Paris Sketches 1

She sits at the table with her nose slightly raised. She is trying to watch the passersby without looking interested, but it is a balance she cannot maintain. Her eyes twitch as some passing person catches her attention, forcing her to lose her carefully constructed indifference.

She aches to be cool, to be a true Parisian. Her floppy black hat is is a careful contrivance, a nod to the avant-garde heritage of a city which will never be hers.

Tapping her toe and tossing her hair (a studied attempt at casual) she misses the irony of sitting at a tourist trap café on the Champs Elysee. Relying on her hat, she does not smoke Gitanes, drink pastis or even scribble in a dog-eared notebook, the signs of a true Parisian thinker.

The longer she sits, the more melancholy she becomes. Her lifelong dream of visiting Paris has lost its lustre. The days of the great Parisian thinkers have faded, the city now a melting pot of homogeneity, of cheap plastic trinkets and overpriced burger joints, no different to London, New York or Sydney.

The fact that she sits outside an overpriced boulangerie on the busiest tourist street in the city is an irony lost on her. She is waiting for her boyfriend to return with a filled baguette for them both and her mood deepens further. She realises that he does not share her dream of free thinking, a life unfettered by the bourgeois constraints of a “proper” employment. She wants to paint, to write, to sing. But he dreams of children, a nice house and a steady job to support both.

She sighs inwardly, struggling to maintain her icy façade, realising that her dreams of life and of Paris were never realistic. Her hat may look local, but she will never belong to a city that exists only in her dreams. And inside she cries.