Toujours Paris.

On my twenty-first birthday, my mother gave me a small book of manners, written by George Washington, and a hardcover book called "Mount Vernon Love Story". In the first, she wrote a note, "Always remember your propriety," and in the second, "Go write your own love story, like George and Martha." I suppose it was at that moment she believed I was grown, and so it was time to pass on a few pearls of wisdom about love. What she hardly realized was that the greatest love I could ever know I had already experienced, with an ancient breathing city on the other side of the Atlantic: Paris.

I can only imagine the number of eye-rolls that last phrase conceived. People either love Paris, or they hate her. The state is a rare and clean binary. Three years after I first set foot on French soil, the images continue to haunt me. Around this time of year, we approach our anniversary, Paris and I, and she tugs on my heartstrings for hours on end. Even though I consider myself a writer, I have never (nor will I ever) been able to express my adoration for the only place I have ever truly felt at peace. There is simply nothing as marvelous as a drizzly Parisian morning, the people who mill about in it, or the richness of culture that seeps from the cobblestones and into your bones. There are not many things in life that happen in perfect timing. My happening upon Paris as a disenfranchised artist and a lost little girl was one of them.

Like all incredible romances, however, Paris and I are complicated. I was born in the wrong country, at the wrong socio-economic state, and the wrong century  to live with her for more than a semester. A year after I left to teach English in France, my irreparable psyche is reeling still of failure. My half-baked attempt to return to what once was, made for a string of grave mistakes that reduced me to financial and emotional ruin. And still, tucked far away, in that little fold of my brain where I keep all my aspirations and ambitions, she lives, Paris, glittering in the twilight where I knew her best. To someday or never return? This question pervades my thoughts. What happens, in fact, to a dream deferred, to unrequited love?

There are only so many quiches I can make, museums to visit, and Hepburn movies to watch before my heart rips from my chest. Standing on the precipice of my young and indeterminable life, I watch twenty arrondissements float away, shrouded in a silver haze. The question was never whether I would return to Paris; for this is of course inevitable. Rather, it is whether I will live there again. The answer, unfortunately, has no easy resolve, because reality is a grim and fickle mistress. And the inexorable truth is that I stopped believing I was capable of any kind of love the moment I left Paris. While I feel I must go back, I know full well I cannot.

Life here in DC is, my definition, normal. I have a normal job that I hate. I have normal acquaintances I hang out with. People I know get engaged, married, and pregnant. We suffer. We laugh. We get stuck on the metro on Sunday mornings. But it is a far cry from the extraordinary. It is far removed from the French joie de vivre I learned and captured and lived so well when I studied abroad and again when I lived in Nantes. I could fill this blog with should haves and should nots. The mistakes of course are clear. My fear is that I shall never move beyond what was once to pursue a world that could be. After too many attempts, I feel I have exhausted all avenues. What I desire, more than anything in the world, is to go home. This simple pleasure, however, is denied to me.

I can only hope I will find it in me to fix my heart and soldier on, to a time when Paris and I will live together again. Until then, true happiness for me is toujours, toujours Paris.