam Sesh sweater (c/o)
Wolf Circus necklace
Gisel B. ring (c/o)
Urban Outfitters earrings (similar)
Location: Rue Brezin – Paris, France

Dear friends,

This is it. Our second last full day in Paris. I try not to let the sadness weigh on me as I go through my early morning motions – wake-up, shower, make tea, blow dry my hair in the kitchen – but it isn’t easy. This happens every time. We arrive in the capital feeling like our stay stretches out endlessly before us… and then, suddenly, we wake-up a week later and the stay that felt endless is nearly over.

I spend the morning wandering the apartment, feeling listless. The beautiful sunshine that illuminated the early part of our week dissipated days ago, leaving behind the grey skies we expect this time of year. Ian is on an important errand – buying French butter to smuggle back home in his suitcase. (Not all of you may know or understand the significance of the difference between French butter and it’s Canadian counterpart, but trust me, it’s worth risking the wrath of customs agents to take the French stuff home illegally.) I am supposed to be packing. But it’s hard to want to pack at the best of times, never mind when it’s to leave a place you wish was home.

So I procrastinate. I lay my new Editions Gallimard books on the parquet by the window and take flatlays. When that doesn’t take long enough, I unbox my new Balenciaga pumps and repeat the exercise. I rearrange the tacky bits of decor – a small ceramic bus from Colombia, half-burnt Yankee candles and old glass apothecary bottles – that are so meaningful to the woman who owns this apartment, but just look like clutter to me. I want to be out wandering the streets taking photos, but we have only one key to the apartment. Faced with a choice between grocery shopping and anything else, I will choose anything else every time. But I regret it now, at least a little bit.

Outside the front door, I hear the old wooden staircase groan. Ian must be on his way up. He really hasn’t been gone long, but the waiting dragged on, so I open the door for him before he reaches for the key. Instead of hello, he greets me with the words, “Were you bored?”

I just shrug. He knows the answer.

We unpack a grocery bag full of award-winning varieties of butter, laying them carefully on the shelves in the fridge. Later, Ian will wrap them in plastic and tinfoil, before putting them into a specific plastic container for transport. There is no time for that now – the rain stopped and there is a city outside to enjoy.

But before we leave, we stop at the windows. Our landlord – Madame, we call her – has them arranged behind elaborating tied curtains, surrounded by half-dead plants and strings of ethnic beads. It makes sense. The view outside isn’t much to look at, for a native Parisian, just some rooftops and a low-budget hotel. For me, the view encompasses all of the very ordinary things that make the place I love but can never make mine what it is – the old rattling window shutters, the streets lined with petite cars, the patchwork of new buildings fitted into empty spaces between the old stone ones. “Let’s take a picture.”

Ian agrees wordlessly. After all, we might not get another chance. We dismantle Madame’s elaborate curtain set-up and poke our heads out of opposing windows. Twenty-six shots later, we put things back as we found them and make our way to the door. This is it. Our second last full day in Paris.