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I'm walking aimlessly, as people in foreign countries with bad senses of direction are wont to do, and I'm thinking about this guy Franc, who asked me earlier if I was going to go back home. I'd laughed and said, Well, yeah, unless you know of a good burrito joint in the area, and he said, You should stay. He said it in a nice way.
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People ask me that often, whether I'm going home. But when they do, I can tell they assume I will stay, that everyone who comes to Paris eventually stays. They smile like I am the paper clip and they are part of the collective magnet. They seem to know that all the people in the world are really homing pigeons and this city is where everything began, the real cradle of civilization.
And I love that. I really do. Love for the place you are seems so rare sometimes, and I treasure it when I stumble across it, but their knowing look unsettles me.
I want to say, You should travel too. Outside of here. You should go somewhere where there is real dancing, not grinding on an artificially lit club floor. Find a place where the women do not dress in black even on sunny days, and cigarettes do not bloom from every person's hand like a smoking, stinking sixth finger.
Your city shines and there are nights when I am speechless under its beauty. I will never deny that there is a spell here. It's just that I can't see any stars at night. I know it's a small thing, and I'm not saying that a desert full of stars is preferable to a city full of lights. I just think that there's no good reason not to see them both.
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I love the rain here, I would tell them. I love the way it fades into the background, how it makes the landscape look strange and forbidding in that seductive way. But when you're around Paris rain too long you forget to notice that there's no thunder here, no lightning. I wish I could hear it threaten me half an hour before it shows up to deliver, see it lit up under the sky. Here rain is mostly an inconvenience, but where I'm from people pray for it, depend on it, dance in it. Have you ever smelled rain? Here it doesn't seem to smell like anything at all.
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Here, there are so many places and things and people. Frankly, it's wonderful. All I want to do in this city, your city, is get lost and walk into something I've never seen before and won't ever find again.
I wandered into a store yesterday which had nothing but tens of thousands of seashells, meticulously labeled and displayed in cracked glass cases. You have everything here, and I love that. I know.
It's just that I'm a girl who grew up in a place where we have less things but more room. I'm used to having more heaven than earth in direct visibility. I want you to be able to see that too. I guess it's harder to believe that you need something if you've spent the first twenty years of your life not knowing what it looked like.
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I know that you have things to do every night. There is no shortage of packed clubs, smoky restaurants, loud bars. There is everything to do and when you get home you lean out your window and smoke while listening to the street under you.
But have you ever gone outside at night and not heard anything at all? And how can I explain to you how perfect that is? When the darkness is out there holding its breath you can feel the ground holding you up, waiting. And you can feel the weight of the sky over you, waiting. And even if you get restless and you have to drive, you can feel the silence and the still under the hum of the road, see the horizon in every direction, sprawling before you in the predawn grey.
I know I can't describe it. I guess that's why you have to go somewhere and find it. Paris is beautiful, but isn't everything? That's what I want to say, what I want them to hear. Isn't everything, really?
