Wilfred sweater (similar)
Wilfred dress (similar)
Mango belt
Chanel flats
Celine sunglasses
Chanel handbag
Linjer rings (c/o) (similar)
Mejuri earrings (similar)
Location: Avenue de Camoens – Paris, France
Paris, May 25, 2023
Dear friends,
It’s so good to be back. I’m trying not to smile too hard in these photos. But the rush of giddiness that accompanies stepping off a plane (and, today, onto a bus to the terminal, which is never my favourite) at Charles-de-Gaulle airport and follows for the rest of our first day in the city tugs at the corners of my mouth, pulling them constantly upward. Bonjour, Paris! We’ve missed you.
The last time we were here also marked our first holiday after nearly two years of pandemic lockdowns. It was a dream trip, in so many ways. But it was also a trip spent, mostly, on trying to make up for lost time. In October 2021, I was newly thirty-six, but I’d been living in suspension since February of the prior year. The result of that period of stasis was that I still felt like the thirty-three-year-old version of me that I’d been when we visited the city in 2019, although years had gone by. It turns out that it’s the absence of experiences that makes us feel like we aren’t really living. And while I loved my life at thirty-three, I didn’t enjoy feeling like I was stuck at that age intellectually while my physical body continued getting older.
So – I went to Paris in 2021 with a profound sense of needing to do all of the things, to pack every possible experience into the time we had in the city because I desperately needed to make memories away from my Winnipeg apartment to feel like I was, once again, moving forward. What I didn’t anticipate was that those ten days were truly the start of my living again. And that I would make up for lost time in ways I’d never imagined possible, so that when we landed back in the city another year and a half later, I would not just be an older person but a very different one.
“You have not changed!” A few weeks before departure, I met a girlfriend I’ve known since my early teens for drinks. We hadn’t seen each other for about four years. Whether people really can or do change is a matter of some (legitimate) debate. But there’s no doubt that there are more fine lines under my eyes these days, even if I do wear them well. I think it’s love that makes us see people and places as unchanged despite the passage of time, more than anything. A year and a half has passed for Paris, like it has for me. Bonjour, beautiful girl. In my eyes, you aren’t a day older, because I adore you. But I know that, like me, you aren’t exactly as you were the last time we met. And that continuous evolution, whether visible or not, matters. It’s moving forward.
It strikes me in particular that I’ve changed because I’m standing on avenue de Camoens in the sixteenth arrondissement. I wrote, at some length, about visits to this neighbourhood, and this street specifically, in 2021. This would never be my place, I thought back then. But we chose deliberately to stay in this neighbourhood on this trip, seeking a new perspective on a place we already know and love. The woman I was in 2021 wouldn’t have done that. She would have returned to familiar streets, not exactly chasing after good memories in the hope of recreating them but certainly comforted by the safety of places where she knew exactly what to expect. This gave her the illusion of control over what was not controllable.
I have changed, in fact. I accept now, in a way that I couldn’t for most of my life, that I can’t control anything – not people, not circumstances, certainly not the weather – through sheer force of will.
And what better place to prove it than avenue de Camoens. Bonjour, my favourite beautiful street overlooking the Eiffel Tower. You are the same as ever, a wide, cobbled residential block that dead ends at the top of an elegant flight of stone stairs. When I found you for the first time in 2016, you were deserted; a secret place known only to neighbourhood locals. By 2021, you’d gone viral on Instagram. The top of your staircase was constantly crowded by girls in gowns with balloons and shopping bags, each wanting their own perfect Parisian snapshot. It still is, on a Thursday afternoon in 2023. And it makes me smile, I admit. The avenue, named for an obscure Portuguese renaissance poet, is 115 metres long and about as many years old. For most of those years, it was just a street, albeit a pretty one. Now, it’s a destination.
It makes me smile because although it’s nothing less than totally infuriating to walk around fifteen different photoshoots to climb a flight of public stairs, there’s a metaphor in this, I think. We can change. And we do change. There’s no set timeline for that. Sometimes, we spend most of our lives being just a street; quiet, consistent and dependable. But then, when we let go of what we’ve allowed to hold us back, we open up and the world takes notice.
Once upon a time, I would have waited (impatiently) for my chance at photos at the top of the avenue de Camoens stairs. In 2021, I shrugged it off and chose a different angle. This year, we moved down the street. There are beautiful views everywhere, if you know how to look for them. I would rather see something new, now, than return to places I’ve been over and over. I would prefer to show you all something different, too. We can all benefit from a different perspective. And this city really has no bad angles.
Bonjour, Paris. I’m so overwhelmingly happy to be here. But I know that I’ve arrived here in a different way, with a different outlook, and I can’t wait to see more of how you’ll look to me now.
