Zara blazer (similar)
Wilfred dress (similar)
Jonak sandals (similar)
Chanel handbag
Celine sunglasses
Celine necklace (similar)
Linjer ring (c/o)
Location: Avenue du Colonel Bonnet – Paris, France
Paris, June 1, 2023
Dear friends,
We’re home! …which is to say back in Paris, after spending the better part of two days in Alsace. But, perhaps more importantly, back in our seventh floor apartment in the sixteenth arrondissement, which felt like home in the moment we found it.
Paris is home, even if my government ID says otherwise. On this trip, I suffered the indignity of getting new photos for the last French ID that I still carry, my metro pass. The experience required me to sit in a very sticky photo booth in a subway station and stare, unblinking, at a digital camera. The result is snapshot where I look, at once, appalled and stunned. (In other words, exactly how I felt in the moment.) If that, combined with my investment in previously unread books from local used bookshops, doesn’t qualify me for citizenship, there’s something wrong with the system.
I digress. Paris is home. We slip into the routine of life in the city quickly and easily when we arrive, as if we’d never left. The neighbourhood matters less than I’ve lead myself to believe. We started our Parisian life in Montmartre in 2009, because like all sixteen-year-old girls in the early 2000s, I nurtured dreams of living like Amelie Poulain. For years, I thought I’d never leave the area. But ultimately, the vibrance of local life – by which I mean the constant traffic noise and perpetually crowded streets – lost their charm.
So we moved to Le Marais. From the moment we stepped out of the taxi on rue Saint-Sebastien, I was smitten. I thought, this is it. From 2012 on, we spent most of our time in Paris within walking distance of Place des Vosges and Merci. And what a charmed life. I’ve written extensively about Le Marais over the years. The neighbourhood is the perfect mix of classic Parisian charm and modern trendiness. All the newest boutiques and best coffee shops open there first, so it feels like you’re always ahead of the curve, always making exciting new discoveries just by virtue of proximity. Every day is an adventure. When you walk out your front door, you never know what you might see on the other side of it that wasn’t there the night before.
During our last visit to Paris in 2021, we had the chance to live a dream version of our life in the neighbourhood we adore. We stayed in a historic apartment on the corner of boulevard Beaumarchais. Its floor to ceiling windows gave us views over all the streets we’ve known and loved for so long. It was, to use a tired but appropriate cliche, a dream come true. But dreams change, sometimes without our realising it.
In the past three years, so much of our collective existence has changed. And we’ve changed with it. I’ve changed, I know it – and some of that change was intentional, though I didn’t always know where the work I was doing to foster that change might lead. My perspective has shifted in ways I never expected it could. And while I’ll always treasure Le Marais because it is the backdrop of so many of my happiest memories, I don’t feel the need to keep returning to those old scenes. I’m ready, now, to create new memories.
When I was in my early twenties, I wrote my first and only book of poetry. It was an assignment in third year university that I took on with the seriousness I felt it deserved. The book was called, perhaps unsurprisingly, Travel Diary. I wrote about places I’d been, like Paris and Acapulco, and places I dreamed I would someday visit. I couldn’t afford to travel much, if at all, as a university student. So I wrote to escape; to make the life I dreamt of reality, if only briefly. At that age, the idea that I might someday make it my reality seemed so remote that it was almost unfathomable…
…but now, a little less than twenty years later, here I am. And the sixteenth arrondissement of Paris, this apartment on rue Alfred Bruneau, just past the spot where the street joins up with avenue du Colonel Bonnet is, I know, the place that this adult version of me, who is living a life that is beyond her wildest post-adolescent dreams, would choose to live. I discovered that only after we arrived. And what a beautiful revelation. There is always a place for us. That place will change as we grow and evolve. Sometimes, it will be where we least expect, but that’s just one of those wonders of life – finding yourself in somewhere unfamiliar only to realise it’s exactly where you’re supposed to be.
For a long time, after Travel Diary, I didn’t write much at all. I could pretend it was because I was too busy living, but the truth is, studying writing made it feel like work and sucked most of the joy out of it for me. So I put it aside, to pursue different interests. Perhaps I could argue that I felt less need to escape my life after university, and therefore writing was less essential to my survival. I don’t necessarily believe myself when I say that, though. I came back to writing, it just took some time. It’s been an interesting exercise, particularly in recent years, as I’ve reached the point in my life where I can say that I have everything I ever really wanted. What does one write about, I’ve wondered, when they no longer need an escape?
The answer, it turns out, is, the things from which there is no escape.
I came to Paris decades ago with vague dreams of getting away. The city, I thought, would be a place I could disappear into, leaving behind all the parts of my life that came before my move. I was a kid – a fanciful, imaginative one. To make the escape I dreamed of reality required all kinds of practical work I was neither prepared nor truly ready to do. But I also learned, quickly, that my concept of escape was only an illusion. There are some things that I, just like everyone else, simply have to live with.
Time passes, and we evolve, but there are some facts that no amount of time or wishful thinking will alter. We live with them, there is no escape. I understand that now, in a way I didn’t when I first moved to Paris. And so, no matter where I am, no matter what neighbourhood I call home, that’s what I do. I live my life, accepting that these things are part of it and always will be. Sometimes, like today, I write about it.
