Essay: There Is No Getting Over Paris
The clock on my computer says it’s 18:36, but I know better. First of all because nobody here tells the time as eighteen anything, and secondly because the clock on the wall says it’s actually 10:36. I adjust the time in my head and wonder what my friends in Paris are doing, or have already done with their day. It’s been nearly two months since I moved back to the U.S., but somehow I can’t bring myself to change my computer’s time zone from European to Mountain Standard Time.
It’s not that I thought I’d live in Paris forever. My two years there was a year and a half longer than I’d planned. Theoretically, I could have stayed longer, except that I ran out of money (kind of an important thing to have in Paris) and, more importantly, I missed my family and closest friends. In the end, there was nothing tying me to that beautiful city, unless you count the pleasure of being alive. But selfishness can’t last forever; I was ready to settle down, get a stable job and have a home of my own in which to hang all those vintage posters I’d bought at the marchés aux puces. It’s time, I’d assured myself after buying my ticket home. I did everything I wanted to do there: saw beautiful and new things every day, made friends, became (half-)fluent in the language. I wrote the first draft of my first novel, the whole reason I’d quit my career as a video editor in New York and moved away in the first place. There is nothing I wish I’d done in Paris that I didn’t get to do, no loose ends. But that hasn’t made it any easier to come back.
No matter how many loving people you come home to, repatriation is a lonely process. The people who filled the nest of your recently-left life are suddenly far away, and the people in your new nest can’t understand what you’re missing, let alone replace it. With one long plane ride, your usual rhythms and routines and language and weather and architecture and support system are disrupted. Both of the places that define familiar to you suddenly become foreign.
Yet somehow, you’re not allowed to feel the sadness, because depending on from where you’ve just returned, repatriation is often a mosaic of first-world problems. For me, I went from a hipster-chic neighborhood in Paris to my parents’ house in middle-class suburban Phoenix. “You call this a baguette?” is something I actually said to my mother at the grocery store, one instant before wanting to die from the embarrassment of being an asshole. Just as the American in Paris not supposed to complain about anything, ever — because how bad can anything be when you live there? — the “rentrée” back to one’s home country is likewise emotionally stifled. “Poor you,” people say, “you finally had to come back to real life after living in Paris.”
Just as, when I moved abroad, I had to get used to not having decent pizza and my new city becoming a ghost town on Sundays, since returning home I have also had to come to terms with the fact that, yes, the bread is different here, the wine is more expensive and there’s not a museum a bike ride away. Poor me. Yes, in America, commercials are assaultive and constant, and restaurant waiters bring you your check three bites into your meal. But beneath all these superficial complaints runs the undercurrent of one true and complicated sorrow: my dream has been achieved, it’s over and put away, and now I have no idea what to do with myself, where to go, or what is home to me.
Culture shock is to be expected, but repatriation goes deeper than that. It’s not like coming home from a long vacation; rather, it’s like losing a dear friend, or a limb. You have to wake up in the morning and remember where you are, and how your life is different now, and get up and try to move forward instead of thinking about what you once had. While everyone around me is asking where I want to “travel” to next and whether I miss Paris (Yes, I nod with a held breath), and while I put on a happy face and tell them my favorite things about my former city, I’m often struck by random moments of desperate panic. What have I done? Why in the world did I come back? I think. I’ve found myself bursting into sobs in the shower, a reaction I’d once thought was reserved for post-breakup emotional collapses. But nobody tells you not to cry when you lose someone you love. Nobody negates your sadness because of the happiness you had. Why should it be any different when what’s absent is an entire city, a way of life, a dream you made come true?
The experience of re-uprooting and replanting yourself is an adjustment of reality. More than just the streets you walk and the friends you see every day, you must change the way you think and speak, and how you respond to social cues in every public interaction. When I sit down to dinner every night, my instinct is to say, “Bon appetit,” and not in a pretentious way. That’s what any polite person says at dinner in the culture I just lived in for two years. But if I do that here, I look like a snob and whomever I’m dining with invariably straightens their back and responds with faux gentility, “Ohhh, bon appetit.”
For the first month after I came back, I was constantly a bit confused. When trying to recall a conversation with a friend or where I was when I had a certain idea or thought, I’d struggle to remember the context of the event. Was that there, or was that here? I’d wonder. Oh yeah, it was there — I was walking down that street near Rambuteau where I always used to get lost… and then that street would come rushing back to me, all the buildings I’d learned to recognize popping up all around me in a combination of both imagination and memory, and I’d think, I know that street. I wasn’t lost there anymore.
The structure of the city, from the physical shapes of the buildings to the way the air smells on a winter afternoon, had become so much a part of me that removing myself from it has left me raw and vulnerable. Paris stitched itself into me like a second skin, and tearing it away is like cutting a wound onto myself that no Band-Aid is big enough to protect. It must heal on its own, and the only way that will happen is with time.
“You’ll go back someday,” everyone assures me. But that feels unspeakably trivializing. “Do you understand how hard I worked to get there the first time?” I want to say. “How long it took to save up the money and scrounge to make it last for an entire two years? Do you understand that it will never again be enough for me to visit for a week every few years when I know how comfortable, how at home, how myself I felt living there every day?” But I know I can’t say that, because I’m lucky to have gone at all, and the decision to come back was mine alone.
Of course, the mature and therefore most difficult way to adjust is to face the pain head-on and not deny the things that you miss. But the hardest part of coming back from one of the most iconic and idealized cities in the world is that it is everywhere, all the time, in movies and art and the New York Times crossword puzzle. I’m constantly bombarded with reminders of Paris. It’s in Home Alone (Kevin’s family goes there for Christmas). It’s on nonsensical six-dollar mesh tank tops at Ross (an Eiffel Tower with the words “I love my beautiful city in this world, Paris Je t’aime”). While shopping at a home décor store with my mom, I turned a corner and was confronted with fifty different picture frames, all bearing sample photos of the Eiffel Tower. A seven-foot tall frame before me displayed a massive picture of the Sacré Coeur, and I felt deep pangs of sadness knowing that that beautiful building is no longer a ten-minute uphill walk from my apartment. Hey, that’s mine, I thought, like seeing a picture of your sister in someone else’s living room.
Paris is, for millions of people all over the world, a fantasy, and in many ways it hurts to see it cheapened and flattened into a misspelled collage for sale en masse at World Market. When I lived there, I secretly savored the moments I’d be uncomfortable and pissed off at people on the Métro, because it meant that my relationship with Paris was not a fantasy at all; it was my reality.
But that reality is over. I have a new reality, one where people easily understand my jokes and I can dry my clothes in less than forty minutes. And I know that I can’t escape other people’s fantasy of Paris, ever, so I’ve had to train myself to not look away from “Merci” letterpress cards or all those cheesy, faux-vintage “patisserie” signs in Bed, Bath and Beyond. And the next step after that is to find more happiness than longing in reminders of my previous life.
Last week my best friend took me to a specialty cheese shop in our suburban town, knowing how obsessed I was with cheese when I was in Paris. It was located in a strip mall far away from the more culturally rich part of Phoenix, but as soon as we walked in, I knew I’d found an ally in my search for a true piece of France in my hometown. They had all my favorite cheeses (at least, all the ones that are legal in the U.S.) — nutty Comté, stinky Camembert, and the indescribably rich Brillat-Savarin. The owner helped us compose a plate and paired it with wonderful wines. As I ate a piece of Comté, once a staple of my daily life in France and a cheese that’s much harder to find Stateside, I was flooded with a kind of relief. It was the particular comfort that arrives buried in the taste of nostalgia — the taste of a part of my life that I was desperately missing, the taste of one of the many places I’ve called home.
Because the fact is, the home you return to is rarely the home you remember. It may have changed a bit, but more accurately, you are the one who has changed. Your heart and mind have expanded to include an additional home, an additional way of life. A part of you will always be there, as well as one part here, and never will both be satisfied simultaneously. It’s a change that happens the moment you leave home for the first time, no matter how far away you go, and if you are living bravely it will happen on many levels and in many variations over the course of your lifetime. The price, the beautiful pain, of continuing to discover and experience the world is that you cannot have it all at the same time.
In some bizarre way I don’t want this ache to end, because when I’ve finally gotten over it, it will mean my time in Paris is truly, officially over. After all, acceptance is the last stage of grief, right?
I wanted to wait to write this essay until I knew what this process meant, until I had an answer. But maybe there is no answer. Life just keeps moving forward, and someday when I’m not looking, Paris will no longer equal pangs of loss, but will instead be just one more place I’ve lived, one more adventure, one more tattoo on my wrist.
There may be no such thing as getting over Paris, but who would want to? “Cry floods and get it out, darling,” an expat friend recently wrote to me. So I will. I won’t resist or run away when I’m reminded of what I once had. I’ll let myself cry when I hear “La Vie En Rose” in a coffee shop, because one must cry when remembering their joys as well as sorrows, and a few minutes later I’ll get back to creating the next chapter of my life. There will always be new dreams, new goals, new adventures to look forward to. And someday, eventually, I’ll reset the clock on my computer.
