I.
After packing my bags for a triumphant fourth time, I left my home on a rush with a bag which was still full with jackets and cold weather clothes that my heart was clinging to while my common sense knew I wouldn’t be wearing for the next month.After 3 movies, 2.5 meals, 4 book chapters, 1 thick fashion magazine and almost 3 music albums later, we arrived at the Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris. A black van was waiting for us and took us to the Hotel in the 8th district. The unexpected heat made me lose the wool leopard print coat I’d been wearing for the past 10 hours (at least!), and left me bare in a short black Adele-like dress I thought would likely match the occasion. The whole ride seemed like I was waking up in a dream, little by little my mind starting putting back together the pieces of the first time I’d been to Paris, back in 2007. Being there never stopped feeling like a fantasy, again, like the most vivid dream. The days started passing, but the novelty never wore off. As I unpacked my bags, I could already anticipate how Paris was going to change me, how everything I’d been used to, how I experienced my life before now was beginning to feel old and foreign now that I actually had the chance to go ahead and try to mime the French je ne sais quoi I felt I had inside me all along (kind of). It was like that scene on An Education, where Carrie Mulligan’s character, Jenny, starts going on and on about how when she goes to college she is going to become this interesting and renewed woman, keeping her words to a minimum, her cool cigarette bearing to a maximum, staring at the nothingness with her deep thoughts and an imaginary French pop song in the background setting her pace. That’s how I felt, like this dreamed like was beginning to unravel for me.
Paris always felt like home away from home, even when I’d only spent a total of 5 days there before going on this trip. I felt like a huge nostalgic chuck of me was stuck there. Maybe it was this deep rooted romanticism that filters the smallest decision I make, or perhaps it’s just the fact that I’m profoundly convinced that I was Marie Antoinette in a past life. Whatever it is, at least the fact that I was a perfectly blank page (waiting to be written in French) let me develop this new character that grew more confident every time a stranger asked me for directions as if I knew where I was even standing. I spent my days between the museums and the cafés, lost every minute, but in between finding myself, finding all the things I never knew I was looking for. Though I thought movies and music had completely set up impossible standards for real life to achieve, Paris proved me wrong over and over. I remember once, on an unusually long metro trip from the Louvre to the H&M across the street from La Gallerie Lafayette, as I was talking to my friend Natalia, a tall handsome guy got in. He had dark short hair, and was wearing some sporty outfit that could only by explained the folding bike right next to him. He didn’t look like the type of guy who travels on a bike, and he didn’t look like he took the metro regularly, there was some special allure about him. He was sitting in front of me, his knees even touched mine, but I didn’t give much thought to it until I felt his strong gaze on me. He wasn’t just giving me a look on occasion; he was plain staring at my face, even when I glanced over at him just to, 1. Make him stop, and 2. Check him out a bit, he was still staring. If he had not been as handsome as he was, I would’ve thought he was a total creep, except I later found out that’s just how love works in Paris. If he likes you, his deep glare will let you know. I didn’t know if he made me nervous or uncomfortable, but as I was deciding a way to give an answer to his eyes, we got to our stop and Natalia didn’t doubt on grabbing me by the arm, and pulling my out of there. I still think of him sometimes, though, usually it’s a long ‘what if’ accompanied by the thought of our life together, our sweet little chubby French babies, our huge Haussmannian high-rise apartment with a view of the Luxembourg Garden, if not the Eiffel Tower, and my humongous closet in it…Joking! Though we've all fantasized like that with the least likely (or known) boys that have at some point crossed our paths.
