Sezane cardigan
Zara dress (similar)
Wolf Circus necklace
Mejuri necklace (c/o) (similar)
Location: Sixteenth Arrondissement – Paris, France
Paris, May 26, 2023
Dear friends,
It’s early. Very early. My alarm is set for 5:45 am, just like it is every day at home. But the last time I checked, it was 4:50 am. And I’ve been checking often, for the past hour. I’m wide awake.
I manage jet lag pretty well, mostly because I experience it so often. The time difference between Winnipeg and Paris isn’t why I can’t keep my eyes closed. I’m just so excited to be home; to get up and live our first morning moments in this magnificent apartment, in the city I love more than anything in the world. Sleeping any longer feels impossible. At 5:02 am, I tiptoe out of bed and across the hall to the kitchen, when I turn the kettle on to make tea.
The second time I came to Paris, I was seventeen. It wasn’t the transformative experience that my first visit two years earlier was, simply because I wasn’t discovering Paris for the first time – I was returning to it. That’s why that trip doesn’t get mentioned very often. But in retrospect, there was much about it that is worthy of remarking on. When I first visited Paris at fifteen, I could barely take it all in. The city was so vast and so much more elegant than anywhere I’d ever been, I spent the whole three days just looking up, trying to see everything. When I got home, all I could do was dream of returning.
On that second visit two years later, I knew what wonders awaited me. It was thrilling to return to them after what seemed like an eternity. We stayed in a sixth floor room in an aging, but clean, hotel near the Opera-Garnier. The view of nearby rooftops from the tiny window balcony were the Parisian cliche of my dreams. But it was when we took the metro over Bir-Hakim bridge, and I saw the domed rooftops of the homes near the river in the eighth and sixteenth arrondissements for the first time, that my dreams took a more specific shape. I didn’t just want to come back to Paris again. I wanted to stay in this neighbourhood, among these buildings shaped like gilded Easter eggs.
I’ve nurtured that dream for years, while making a home in Montmartre, and then Le Marais, miles from the eighth and sixteenth arrondissements. These neighbourhoods are not central. They’re also notoriously expensive. As much as I still wanted to stay in an apartment that overlooked another with a dome rooftop, it never seemed like a very practical choice – or like a choice that would fit into our budget.
But things change. Sometimes slowly, sometimes quickly, and most often without our really noticing that the change is happening. I can honestly say that I never thought I’d be here. I leapt miles further along my career path in the past two years than I thought I was ever likely to go. Ian’s career has changed, too. Suddenly, we’re accomplished adult professionals, not a creative young couple doing jobs to pay bills while they use every spare moment outside business hours to work on their craft. A world that we could once only imagine is open to us now. And because life is short, because nothing in it is ever guaranteed, we choose to walk through every new door that opens to us.
I stand in our tiny kitchen and pour boiling water over a tea bag in an oversized white teacup. I live for morning moments in Paris. There is a feeling, when you wake just before the sun, when the streets are still empty and quiet, that the place is entirely yours… and what an incredible treat, to have a place like this city to yourself, even for an instant. When we planned this trip, I spent a full eight hours one Saturday combing through Airbnb listings, searching not for the perfect Parisian apartment but just for one that looked reasonable and not overpriced. (This new world hasn’t been open to us for that long, I still act like I’m on a tight budget most of the time.) I found nothing. And, in a moment of frustration, I nearly gave up. “Maybe,” I sighed, “we should just look for a hotel.”
But first, I decided to take one more look through the sixteenth arrondissement, near Passy. I’d seen an apartment in the area that wasn’t too bad, I recalled vaguely. I just needed to get back to it.
I never did find that apartment again. Instead, seemingly out of nowhere, a snapshot of a balcony overlooking a conical rooftop appeared. It seemed too good to be true, but I had to click on it, anyway. And there it was… the sixteenth arrondissement apartment of my dreams, with a marble fireplace and two balconies on different levels. There was even a piano. I clicked the Book Now button without a second of hesitation.
Now I’m here. It’s just after 5:07 am. I take my oversized teacup and tiptoe giddily down the stairs to the living room, where I pull open the curtains. The balcony, with its view of a domed rooftop across the street, is just barely illuminated as the sun rises, watercolour pink, over the chimney tops. These are the morning moments in Paris that I live for, truly. It strikes me, in this one, that there isn’t an English word to describe the feeling of a dream coming true. And I wonder if that’s because, collectively, we don’t really expect that they will? It’s hard to say. But this one did come true, for me.
In this moment, I remember seventeen-year-old Cee, riding the rickety metro across Bir-Hakim bridge. She was looking out the window at the Haussmannian buildings on either side of the track, wondering what it would be like to see inside one of them someday. I’m not sure I could find words to adequately describe it to her, except to say that it’s probably better than she could have imagined based on what she’d experienced of life at that age. And that the overwhelming emotion associated with it is gratitude. She’s worked hard, there’s no question about it. But she’s so incredibly lucky that her hard work led her to exactly where she wanted to go.
I will savour my morning moments in this beautiful place for as long as they last. And never stop wishing they could last forever.
