This was a night to lie on the floor. A night for a heavy heart to sink to the floor. A night to drop down and curl up around it. The anger, the action, the tearily mobilized “next steps” are no doubt underway. But this was a night to lie on the floor.
It’s grief, and it’s something else. It’s confusion and fear, and it’s something else. It’s the despondent fatigue of knowing that before long I’m likely to find myself here, on the floor, again, and still, it’s something else. Because at some point Paris won me. It stole my Yankee heart. Somehow, shit at French as I am, Paris sang its way into the center of my world. It’s that I’ve been hit where the heart is.
Falling for Paris with unreasonable dedication is tradition of a sort. Call it love, call it infatuation, it strikes hard and with a charming lack of possessiveness. Paris doesn’t fade with time, because to love it is to love the idea of it. There may be nowhere in the world that ages better in the background of a memory. Perhaps, such are our expectations; it is only with distance that Paris can ever really give what we ask of it.
Paris means something because it’s fictional. We dress it, like a lover, not in clothes, but in our fantasies—in our buoyant delusions. In Paris a streetlight is not a streetlight. The rain is not rain. Experiences are not experiences because while underway they are already romanticizing themselves into memories too. To write this, about the magic of the city, it’s is a cliché. It’s the mother of all clichés and perhaps for that very reason the very loveliest. Romance, after all is meant to be shared. On the right Parisian evening, walking alone along the canal or through the shops of Belleville, to just be there, the mere act of it, is to link arms in some delicate way with every quixotic pilgrim who has come before; to smile at them, knowing you cannot explain, knowing there’s no need to.
The President said that what happened in Paris was not just an attack on the city, or the people of France, but on all of humanity. And yet in some unpolished, romantic way (and what could be more Parisian), it was an attack on our fantasies too. Because for me, an American, that’s where Paris really lives. So what makes the attacks so tragic is the same thing that makes them futile, useless, destined to fail: if the city truly exists anywhere it’s in the hearts of those who’ve loved it; it’s in the heads of those who dream to. Paris will always be there, ethereally, hard as stone. It’s painted on the inside of my eyelids. The colors are rich, it’s Friday night, and the dancing is carefree.
Photo credit: Eddy Rosales
(‘15, History / Theater and Performance Studies, Literature Editor) is from Telluride, Colorado. His writing varies in genre, as it does in quality.