A Complete Unknown: Vanishing into Paris

To find myself, I first had to become invisible in the world's most visible city

There were a lot of voices when I decided to go to Paris for three months. Some called me brave. Some called me selfish. After too much thought devoted to both, here's what I’ve come to: They were all wrong. At least in the sense they meant it.

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I was acting in pure, primal self preservation. It's neither selfish nor brave to put on the mask if your plane drops altitude. Neither brave nor selfish to leap out in a parachute if the plane’s crashing. Where the selfish label hits home is that I leapt, I left with everyone I love here in the carnage of the crash that is this country. Where brave might apply is that I did it when it was the most terrifying thing I'd ever done (and I didn’t even know the half of it until I got there).

Here’s what else I know: in a fiery crash you have to just try to survive. If I'd stayed, if I hadn't been carried by the knowledge in those weeks -- the darkest days following the election of a monster made real by the half a country who elected him -- that I had an escape hatch, the version of me that a very few people love fiercely and need, that version of me would have gone down in flames.

I wasn't selfish. I wasn't brave. I was surviving.The parachute didn’t drift into a land of milk and honey. Careen into bread and cheese, maybe. I comforted myself with the foods I love, surely. But where I landed was dark and dismally rainy and the kind of damp cold that seeps through your (many!) layers to your blood and bones. And it was horrendously lonely. Not just because I was alone. I was alone in a big city where I was quite literally nobody, a foreigner invisible in a rumpled rainjacket I bought the first week at a by-the-kilo thrift shop, who stumbled over the most basic French exchanges.

Stripped of the two things that make me me - my words, and my way of creating spaces and experiences; shorn of the threads that weave me into my home, the people I know, the accomplishments (however minor they may be) that I’m know for -- I felt naked.

Does it matter if you’re invisible when you’re naked?

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And there was no sanctuary to be found in my temporary ‘home.’ Transforming spaces into something beautiful and welcoming is not just a gift I’m fortunate to have; it’s a need at my core to create. But the rental apartment was owned by someone whose behavior indicated they were so fearful I would destroy it that my every move within the four walls was controlled tightly by our contract with interrogations on my usage of what I was constantly reminded was theirs, lengthy and ever-expanding lists of rules and stipulations from this first-time landlord who didn’t seem to understand that I myself have been in this line of work for more than a decade (“toilet is for human waste only”). Monitoring of my activities on Instagram (“was that dog in my apartment?” came one message after I found the miracle that is Emprunter Mon TouTou -- a dog borrowing app — before I blocked them from viewing my stories). Demands for video conversation and insistence that I serve caretaker duties.

The constant hyper-vigilance this created in me, coupled with the untethered sense of being so far from home for so long, living alone for the first time in my life — even the bed where I slept palpably someone else’s who it seemed quite clear didn’t want me there now that I was there — clanged every alarm bell in my central nervous system. The one that had lost its ability in the sloshing waters of an earthquake-rocked pool in Marrakech to discern the difference between the earth crumbling, and a mere human whose emails, text and Instagram messages may await me in the morning and awaken the same bodily reaction a literal earthquake did.

Feeling helpless to control my response, what I now know is the physiological reality of a forever-altered nervous system, only amplified my disappointment and frustration in myself.

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Because this was Paris. PARIS. The “home of my heart,” I’ve called it. The place I'd dreamed of, longed for, escaped to, loved. I'd walk the wide boulevards and cobblestone streets, its winter beauty impossible, tears marking my face as a fraud, a failure, unable to find happiness in Paris.

Other times a smile would burst forth like the ever-rare sunshine, sparked by Paris being its most glorious Paris self. The guy at the foie gras shop setting out his tall white wooden goose in the morning on my walk to the metro. Uniformed pompiers jogging down the gleaming street, the pavement wet from rain or freshly washed, I don’t know. Two cats sleeping, entirely assured of their splendor, in the sun on a table in a cafe.

Like the weather of Paris so swiftly and dramatically changeable as to be a laughable cliche, one instant sodden grey skies pelting their burden onto the legion of umbrellas, the next blazing blue and January-brilliant sun, if not rain and sun pouring in equal measure, so was the landscape of my emotions -- heart standing still in the purest joy at the bells of Notre Dame pealing through the twilight rain as I knew in my soul that this, this wonder was why I was here, only later to stand in mute misery at Monoprix, wondering why I find “simply” grocery shopping so hard, existence here so exhausting. Why I was so blindsided that living alone and on a strict budget across an ocean, a place I’ve visited a couple dozen times in as many years only as a tourist, was … hard.

And always, the twin shackles of selfish and brave rattled along behind me. Why was I even here if I was going to sit on a bench in Pere Lachaise cemetery and cry, still desperate to soak up Paris outside the walls of the apartment, but at least here as the crows wheeled overhead, cries echoing against the stark, dripping bare black limbs of the trees, at least here, no one would notice the tears. I called home to my husband. He was going into a meeting.

One especially lonely night a couple of weeks in I tried to share, writing a heartfelt post on Facebook about the unimagined difficulties of moving to another country, alone. Crickets the next morning when I awoke, looking for comfort. One kindly-meant comment that only succeeded in making me feel worse because my experience living abroad wasn’t idyllic like theirs. I deleted the post and didn’t say anything else there for a month.

I posted photos on Instagram though, trying to convince myself that the sporadic moments of glee would sustain me -- look, here you are in Paris, the Paris you've dreamed of. The river! The cheese!

Even getting to walk a dog, playing Parisian with a jaunty little senior chien named Raffy I found through the dog borrowing app.

I performed what I thought was expected, what I had envisioned back when this was a fantasy. I bought fresh ingredients, marveling that in Paris you can buy just two leeks. I cooked often-delicious food -- but constantly on edge lest I damage the new stove, the dishware, and God forbid the improperly-finished butcherblock counter by the sink that I'd signed and acknowledged and been reminded so. many. times. to NEVER LET STAGNANT WATER REMAIN on (with close-up photos and video upon arrival at the landlord’s ready in case there was need to demand I replace it.)

Cooking for one takes no less time than cooking for two. Clean-up as one takes far longer than as a team. Weary from 19,000, 20,000, 21,000 steps, from carrying bags laden with any and all things I needed, welts in my shoulders telling the physical story of this new solo urban life, I'd clean the kitchen so carefully afterward, wanting only to pull out the narrow, thin mattress in the single chair and collapse with my comfort object, a plush stuffed baby hippo named LEO that I bought half-price in the Monoprix January sales.

Meet LEO, the baby hippo who kept me company in Paris. (Yes, I brought him home when I came back)

Also? Though the cost of ingredients here was so much less than at home, it still cost as much to shop for food, at least the food that was so central to my love for Paris, as to get meals already prepared. After one particularly trying clean-up night when I had passed a cafe, candles on the other side of the rain-streaked window glimmering amongst the smiling faces of people surrounded by friends, people who didn’t have perishables at home that needed to be cooked because: budget, I’d silently and numbly eaten my scallops in brown butter, charred endive, and (Monprix’s finest packaged) truffle risotto.

An hour later, the tiny kitchen at last baring no trace of my mess, my existence, fuck it, I said, I'm not cooking anymore. Nobody gives a shit if Dana is cooking in Paris. The expectations of friends who so well-intentionedly told me this would be the greatest adventure of my life had encased me in lead, the weight of relentless thoughts of what I should be doing, how I should be feeling.

When you’re alone there are a lot of voices. That night, my own began to surface.