I wish that I could write like any of Paris’s many-varied and mystical wordsmiths, to tell you how exquisite and intense and sharp it is to leave, but as I am not so nimble I’ll just say that leaving Paris is like peeling off a tongue that’s stuck to a popsicle — just as the flavor is roiling up, you have to tear it away, slowly and painfully, bit by bit until you’re separated entirely but you’ve left cells of yourself behind and everything, for a moment, feels raw and strange.
Perhaps the most painful thing is that it’s only you that feels this separation. Paris, like any great and beautiful and haughty thing, won’t notice your absence. Of course there are the wonderful people still there, lingering shared memories of honeysuckle along the Seine or dancing in the street or sharing a bottle of Monoprix’s finest Roche Mazet on a rooftop in bare feet, but just as Paris didn’t notice me arrive, it was sunny the day that I left, and life went on.
But my life there won’t, and it is a great loss to me, and already it aches. I know my friends will quickly get tired of my “one time in Paris” stories — their lives continued and changed too while I was away. So perhaps that’s the real struggle, trying to fit yourself back into a life that you feel you left, a puzzle piece that morphed into a shape that doesn’t slot in where it did before, that feels for a bit like it definitively belongs in another jigsaw entirely.
When I landed in a dusky New York it was one day shy of seven months since I landed, tongue-tied and terrified, in Paris. In seven months I broke and healed again, gained a fluidity of speaking that I’d never had before, mastered the metro expression of polite boredom and slight annoyance. I did incredible things, met incredible people, and spent a lot of time cold and alone. But, and here’s the catch, I don’t want to overexaggerate — in the end, is seven months anything more than a blip, a jaunt, a generic study abroad? Maybe myopically, I think so. Paris is a hard place to live if you don’t belong there. I carved out a place for myself, I tried to ingrain. I suppose what I’m afraid of is that, though I was changed, nothing in Paris was, even slightly, to prove that I had been there.
The word for tongue in French also means language (perhaps the popsicle metaphor is pretty apt after all). I am reluctant to let go of French now that I feel it comes easier to me (the brusque New Yorkais stewardesses got annoyed that I automatically responded to them with “ouai, merci.”). I suppose I’m afraid that being home will make the person that I am now fade into who I was before, even though no one can really go back to the way they were. And so now the questioning begins — what do I keep and what do I throw away? What parts of me belonged in France, what parts of me belong here?
Since being home it’s been a whirlwind of corn and hamburgers and people at the grocery story asking me how my day was, none of which really exist in France, and then this afternoon I took deep and shuddering breaths of air that smelled like earth and storms and salt as we soared across the Potomac in a view that you can’t get anywhere in Paris — the silver prow of a boat cutting across ridged water that is all you can see, and the curve of the sky mirrors the curve of your iris, and the wind is warm and enfolding and feels good on your bare skin. And that part, those parts, of me are firmly rooted here. But they are only parts.
I want to believe that it’s a pause until I go back and pick up where I left off, that the friends I made and the places I haunted and the boys I kissed will all remain the same. But life rolls along, sometimes the way you want it to, rarely how you expect it to, and always with a changing cast of characters and new chances opening. I’ll try not to cling to Paris too much. Ah my dear friends & family, try not to get too annoyed with my incessant need to talk about it, I’m still trying to accept that it’s over.
Popsicles aside, leaving Paris hurts like walking away from someone you know won’t call after you to stay, a blooming ache caged in your ribs. That’s the most poetic way I can put it, anyway. Hemingway, whose ghost I followed through a dozen dark streets, described Paris as a “moveable feast” — the kind of feast you can gorge on and feel like you’ll never need to eat again. I’m waiting for the hunger to return, to remember that feasts can be foie gras and Bordeaux, but they can also be biscuits and lemonade, and neither is better or worse than the other.
Emily Wolfteich 