Malaise

Sezane cardigan
Mango jeans
Chanel flats
Vintage necklace (similar)
Linjer rings (c/o) (similar)
Mejuri earrings
Location: Le Marais – Paris, France

Paris, October 14, 2021

Dear friends,

I confess, I’m starting to feel it; the feeling that inevitably comes over me as a visit to Paris begins to approach its end and I’m faced with the reality of returning to Canada yet again. We call it malaise, for lack of a better term. We spent the most wonderful Parisian day today. Pain au chocolat for breakfast, a visit to the Musee Bourdelle followed by a stop in at Le Bon Marche, pastries from Maison Philippe Conticini and a bouquet of cafe au lait dahlias in the perfect shade of cream from a nearby fleuriste. Tonight, we’ll enjoy dinner at the restaurant we’ve loved since our first visit in 2009, L’Afghani. But the fact that it’s such a wonderful day almost makes it worse.

I realise how that sounds. That we get to come to Paris at all is such an immense privilege, and one that I will never take for granted. This morning, I stood in a room full of sculptures twenty times my size, all crafted by one man: Antoine Bourdelle, a master in my eyes but also a man whose style has fallen so out of favour that his work languishes in a free museum on a residential street in the fifteenth arrondissement. When we’re in Paris, I can visit anytime. I just need to get on the metro. And that’s the problem. Even though I’m still here, still surrounded by all of the things that I love, that inspire so much awe in me, I know I’m leaving and that leaving means soon, they will all be just out of my reach. That knowledge breaks my heart preemptively.

…this is malaise.

I try not to let it get the best of me. L’Afghani opens late for dinner, by North American standards, so we are back in our Marais apartment for l’heure de l’apero. We drink from a bottle of Cotes du Rhone left for us by the landlord. It’s nothing fancy, just an average red wine, bottled for Franprix, a nearby grocery store. But it tastes familiar, like every other inexpensive bottle of red wine I chose at random in the grocery store when I knew nothing about wine except that I liked it, and liked it better if it was cheap. Its things like this that I hate to leave behind, not knowing when I’ll be back.

There’s still so much I want to do. That’s what I keep thinking, as I sip my wine. We wanted to visit the Louvre on this trip, but didn’t make it. The list of museums I knew we wouldn’t get to before we even arrived is long. So is the list of cafes we won’t have enough time to try and shops we won’t get to. There is never enough time, and always something to sacrifice.

Maybe it speaks to the fact that I’m privileged and frivolous, but the pain of those sacrifices, the thing we call malaise, is very real. I’ve known it since before I’d ever been to Paris. When I was seven, on a car ride back from the library with my mom, the subject of death came up. That day was the first time the enormity of it, the finality, really hit me. I still remember crying quietly in the back seat of the car, realising that there would never be enough time to read all of the books I wanted to read. Not in sixty years, not in eighty… not in a thousand. There never could be. Just like there will never be enough time in Paris, no matter how many trips we take.

Rather than giving in to malaise, I try to make the best of every moment we have when we are here. But in the quiet ones, between visits to the caviste and runs to the bakery and photoshoots, it inevitably comes back to me. Maybe the malaise is what makes the happy moments so wonderful; maybe it’s the low that makes the highs soar that much higher. Even if that’s the true, it still hurts.

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