Paris in bloom. photo by sarah macdonald.
I woke up at 3 a.m. to total darkness and my first headache in 24 hours, which was miraculous since my face and brain had been aching in some way for nearly two weeks. The blackout curtains in my hotel room really do work. I started Butterfield 8 somewhere around 7 p.m. but I was so totally wrecked from travelling that by 7:45 I had to sleep. I dreamt of Patti Smith. Or perhaps who I think Patti Smith to be. I’d just finished a book called This Is the Place by a New York tour guide and writer documenting the rise and fall of the city’s most popular music venues of genres like jazz, folk, punk, and DIY all from lower part of the city to Brooklyn. The book tackles (and dismantles) how each generation of New Yorker thinks the next one is where New York is finally over by looking at the history of music and real estate. (New York is a lot more self-conscious than Toronto, I think.) Anyway, the book’s writer seemed particularly disdainful of Smith, and that made me feel a certain way—even though I’ve come to accept and loathe that she’s friends with a terrible person famous for his pirate caricature. Perhaps that’s why I dreamt of Patti. She was so motherly in my dream, so comforting. Another girl with whom I worked at VICE showed up and was deeply comforting, too. I woke up feeling very tender towards her at 3 a.m. I fell back to sleep at 5 a.m. and woke at a much more reasonable 9:30.
My flight was actually divine. A perfect flight. I had the entire row to myself! I watched Top Chef: Portland, slept for four hours, didn’t feel sick (I am so aggressively motion sick that I swear it makes me feel not like a person sometimes), and enjoyed the hell out of my apple juice in the sky. In therapy before I left, my therapist and I spent a good amount of time talking about how much we loved drinking apple juice in the air. I’ve talked about it before—I talk about it a lot in my life for something so meaningless to so many—and I’ll talk about it again. I also had a glass of white wine. Did you know that on airplanes the water used for coffee isn’t filtered? I should find the article Dan sent me. We talked about it while watching the The Last Week Tonight segment on Boeing 737s. (I can’t find the article he sent me but I did find one from USA Today saying it’s safe to drink so make whatever choice you will. )
Yesterday, after lugging my heavy suitcase to my hotel, I got cleaned up and wandered to the Marais neighbourhood where I had stayed in February last year, arriving back at the café around the corner from my previous hotel. There’s nothing that exceptional about it but it felt like home. I remembered where it was without looking at a map, let my heart direct my feet. I sat outside and ordered scallops and a big glass of Chardonnay. My face got hot immediately and I sank into it like I was in a sauna. I sat across from an American (I presume) woman with a similar outfit to me. Two North Americans wearing camel coloured trench coats not speaking French. On my walk back to the hotel, I walked through Elie Wiesel park and saw that the lilacs had bloomed. My nose warmed again the way it does when I’m about to cry. It’s lilac thieving season in Paris.
I brought Annie Ernaux’s Getting Lost with me, and feel a little weird reading it in public, in English, but it’s really good so I suffer through my own self-esteem issues around perception. I think that book is why I’m going to be writing these diaristic newsletters to you on this trip. Recording to remember. Recording for someone to remember me. If someone ever wanted me to describe my style or what I find important about my own writing it’s that I’m writing to remember. This book gets at the heart of that, too, as she writes about her affair to remember it. More thoughts on that in a moment.
I lost a subscriber after my last newsletter and a follower on Instagram after posting about it so I believe they are connected. I’m deeply grossed out by my ability to track and care about such things. Who cares, is something I think often, and I hear it in my friend Anne’s voice. I think of what Jess Dore wrote in another recent newsletter about the one person you know who doesn’t like you or reading your work and how that makes you feel. I’ve always wondered how to not have that. I’m constantly thinking about the people I shouldn’t reading anything I write, and what they might say and how that prevents me from writing at all. How terrible. My sister texted me after she read it, because it was about Angus, and said something really affirming to me. I write a lot about subject matter she tends to want to forget (our family). So when she says anything at all about my work to me it’s the sort of achievement akin to winning a prize. I had forgotten about that person who unsubscribed until just now.
Back to Ernaux. Getting Lost is the diary of her affair with a Russian diplomat that lasted over a year. She was 48 when it began. I’m almost over a third through but I’ve had to put it down because it reminds me too much of my journals from ages 22 to 25. It’s devastating to care so much about someone and know they don’t care that much about you. (I’m projecting because I don’t know how Getting Lost ends, no spoilers.) The way I wrote about each lover with such precision, the angst of waiting to hear back from them. I scrawled their phone numbers at the bottom of some pages because I had deleted them from my contacts on my phone. They still called or texted. Each entry is recorded with a kind of heat and obsession that I had trained myself to hide in my own life so they were thus relegated to the journals only I read. It’s brave, I think, of Ernaux to share this side of her. I think the book is often cited for her relationship to sex and passion and death, which seems dramatic and, I don’t know, different? For me that was the only way to be, and perhaps the discomfort arising when I read it is because it’s so familiar. There are phrases verbatim in Getting Lost in my own journals. It’s like meeting myself in a different city and saying, oh wow, there you are! Ernaux is precise, articulate, and also really annoying, which is my favourite part. It’s honest. It wasn’t meant for publication; she was working out things in private.
I’m electing to write here publicly, listening to the competing sounds of Transatlanticism and street cleaners below me, and not suffer my own self-doubt. Tomorrow, Jamie will join me from Italy (before I go to Italy to join her), engaging in this friendship dream we’ve always had to be in Paris together, going to cafés or restaurants to get wine and sit in silence together. The mark of any good friendship, I strongly believe, is how willing you are to be quiet in the presence of another and feel comfortable.
This morning, I sat outside of a café called Blondies, eating a perfect chocolate croissant and sipping on a sharp flat white. I watched a queue of people outside of a boulangerie across the street that I had saved but forgot about so it was new to me then. I wanted to send my nephew a video of a truck turning down the tight Paris street (something he asked me about before I left, asking why it was this way and I didn’t know how to answer) but remembered it was 4 a.m. in Kitchener. There’s nothing riskier than waking a pregnant mom of a toddler before she needs to be awake. I like sitting in places alone, without music, without a book, listening to the day-to-day noises of living, existing. People with their dogs, others carrying wire baskets of bread; seeing folks going to and from work or getting a run in before they start their day. It’s quieting—for me anyway.
Soon, I may go see my yellow wall by the Picasso museum. This faded yellow wall with absolutely zero real significance other than that I first saw it six years ago on vacation with my mom and my sister and it instantly calmed me. They were talking near the park and I stood in front of this wall, sunlight beaming on it, tranquil. I have a photo of it on my wall by my desk that I stare at when I want to regulate my nervous system. I may walk to another park. I’ll drink the €9 natural wine I bought at Monoprix earlier while I watch a movie.
I just want to sit outside a café and listen to the city exist, still.
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Enjoy the dream and the loveliness of Paris 💞