Learning to Love
What first brought me to Paris is what first brings most foreigners to Paris: tourism. I was seventeen and invested what little I had saved from working at a bagel shop and doing odd jobs in a transatlantic flight and Eurail pass. After Brussels and before Biarritz I found myself in Paris, the destination I felt most obligated — and as a result, least enthusiastic — to visit. I discovered the Seine with the Bateaux-Mouches, climbed to the top of the Eiffel Tower with a sweaty money belt tucked under a t-shirt and denim shorts and glimpsed the Mona Lisa from behind a herd of other sheep. I didn’t like the city much. To like it would have been a cliché. How naive to love what everyone else loves. So I spent three days criss-crossing it’s center without ever approaching its heart.
The next year I was back in Paris with an American man I’d met at university. Somewhere along the banks of the Seine we fell in love. Two years later we spent three clammy summer months together in a sleepy corner of the 7em arrondissement where he had been living while I was was on the other side of the Atlantic studying Descartes and Foucault. The job I secured at a French nonprofit two metro lines away hardly made a life so I took pleasure in playing homemaker with daily trips to the open-air market to prepare dinner for my boyfriend. I filled the swollen August days with long walks to nowhere. Paris set a beautiful stage for my coming of age and tangled love story. But the beauty I perceived with my eyes never reached my heart. I faulted Paris for my loneliness and longings. I felt small in her presence; she was the mistress who had taken the man I loved. I learned how seductive it is to hold a city to account for my own sorrows.
It turned out I was naive, not because I loved Paris, but because I didn’t. In its light, my shadows were never far. I resented it for that. And yet isn’t this what’s so beautiful about a city, and any intimate relationship, that it shows us what we want by giving us what we don’t?
When I finally returned to Paris eight years later, I decided I would rewrite our story. I let unknown neighborhoods enchant me for the first time. I indulged in wine and a meat-rich dinner at a friend’s neighborhood restaurant on Ile St. Louis, forgiving myself for not knowing what I was eating or what anyone was saying. From the Pont Neuf I watched the sun dip into the river’s gentle bend. Beneath my feet the Seine swept away debris that had been cast between its shores. Caution guided me through the familiar streets and sights, braced for the wrath of bygone tears and regrets. But they were no match to the fury of time which had flushed them out of my core, the way the river rinsed the city’s heart.
Paris was not a destination for me, but more a fling, a moment that bisects life changes into befores and afters. And because of that, there was nothing to grasp for because it was over before it ever really began. I returned to the United States with my memories tucked into the soaps and chocolates I toted home, content not knowing when or if I would ever return.
I turned all my attention to a travel startup I was building in San Francisco. Then one day, while my back was turned, Paris called. Our business was beginning to blossom there and over the next few years I would take several trips to tend to it, unaware that I was planting the seeds for a future that would bear no resemblance to the one I had planned.
A seven year silence passed between Paris and myself. I had no reason to stay away, nor did I have a reason to go. Paris had simply become a garden that I did not tend, and the inertia of habit assumed that meant it was no longer fertile grounds. I therefore cast it aside in the worst way one dismisses and old friend: with indifference.
Attention is a funny thing. Like a spotlight on a stage, it suspends our disbelief and convinces us the entire world’s activity takes place only within its bounds. Paris may have been out of view, but the seeds I planted there years prior would still continue to mature. Nature is not indifferent.
A decade later, the seeds began to bloom and I made Paris my home. I had no plans or premonition, just two suitcases and a heart ready to love the city I had written off as unlovable. Luckily for me, Paris doesn’t hold a grudge.
