Paris

The movie, Paris Je’Taime, features a variety of small vignettes about love in what is arguably the world’s most romantic city. Some are happy, some are sad. Some are of romantic love, others feature the love between family members… but I found the last one the most relatable: it tells the story of this woman, a post-woman from the US, who dedicates herself to the study of French and saves up all her money so that she can visit Paris, a city she’s dreamt of all her life.

She narrates her experience of the city in heavily accented French, about her trying the food and walking the streets, admiring the buildings and talking to the people. The end features her eating a sandwich in the park, and getting this overwhelming feeling that Paris, the city she has dreamt of and loved for so long, has fallen in love with her.

Paris is like that. There are so many young romantics there that it is like the excess of love produced floods out of apartments and cafes and restaurants to wash the city streets with it, to coat the buildings and lampposts, to seep into the gardens and the leaves of the trees—to catch in the wind and get caught in your hair and your clothes and the air you breathe, and before you know it, you feel like the city is carrying you lovingly in her heart.

I only had a day in Paris. I walked her streets, as I am apt to do in any city, and was delighted by her quaint architecture and modern styles, by her being a city of the world while still keeping her tranquility. She is lovely and she is kind.

And for me, she is familiar: I have been here before, with my father, when I was in grade school. I walked through the streets noting things that seemed familiar to me, things I vaguely remember. As I passed into the gardens beside the Louvre and passed the sculptures, I felt like I was re-entering a dream, half remembered. I have been here before; my father walked beside me, and I had the whole world before me.

It reminds me, I suppose, that some things haven’t changed much. My parents are still there for me, and the world is still before me; there’s just more of it behind me than when I was young.

So am I in love with Paris, and is she in love with me? Well… not yet, I think. Like the kind stranger you meet at the wrong time, the circumstances were not quite right; kismet, a smidge shy of favorable; the constellations, just barely unaligned.

There is always time, though, to reacquaint with the kind stranger, always the possibility to meet again, fall in love, and find happiness together, even if it’s not the kind of happiness that lasts forever. Maybe one day, Paris and I will find that, but not today. C’est la vie.

And now, after 28 months, I’m finally going home.