Destruction of illusion, or, finding Paris beyond the fairytale.
The Paris of my fantasies didn't exist. What I found was so much better.
We tell ourselves fairy tales. We grew up on them after all, and the brain needs always to believe there’s a better way, a better place.
For me, that way, that place, has always been Paris. A city of such ethereal light it’s literally called The City of Light. Of pleasures meant to pursue, not to be parceled out. Of beauty, of an aesthetic coherence (thanks for introducing me to that term, AI Claude) that lights up my soul. Of a magnetic pull that has made me ask for 20+ years, in wonder laden with regret, how this could exist and I could live anywhere else.
So it was no surprise that Paris was where I’d go when I had to hit the eject button on this country after the election. So many happy and idyllic memories are layered there that would be waiting for me when I landed on inauguration day in January, waiting to envelop me in Paris’ sweeping embrace and create a safe container for the Personal Growth and Development I imagined, freshly back from unironic epiphanies in the Himalayas. Yoga! Meditation! Writing! Manifestation of Life’s Purpose! So Many Miracles ahead!
Surprise! Those lovely, light-filled memories -- maybe that picnic in the grass at Parc des Buttes-Chaumont with Brian on a spring day just last year feeling like a gauzy dream now -- were fucking painful when superimposed against my solo existence in the sodden, bleak winter, something drawing me back to the exact spot of that picnic. Surprise! You can be lonely and sad in the most beautiful place in the world. Surprise! You can be homesick for a place you didn’t even want to be.
You know quoi d'autre? The human spirit is resilient and adaptable. I found transcendent joy standing alone at the stove in my first taste of the sublime: just-melted Mont D’Or cheese draped over potatoes I’d roasted in duck fat. I danced around the tiny apartment, the exuberance unable to be contained in a still body. And this after I’d sworn off cooking. Funny how once you do something because you want to and not because you think it’s somehow expected, you can find pleasure in it. And the purest of delight in seeing swans gliding along the green Seine, glossily confident of their beauty and indifferent to the gazes upon them. So French, they are. And a deep contentment in just gazing at rooftops from a chair in the Tuileries while seagulls fought over picnickers’ crumbs.
I hadn’t yet encountered this poem by Jack Gilbert, but I read it this week and it is my retroactive mantra:
We must risk delight. …We must have the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless furnace of this world
Spoiler: this is not an “I woke up one day and everything was fine” story. There were hard moments, hard days, a raging sinus infection (Jesus, do they smoke everywhere in Paris), a case of my body revolting and rejecting something I’d eaten (it seems to have become a pattern with tartare there, to my utter and eternal dismay).
Dejection with my challenges learning French grew. Despite daily half-day classes and utter immersion I finally had to acknowledge that competence, let alone conversational ability, may be out of my reach, but that doesn’t mean I can’t still try. Do you know what it means for me to admit I can’t do something but continue to work at it and -- in my mind, anyway -- humiliate myself publicly and repeatedly hour after day after week on end?
I will forever bless and send joy and light to the barista at my favorite coffee shop who -- after I butchered a phrase one day and, defeated, slumped down in the seat and said “desolee, je suis fatigue,” (sorry, I’m tired) -- told me in French that I could actually understand that my French was good, to keep doing what I’m doing, and bon courage as I left, tears welling at this small but mighty act of kindness that turned my day around and may have restored my faith in humanity altogether.
The longing to be near the people I love, of my heart Cash back home with no idea why his momma was away for so long, was sometimes visceral in its grip. I dreamed of riding in a car with my best friend on a country road. He turned to smile at me and the heartache when I woke that it wasn’t real struck me to my core, nearly taking my breath away. Another dear friend was alone and reeling in pain in another dream and I hugged her so tight I could feel her narrow shoulders until I woke alone in my little bed, arms wrapped only around Leo, my stuffed baby hippo and lifeline, a primal attempt to reclaim the solid warmth of so many years of Brian next to me, Cash at my feet.
These -- for that matter all -- mornings brought a particular emptiness. Everyone I loved was not only thousands of miles away but asleep and would be silent for hours. I’d open the blinds, praying for blue skies not leaden grey, turn on the radio I’d bought for company the first week (croooooner, croooonerrrr! will forever reverberate in my head in the morning), hit the button on the plastic coffeemaker that I without fail set up the night before as an act of kindness to my morning self, and after stowing the bed back in the pull-out chair, sit with my pink and white coffee cup (a Monoprix cheer myself up purchase) and my journal and write it. All of it.
I never looked back at those words. Until now.
The situation with the landlord who clearly wished I weren’t there grew more untenable when they casually dropped an email bomb while I was at dinner (with champagne no less!) to celebrate making it one month, notifying me they’d made a mistake on the ‘taxe de séjour’ they’d charged me on the 80-day rental. I would be responsible for another few hundred euros, they said, no I will NOT thank you very much and the mental energy that went into preparing for what I knew would be a battle of wills worthy of the Game of Thrones finale (and do you know who you’re dealing with here? Ask anyone I’ve ever been in a dispute with, I’m not proud, I’m just saying you will not break me) extinguished in a moment the glimmers of hope that had at last begun flickering with some promise.
But. But. I wrote in my journal one day that I felt less desperately sad. Another day that I didn’t want to jinx it but that I felt more like myself. By ‘myself’ I meant the capable one who can do things back home like run a business and renovate houses and sell them without a realtor.
That person had gotten lost in the knockout punch to self confidence that is being a writer, a lover of words, readily available for my profuse -- and, I fancy -- sometimes eloquent use, now unable to communicate in more than the most caveman fashion. (I just moved to Paris. I bought my tickets after the election. The new president is a big problem. I am here for three months. I am a journalist. Freelance. I can work remotely. I like this neighborhood. It is very nice and very calm and the people are all nice. I love Paris. I am from Kentucky. Do you know Kentucky? We make all the bourbon whiskey. No, not Jack Daniels. I would like a variety of cheese, please, for apero for just one. I will take a latte with cow milk, please. My code [in an uber] is 5 8 9 1. One. Nine one. ONE. I’m sorry, I study but my french is bad. Thank you, you are very kind.)
Though I could tell a simple story in French class (and even often understand when the instructors or my classmates spoke slowly), put me in front of the steely-eyed, barely-containing-his-sigh very serious butcher who would like to remind me that I was lucky he let me ring up the additional item from the case inside when I handed him my ticket for the carry-out purchase selected outside because there are RULES here (no matter that only one other person was in the shop), and I would immediately revert to 10th grade where I got my first and only D — in my first nine weeks of French. I never did win him over like I imagine I did the fromagerie guys and the produce shop owner who began beaming at me and conversing (en français!) after about six weeks of buying kumquats and whatever three items I needed to make for dinner.
Through it all, I kept wondering: why am I even here? Why let people make sacrifices for me, why spend the money I’d swiped from my IRA if I wasn’t enjoying it more, not doing more, not “just going to the Orsay on a random Tuesday because I can, what a luxury that will be” as I airily proclaimed I would before I left.
When I could give myself a break, I tried. The mental load and decision fatigue of operating in another language in another country with nobody to rely on but myself required every scrap of energy it was possible to muster. “It will break your heart one day when you look back and think you lost even a moment,” so went the accusations in my brain, and so I even said, in one Instagram story when I realized I’d forgotten I was in Paris while working on a story in a coffeeshop. OH MY GOD I want to go back to that Dana and say. IT’S OK! You don’t have to try so hard.
But I try. That’s what I do. And I was trying to make Paris the fairytale, trying to bend an entire city to fit my fantasy.
A month in I decided to hit the re-set button. If the theme the first few weeks was the Dylan lyrics ‘how does it feel / to be on your own,’ the theme would now become This. Is. Paris., I said in an Instagram story complete with sparkle font. The light was changing; spring was coming. My friends would be coming to visit soon. The French classes that proved more frustrating than helpful would be ending soon. I was ready to turn a corner. (And to say fuck it, if I run out of money I’ll go home early; I’m going to eat the things I love. As to that, let's just say I would have had to come home in February to have stuck to my budget.) I played Higher Self by Dope Saint Jude on repeat in one earbud while I was out (never on both; I’m not trying to get hit by a bike here) and I looked for the endless ways Paris was its most beautiful.
Then I went for a walk with my life coach (message me if you’d like his info). He doesn’t call himself a therapist; can’t, perhaps? But like, or better than a traditional therapist, he sees into my soul and tells me what I can’t tell myself.
I recounted the past month and half to him. My disappointment in myself, the loneliness. The landlord traumadrama. All of it.
Walking along the overflowing banks of the Seine, heading toward the Île Saint-Louis under an uncommon blue sky, he turned to me. “If this segment of your time here were a book, the title would be Destruction of Magic,” he said.
No. No, I said. I want the magic. “Destruction of illusion then,” he said.
It felt like the world tilted under my feet for a moment, a tidal wave passing through my body, or maybe like I was taking a vision test and the eye doctor slid the second lens in front of my eyes and yes, now I can see better but why does it feel weird to see?
Destruction of illusion.
This destruction is cleansing, he said. Like a flood. He gestured at the river (I’d asked him to switch me places and walk along the edge himself; France doesn’t believe people need guard rails, relying instead on our self preservation and common sense to not fall in the river and it made me a little dizzy to be so close to the the muddy brown waters coursing along beside us).
But what’s left behind, he said — the pieces, the debris — you can pick that up and create something new. Something authentic.
Did I say then “that’s where the real magic is,” or did I only come to that later? I don’t remember and it doesn’t matter.
The fairytale that never was was over. And something raw and real and really, really wonderful was rising from that destruction in its place.
“But what’s left behind, he said — the pieces, the debris — you can pick that up and create something new. Something authentic.”
THIS PARAGRAPH! 👆🏾✨Wow! It’s got me in my feelings and making my eyes well up. So many forces and influences all around us, it’s easy to get lost and lose sight and sense for who you are. Although, I have to believe and trust in the journey of discovery. It’s a series of contradictions for sure. Enough to make you want to scream out and cry at times. Perhaps those are the moments that create the epiphanies….if we let them. I don’t know about you, but I’m team “I don’t want to go there, so let me stifle that emotion and carry on about my business like nothing happened…..until it happens again.” Le sigh. 😮💨
Thank you for sharing, Dana.