The Shift
What struck me, and made me feel sad, was how unremarkable our weekend in Paris felt. We went for a long walk after the race on Sunday afternoon. We followed our favourite routes... cutting through the Tuileries Gardens, crossing one of the countless iconic bridges to walk along the banks of the Seine and taking the stairs at the base of Pont Alexandre III that, once at the top, brings you face-to-face with the Eiffel Tower before following the same view along Rue Saint Dominique to turn left on Rue Cler. Always our favourite street. But I felt like we weren't seeing Paris. I felt like we were going through the motions, not seeing or appreciating, all the things we loved and that once felt so part of us.
I haven't written much about Paris the last few years. I think about the city often and I visit at least once a year. My Eiffel Tower tattoo still makes me smile. When people ask what my favourite city is, Paris is still my answer.
But my life has changed so much since my first awestruck visit in 2003. I am now a permanent resident of the UK. Chris and I have successfully navigated a nearly ten-year long-distance marriage. I have travelled extensively beyond Paris, something I couldn't have imagined twenty-five years ago.
I have fallen in love with other countries, cities, and experiences. There is a part of me that misses my all-out, blind infatuation with Paris and mourns the loss of our Paris dream. In Canada, a yellowed piece of paper is stuck to our fridge titled in cursive font, 'We Will Move to Paris in Five Years'. Beneath the title is a detailed, bulleted list of our former five-year plan. Everything from Chris learning French to hiring an immigration lawyer. Neither of us can bear to discard this horrendously outdated piece of paper. Sometimes when I read it, usually the first morning I am back in Canada, jetlagged, standing in front of the fridge, and gasping for a coffee, I feel miserable and guilty.
I am the one who moved away. Not to Paris, but to London. I am the one who has stayed in the UK long past our initial one-year plan and I am the one who ultimately made the UK our second home. Not France, the UK.
It's been difficult, and is difficult, to write about this shift.
I was going through old papers a few weekends ago and I found my journal from that first trip to Paris in 2003. Not only Paris, but London, Dublin, Barcelona, Brindisi, Corfu, Amsterdam, and a few other cities. I took a leave of absence from my job that spring to backpack through Western Europe. I was twenty-five years old. Old enough to know better and much too old for the grotty hostels I mostly stayed in during those eight-ish weeks.
My journal captures a very different time in my life. And a very different time in my relationship with travel. Everything on my 2003 trip was a first. I didn't have a phone and I stayed in touch with my family from then-expensive Internet cafes that were often in less than desirable parts of cities. I had experiences that are no longer possible. I ate in restaurants without checking online for reviews and I stood under the Eiffel Tower before barriers, body scans, and armed security guards. Unless I emailed or rang home, nobody knew my whereabouts. It was exhilarating, exhausting, and sometimes terrifying.
I wrote many observations and feelings that still hold true in my journal, particularly about London and Paris. Something about re-reading it has freed me to feel I can write beyond Paris. I have filled many more journals during over the last ten years. I have written in Paris cafes, economy and business class airplane seats, terrible US dive bars, rooftop restaurants in Singapore, on fast trains in China, and from my bed in Cambridge.
I still find great comfort and release in writing. And now I want to share other experiences and memories during the second half of my life.
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