“When you went home this time, I had a feeling you weren’t coming back,” he says when I tell him, finally. I’ve only just admitted it to myself: the next step is saying it out loud, and who else to say it to than my best friend, this extension of me who, by now, knows everything about me, just because I needed someone for this exact purpose: to hear the truth said out of my very own mouth so that I can finally start to believe it myself.
“I didn’t,” I reply. “But I ran out of options.”
“I know.”
***
When I lived in Paris, I very rarely did things that most people consider to be “Parisian.”
My visits to the Louvre and the Musée d’Orsay were relegated to the handful of weekends I had out-of-town visitors who clambered to see the famous paintings I took for granted. My strolls through the Jardin de Luxembourg were the exception, not the rule, of my daily excursions to God-knows-where. And while my friends and I were known for uniting on most evenings over a bottle (or five) of wine, these were enjoyed barefoot on the floors of our apartments, scattered across the city, and not at the Café de Flore as we waxed on about existentialist theories clad in black and berets.
Why, then, am I overcome with the overwhelming urge, now, to watch any and every movie about Paris and reminisce. I watch La Maman et la Putain and imagine myself at les Deux Magots smoking endless Gauloise cigarettes with Jean-Pierre Léaud, though I never sat for even one minute at the famous brasserie, forgoing it for cheaper dive bars further down the Seine. I am glued to my screen as Chansons d’amour plays before me, and I imagine myself having Sunday lunch in la Bastille even though I know my true Sunday lunches were, more often than not, either taken in Breuillet at Alex’s parents’ hotel, or else not at all, as we slept off Saturday night’s events well into Sunday afternoon.
When I left Paris, I forbade myself from doing any of these things in my last few days there. I didn’t want to have “one last” walk around my favorite neighborhood of Montmartre, “one last” meal at the brasserie that Emese and I had visited countless times. My last trips to spicy soup, to the cinémathèque du Quartier Latin, to the vintage shops in the Marais… I wanted all of it to be genuine, for the memories I associated with these places to be real, and not that forced reminiscence that comes when you leave a place, trying to accumulate memories, like so many souvenirs. That is, after all, the word in French for memory: un souvenir.
“Comment peut-on s’acheter un souvenir ?” I often asked myself as I watched people purchase handfuls of cheap trinkets with “Paris” emblazoned on them to stuff in their suitcases and bring home. How can they be attempting to buy memories? I had judged it pathetic and sad and therefore forbade myself from what I judged as similar strolls down memory lane. Trying to glean all that was esoterically Paris in a last-minute dash attempt was lame and sad and wrong, especially when I was so convinced that I would return. Paris, after all, was my home. I had a plan, a way that I would force my dreams to come true… I just hadn’t laid all the groundwork yet.
“When you went home this time, I had a feeling you weren’t coming back,” he said, and as I heard it, my heart broke.
For whatever reason, now isn’t the time. I have to accept it, because there’s honestly nothing else I can do about it. For whatever reason, the universe has come together to decide that right now, in this moment, I will not be in Paris. My parents have made it easy for me to stay in New York, I’ve cut all major ties with the people who used to pin me to that city that I so fell in love with. Funny, how quick I was to try to leave when it was within my control, and now that it’s been taken from me, I feel as though I’ve been broken up with.
I can plan and pray as much as I want, but even I’ve come to terms with the fact that September in Paris is not in the cards for me.
I’m not sorry about those last few days in Paris: sure, it would have been nice to take one last walk along the Champs-Elysées, to pop the cork of one last bottle of cheap Champagne in front of the Eiffel Tower. But on the other hand, it’s nice to only have those genuine memories, the ones I created when my days in Paris seemed limitless. It’s nice to have left Paris, not by saying adieu, but au revoir, until we meet again.
I can’t say for sure when that will be. I like to think it will be sooner rather than later, that now that I’ve committed myself to staying in the States, the perfect opportunity will arise, as it often does when you’re least expecting it, and I’ll be back at Charles de Gaulle airport once again, walking out into that cloud of billowing cigarette smoke to find a taxi who will take me to my familiar péripherique, to where I can finally see all those twelve-story buildings that make up the blocks of the city that stole my heart away from New York.
But I can’t say for sure when that will be, or if Paris will ever be my home again. I don’t think my mother thought, when she left Paris more than twenty years ago, that her last flight out would be the last time she would call it home, but now she’s a New Yorker, through and through, and she won’t live there again.
I guess my only regret is the fact that I had it: for one brief moment, I lived in Europe, everyone’s dream. My backyard was the Boulevard St-Germain, my playground the Jardin de Luxembourg. I snacked on baguette and quenched my thirst with Bordeaux. I lived in France, and it’s gone… at least for now.
I’m embracing everything that is, now. I don’t want to feel this sort of regret when, someday, I leave New York or Argentina or anyplace else for that matter–this irksome itch that says that maybe, just maybe, I didn’t take full advantage of the fairytale life I was leading. I am living every day for today, because I never know when the “last day” will creep up on me again, and I’ll be left, once more, with mere memories of a place and a time that used to be normal, of a place that was, for a moment, my chez moi, my everything, my home.
As for the food, I offer you today something that I no longer have access to: one of those perfectly French things that can be picked up at your local Monoprix along with the milk and eggs, but that once you’re back in the States is a remarkable delicacy : Cabrichaud au Lardon.
If you, like me, now, don’t have access to this perfect specimen of cheese, get some bacon and wrap it around flattened rounds of goat’s cheese. It’s not exactly the same, but it will still be delicious.
Salade de Cabrichaud au Lardon
1 package of Cabrichaud au Lardon OR 4 rounds goat’s cheese and 4 slices of bacon. (To prepare: flatten the goat’s cheese gently with the palm of your hand. Wrap each slice in raw bacon.)
1/2 head green leaf lettuce
1 peach
2 tsp. olive oil
1 tsp. cider vinegar
1/2 tsp. Dijon mustard
salt and pepper
Heat a nonstick frying pan over medium heat. Add the cheese to the pan and cook without moving, two minutes per side.
Meanwhile, combine the oil, vinegar, mustard, salt and pepper in a jar with a lid. Shake to combine.
Toss the lettuce with the vinaigrette in a large bowl, and then distribute between two plates. Section the peach, and arrange the slices amongst the greens. Remove the hot cheese from the pan and place on top of the bed of greens. Serve immediately with a cool glass of white Bordeaux.
