The Last Time I was in Paris
Welcome to The Long Way Home
On the last day my sister Melanie and I were in Paris, I left her looking out towards Notre Dame from the other side of the Seine. It was 2017, so the cathedral wasn’t damaged by fire yet. It was spring, so all the flowers in the city were pink and full. Once we left Paris, I would think about those flowers almost every day for months. I’d never seen flowers like them, perfect dabs of pink paint next to trees that were green and shaped like squares. I’d never seen trees like that either.
I walked the few streets back to the little apartment we were staying in for the week. It had one pull out couch, a kitchen with a stove that had one burner, and a bathroom with a shower that had fifteen minutes of hot water.
I used the bathroom then came back out and sat on the couch. I probably checked my phone since the apartment was the only consistent place we had internet access. My classmates back in Georgia were still in school. Probably in calculus, maybe at lunch.
Trying to see a whole city in just a week was exhausting. My feet ached. My shoes were ghosts of the versions I’d crossed the Atlantic with only days prior. They were coated in a layer of the gray dirt that covers the streets of Paris.
I stopped at a grocery store on the way back to my sister to grab a baguette and a bottle of rosé. At the register, the person attending to me didn’t say more than “Bonjour.” They barely even looked up and were completely unbothered that an eighteen-year-old was buying wine, which isn’t surprising but felt pretty liberating to an eighteen-year-old American. I put my items in a bag and left the store. I was back on the sunny streets of Paris. For the whole week we were there, we only had blue skies.
When I got back from Paris to my little life as a high school student with big dreams of traveling the world and becoming a writer, I wrote a poem about Paris. For your sake, I won’t share that poem because most of my poetry is best kept locked away, but I’ve always liked the last line, where I posed a question, “How do I explain what it’s like to be sad for months and then to come to Paris?”
Paris felt like a miracle, like a revelation. Never mind that Paris has a population of over 2 million. Never mind that writers have been writing about this city for centuries. Never mind that Paris will always belong to the French and never really to me, no matter how much time I spend there in my life. At eighteen, Paris became my little secret.
Travel is both mundane and life-changing. I love that balance. A visit to a grocery store is not so unique. Feeling joy at the sight of a pink flower isn’t really unique either, but in the right circumstance, it becomes unforgettable. I love that Paris felt like a gift; I love that it exists when I’m not there.
I have this dream of living abroad. This newsletter, The Long Way Home, was born out of this dream. For a couple of months now, I’ve been interviewing with French and Spanish families to become an au pair. I want to spend a longer period of time in Europe, and I want to challenge myself to learn a second language. I’d love Paris to be the place where I end up, and I hope The Long Way Home can be where I share more stories about the city.
I also know you can’t force things, and the truth is becoming an au pair is a frustrating process. It takes longer than you might think. You have to deal with the bureaucracy of a foreign country. You have to trust your instincts. You have to develop new instincts.
I plan to write more about this entire process and my experience of trying to become an au pair, but I want The Long Way Home to be more than that. I want it to feel like a gift, like a secret that you and I keep together. I want it to be a place where I help others travel more easily, and I also plan to share personal travel stories, like the time I ate baby shark in Cartagena, Colombia or the time I got my backpack stolen in Seattle, Washington. I’ll also share my journey towards living abroad even though it hasn’t happened yet (it’s all about the journey not the destination anyway, right? Right?).
The first official post of The Long Way Home is about Paris because my hope is that I’ll wind up there sometime soon, but here’s the end of my story about the last time I was there. Or rather, here is the beginning: I never meant to go to Paris. That wasn’t the plan. My sister had planned a trip, and somehow I convinced her to let me go with her. I would have to miss three days of school, so I also had to convince my dad. We struck a deal. If I could get all my teachers to sign off on me missing school, I could go. This mortified me. It’s so embarrassing to let people see that you really want something. Why is that?
I asked my teachers anyway. I went to Paris.
I don’t know if I’ll wind up in Paris this year. Maybe it’ll be Barcelona. Or a city I’ve never heard of. Maybe I’ll never live abroad. Maybe it’ll be five, ten, twenty years from now. I know I want to travel. I know I want to keep being surprised.
So here’s to Paris. Here’s to unexpected places. Here’s to the long way home. I hope you’ll come along with me.