Mango trench
Uniqlo shirt
Zara jeans (similar)
Oak + Fort mules (similar)
Vintage handbag (similar)
ASOS beret
Zara sunglasses (similar)
Location: Ile Saint-Lous – Paris, France
Paris, October 15, 2021
Dear friends,
When I look back on this day, in the months to come, I know it will seem like nothing but a blur. The day begins early, and with a flurry of activity. Although it’s only Friday and we don’t leave for Canada until Sunday, we have a day trip planned tomorrow that makes this our last full day in Paris. It came too quickly, and there’s so much to do.
We set out early, to the souvenir shops at Saint-Michel, to pick up silly last minute gifts. It’s early, but only by Parisian standards – the shops, which are normally bustling even with all the restrictions on travel, are barely open. The adventure of selecting berets and postcards is an entirely new experience when we’re the only customers. I chat away with a shopkeeper, contemplating the virtues of pure wool versus wool blends in a hat that will only cost a few euros either way. But I chat with an eye always on the clock. Time is ticking, and there is so much still to do.
The early morning adventure calls to mind a spring morning long ago, when I came to this part of the city on my own. It was 2014, just six months since we’d moved back to Vancouver. I’d travelled with Ian, but my brother and his girlfriend were in Paris, too, sleeping on the carpeted floor of our rented apartment. They were all still in bed when I left to meet a photographer to shoot photos for the brand Comtesse Sofia. It was my second collaboration with the brand, who I’d worked with the past summer when we lived in the city. I looked forward to it, as we planned our trip. It was a chance to relive, if only for an hour or two, the Parisian life I’d reluctantly left behind.
But I wasn’t such an early riser then. I felt rushed dashing out before nine in the morning, lipstick barely on. The memory of how I got ready that morning isn’t even a blur – I have none at all.
That frantic feeling changed when I got off the metro at Cite station. The sun was shining. The streets, normally crowded with tourists, were empty at that early hour. It was that morning, walking in the sun, that I felt for the first time like Paris was mine alone. My appreciation for early mornings began that day, and has only grown over time.
This morning, we walk the same streets that I walked that day, to almost the same spot where that photoshoot I remember so fondly began. We don’t stop at Le Lutetia for coffee like I did that morning. But we do pause to snap these photos in front of my favourite building on Ile Saint-Louis. (For those of you who have been here for a while, and like a bit of trivia, the building where the main character in my novels, Sophie Cassou, lives with her brother, Luc, is right next door. Clearly, this place holds a special place in my literary heart.)
The stop is a brief one. I don’t know why, exactly, but it seems like there is less time to fit everything in to every day that passes. In 2014, I already moved at an above average pace, but my approach to life was, admittedly, a bit more casual. Maybe that’s it. Maybe it isn’t a lack of time so much as an impossibly high expectation of what I can do with the time I’m given.
…either way, many of my memories wind up being a bit of a blur. I take notes now, so I can remember what I’ve done later on. Especially on holidays. These are my best memories, and I want to hold onto them any way I can. The rush, and the ensuing blur, mean I recollect how I spent the day after the photoshoot in 2014 only vaguely… and probably not very accurately. I’ve learned from that. It’s not a perfect system, but it works.
By the time you read this, my memories of this day will be vague at best. But the blur will, I hope, be a beautiful one.
