Lettres à Paris, or a handful of letters to and about the love of my life

Dear Paris,

All I can see right now, out this tiny airplane window, is you shrinking from view as we fly higher and higher. 

I feel like I’ve left myself on the ground.

*

Dear Paris,

I realize that I am not the first person to write to you, and I will certainly be far from the last, just another piece of scribbled, inky ramblings amongst millions and millions of people who have loved and lost you, or only caught a glimpse, or perhaps never reached you at all. I, however, don’t care if my words fall unloved to your well-tread pavement, crushed under the unceasing, adoring crowd that churns within you, because all I am hoping from this letter is an easing of my pain, for you have been out of my reach for exactly two months and eighteen days, and I know now what is heartbreak. In writing this, I realize just how much I risk coming off as just another spoiled white girl missing her study abroad days. I suppose I am one, one some level, but Paris was never just a fling for me, neither an off the cuff, blasé decision nor a fleeting interest with a French culture, and certainly never just a jumping off point for other European adventures. For as long as I can remember, I have been in love with you, Paris. From the moments I could walk, talk, and read a map, my end goal was always etre à Paris, and I was. I reached you. Held on tight and cherished every moment. But it is now, afterwards, that I have the impression was truly my end goal, because leaving you finished me off. I am shattered, lying in pieces spread thin between two continents, and I can’t imagine how to begin putting myself back together. Now having been one of those people who have loved and lost you, I am beginning to wonder if loving you at all was worth the risk. 

*

Dear Paris,

It’s been months and months and yet it feels like every day I have to answer questions about being away from you. Do I miss you? Do I miss you. How silly. I feel like I’m being ripped apart from the inside out — that is how much I miss you. 

What do I miss? God, what don’t I miss? 

I miss the mornings: the ping of my navigo pass bouncing off the stone walls, the screech of the metro as it rolls to a stop in front of me. I even miss the disgusting smell of body odor and piss and possibly vomit down in the tunnels.

I miss the smell of warm nutella coming from the panini man two blocks down from Reid Hall.

I miss the coffee machine at Reid Hall. 

I miss seeing what a nuclear family looks like. I miss being, in a way, part of one. 

I miss Antoine’s laugh, Arnaud’s wit, Sylvie’s passion, Alain’s kindness, Nicole’s wisdom.

I miss seeing the kindness between Parisians. The kindness that they extended towards me. 

I miss speaking French, letting the words that are really only half-baked roll off my tongue. I miss sounding foreign, cultured, intelligent.

I miss the smell of a city: of cigarettes, cologne, and the sparks igniting from the heels of the citadines as we screech down the sidewalk. Cities always smell like they are burning with progress. 

I miss hot chocolate in Exki, smooth jazz playing in the background. My own little hideaway. 

I do miss the grandiose. I miss the wonder I felt every damn time I saw the Eiffel Tower, even if I hid it behind my masque désinvolte portée par toutes les parisiennes, moi inclut. I miss glancing over my shoulder as I walked across the Quai Senghor on my nightly walks home to give the Louvre a wave. On a clear day, sometimes Notre Dame would even wave back. I miss the bouquinistes along the Seine. I regret now not buying a painting, even if it would make me look like a tourist. 

I miss the burn in my legs climbing staircases in Montmartre and losing myself in the topsy-turvy hills that mirror Pittsburgh. When I climb up hills now, all that comes to mind is Montmartre. 

I miss discovering the beauty of the 19th, a hidden gem in one of the most “known” cities in the world, and watching through my wanderings how it lived from day to day. 

I miss the smack of the Seine against stone on warm(er) days, blows so forceful that some of my books still have water stains on the corners. I pine for my little spot between the Pont Neuf and the Pont des Arts where I sat with dog-eared Boulinier novels fresh from the carrels on the Boulevard St. Michel, hearing a dozen languages an hour pass behind me, and revelling in the idea that I looked just as parisian as anyone else in a black trench coat and boots buckled at the ankle.

I miss peering down every little alley and into every corner of every street upon which I meandered, knowing that I had so many places to go, so much to see, so much more to fall in love with. 

I miss walks home at night in January across the Pont d’Alma, losing myself in the twinkling of the tower, of the lights draped between the parisian tree branches (meaning skinny but fabulous). 

I miss the smile that broke on my face every morning, knowing I was still in my favorite place in the world.

I miss the unmeasurable joy in my heart every time I returned to Paris. 

I miss the rain, the dreary days that complemented the grey of the buildings. Paris made grey seem chic. Here, grey takes my heart in its fist now and squeezes. 

I miss having time, months and months that seemed like eons, to explore my Paris. To familiarize myself with a place that seemed immediately like home.

I miss the triumph in my heart at achieving my dream, of my ability to navigate Paris by street names and shop awnings, of a small C2 on a computer screen.  

I miss having something, HAVING PARIS to look forward to. 

I miss feeling myself become smarter, become more moral, more sympathetic. More worldly. 

I miss feeling like I made progress with myself (even if the summer tried to pull me down into the mud). 

I miss knowing that I knew love, knew it for the place I love most, with no doubts. 

I miss living my dream.

And (the worst part) a page and a half can’t even sum it all up.

Words can hardly capture it. 

Sometimes I wonder why I bother to keep writing to you if I know that writing won’t bring me any closer to you. 

Maybe I’m just making this all worse. 

*

Dear Paris,

I really have quite a flair for the dramatic, don’t I, as well as a tendency to work myself into a tizzy past midnight. I haven’t quite shaken off this jet lag, although has there been a night of my life where I haven’t been up until the small hours? Perhaps the only perk of being an insomniac was the rare gift of seeing the City of Light at night once the crowds die away and the night air is no longer mottled wit the footsteps of others. Just mine. I have meandered down so many parisian streets in a variety of moments, but only the serenity of Paris at night could underline the depth and breadth of my emotional link to you, my city, in my solitude. I have never been afraid of being alone and during my séjour I often found myself that way. Reflecting on my time in Paris, many of my memories, even some of my best ones, center on me, and me alone. I surely encountered a handful of lonely moments, yet while I walked your streets, I never felt truly alone. As such a literature fiend, I was more than content to rub shoulders with the spirits of the countless authors, poets, and essays who were fellow wanderers. Perhaps I think a little too highly of myself, but I believe writers like me have a special place in the body of people and events who make up Paris due to that insatiable hunger for life and its workings consuming every moment from birth to death, and even afterwards. (Balzac is a spot-on example. What other kind of person, without having a writer’s ravaging, masochistic curiosity, would dig so deep into the human psyche through such mammoths like La Comédie Humaine?) Writers are, in a word, curious. About what? Well, everything, but in people, especially, because people for better or for worse push the world. Have you ever stopped to marvel at people and what incredible, horrible, nuanced creatures we are? The human race is really on such a wild spectrum. Some people make art, others war, some do nothing at all, and every human has this incredible potential to do, to be. This potential, this spectrum, draws writers to it, to explore it, test it, to somehow figure out how or why people make the choices they do, become the people they are, and create a butterfly effect of change, or our proof of existence, even a small one, in the process. Paris is a perfect microcosm in which to gather material, for Paris is full of people (obviously), but not just any people. I see certain people drawn to Paris, people we might once have called movers and shakers, people who have a hunger comparable to that of a writer (or who are writers), throwing themselves against the walls of ideas and moraes that shape (or trap) humanity, trying to change their shape or knock them down completely. For writers, Paris is a near perfect study in humanity-its foibles, its struggles, and its triumphs. I feel so lucky as an ecrivaine en herbe, to have spent so much time in a city that has caused so many pens to move across so many pages, especially mine.

I love you. I miss you. I miss myself with you.

*

Dear Paris,

People are still asking me about you all the time — in classrooms, during run-ins on campus with people I haven’t seen in a lifetime. Sometimes talking about you helps — it gives me a moment to relive those long walks on the banks of the Seine or those rainy days scuttling into Boulinier to spend a few euros on more books that I will regret when it is time to ram them into my suitcase. Other times, though, referring to you in the past tense is more painful than reminiscence is soothing. 

I think what scares me most is what I know is to come sooner than I would like. I am dreading the day people stop asking me about you, when they stop acknowledging that I was Parisian (if I may be so presumptuous) for a little while, for too short of a time. I am scared of the moment when I will see people’s eyes start to glaze over and they tire of hearing about you and me; the moment when my days with you will finally bleed into the Seine for good, into the ink of pictures and journals that only I will ever want to read. 

Paris, how quickly I have realized that the worst part of returning from abroad is after. Not long after, but just long enough that your stories’ novelties have faded, but not charmingly enough to be memories, classical old stories. Not enough to be anything more than you trying to show off, according to the people around you. These are the same people who raised an eyebrow at your excitement to leave American soil, or even those who helped you pack your bags. Upon your return, everyone wanted to talk to you, sit at your feet as you told your tales and waxed poetic on how much you grew. But no one wants to see past your mishaps, your observation of that other country’s quirks. No one will acknowledge that you did indeed grow. You have changed, but you are still expected to fit in the box in which you sit from before. From a lifetime ago. This expectation hurts the most. Sometimes dull, sometimes roaring, the pain of having to return to a life that is no longer yours, the knowledge that who you truly are is in a city you are now expected to leave behind with a grin and a few pictures-that is the worst part of coming home. “Home”. What is home, now? It certainly isn’t here. 

I would rather talk about you until my lips with sore than leave you to dim slowly in my memories. 

*

Dear Paris, 

Do you know what strikes me most about you? That even as an introvert’s introvert, even as anxious as I am, when I am with you, the city of a billion sparking, running footsteps, of cigarette stubs on the curbs and piss in the corners, of strikes gathering in every place and on boulevards with room for a crowd, of light, of blazing light from morning’s first stretch and the bright grins of the streetlamps, it is with you where my soul feels most at ease. Where I breathe easiest, like nowhere else despite the fog of tobacco mixed with the travelling mold of the metro tiles.

It is with you where I filled in so many of the holes that gaped in my very person, where I learned morality, where my privilege made her presence known to me as she smacked me around over and over again, where I found the missing vertebrate in my own backbone. You have always been the cornerstone of my identity, but spending nine months with you only made me stronger. You are so much more than just a city. You are a guardian of so many lessons and secrets about life and ourselves, and through every moment, every Bonjour exchanged with the gardien, every crowded metro ride, every ramble through Parc Monceau or the Cimetière de Montmartre, you siphoned this knowledge to me through every quotidian obstacle that you made me face and every moment that your beauty caused me to appreciate. 

I think the lesson you taught me best was how to appreciate every little moment and to find beauty even in what I might normally consider mundane, because I could never for a moment forget that this ease would eventually slip away, left behind on an airport loading dock, reduced to whispers of stories that I would have to tell until they were raw, until I could make it back to you and breathe easy once more. I remember standing on the 21 bus one night as dusk began to appear at the top of the clouds, coloring for sky for the first time in days. The bus was always crowded enough that I had to stand along the rails for the entire thirty minute ride, but I never minded. Learning back, the grimy metal would rub against my clothes, passing along the dust of fingerprints and bacteria sure to make me sick yet again. Nonetheless, I would have Paris at a perfect angle in my light of sight through the wide bus windows. To the left, as the bus rolled over the boulevard Saint Michel and onto the pont of Notre Dame, I could spy the Pont Neuf and the Louvre in the distance. The history of all the voyages this city has known could make me shudder if I lost myself for too long in reverie. Against the washed out grey and pink of the sky would loom the Eiffel Tower herself, and Notre Dame would wave from the right. Every detail, down to the chipped paint on the passing cards and the rightly held shoulders of the Parisians speeding Dieu-sait-ou, I would try to catch in my hands on every ride because they never lost their luster, no matter how many times I caught them. No matter how many greves made their way down the boulevard montparnasse or how many hot chocolates I ordered from the same café on a nippy grey day, I lived as if every one was my first and last.

You, Paris, made me want to live, and you still do, because I still want to capture magic in every single one of my living moments like you taught me. Even if we are separated right now, I can still take your wonder with me wherever I go. It isn’t the same, but it’s a start.

*

Mon cher Paris,

Qu’est-ce qui me manque avant tout aujourd’hui? C’est le fleuve. C’est la Seine. Le coeur de Paris, c’est à dire mon coeur à moi. La ou se trouve l'âme de la ville, l'âme de chez moi. La journée, sous le soleil, le fleuve a le meilleur vue de Paris, ses bancs remplis des parisiens ou d’autres en train de se promener, a moitié déshabillés, visages découverts et riants. Le mélange des centaines et des centaines des esprits, noues nettement par l’eau coulante, donne souffle à la ville. De ces vagues lentes est née la vie parisienne. Et moi, je pouvais jouer le rôle d’un de ces esprits fluviales, entre parisien et autre, même pour un petit peu de temps. Si on me cherche l'après-midi, on me trouverait à côté de l’eau entre le Pont Neuf et le Pont des arts avec un livre en main, ses pages tachées de l’eau de moments ou la Seine avait sauté sur moi, en demandant un peu de mon attention. Pourtant je ne me concentrais pas toujours sur les pages quand un monde tangible et vivant, bien vivant, merveilleusement vivant, passait autour de moi. Car les habitants du fleuve parle une dizaine de langues à la fois qui racontent des histoires, et des histoires, et des blagues et des petits instances même faciles à oublier, et l’eau emporte tout au bout des vagues nourrissant Paris par ces histoires, ces démarches, ces souffles même. Le fleuve est un don, mais pour survivre il faut qu’on donne à celui-la en retour.

La Seine ne se vide jamais, même le soir, car le soir elle appartient uniquement aux parisiens. Au coucher de soleil, Paris montre son vrai visage sous les sourires brillants des lumières. C’est à ce moment où les parisiens émergent, à l’appel de la paix et de la liberté de la nuit, vocalisé par le fleuve (mais qui d’autre le ferait?). Sous la lune, l’eau fait aussi sombre que le ciel, et les parisiens s'assirent au bord des bancs, prêts à tomber dans l’espace. L’odeur du pierre mouillée, de la bière, du parfum en train de dissiper à la fin d’une journée fatigante — tout coule sur l’eau qui nourrit Paris le soir. Mais c’est la symphonie de la nuit parisienne qui me plaît avant tout — en haut, j’entends des rires, et en bas les démarches des personnes qui y ont mis leurs pieds. Et malgré tout, j’entends le soubassement de la vie, des vie entières comme la tienne ou la mienne. Après tout, j’entends l’eau qui cause mon coeur de battre, l’eau du fleuve qui conduit Paris jusqu’à la ville qu’elle est, qui la conduira toujours, qui nous conduit tous et toutes, les habitants ou les admirateurs de Paris — le Paris qui me manque, mais avant tout le Paris que j’aime. 

*

Dear Paris, 

Whenever people ask me to talk about you (which is still often, thank goodness) I never really know where to start. Do you know what I mean? How do you condense nine months into a handful of stories? But where, really, can I start? There is no pinpoint, no beginning, and certainly no end to my love affair with the city who has played a part in in nearly every decision I have made in my first 21 years of life.

It might be obvious, but I was a child with itchy feet. I first read this phrase in a book about Johnny Appleseed when I was no older than six or seven, but while his itchy feet led him to walk all over North America, mine led (perhaps dragged?) me to Paris. Even when I was barely old enough to stand, Paris was and still still more than just a dream — it is the end goal, my ultimatum. Paris or bust. Paris, I am sure, is where all of my roads lead.

Almost immediately upon mentioning you people ask me the same questions;

“The Eiffel Tower?” Yes, I saw it. She is quite difficult to miss, especially when my internship was practically at its base. 

“The Champs-Elysées?” Crowded, filled with movie theatres and chain restaurants. If you want real high fashion, head to l’avenue Montaigne. My favorite, though, was:

“Did you actually have to speak French the whole time, even in class?” 

Yes, I did, and honestly that was the best part. Where language in concerned, French is the love of my life, and I am a proud member of the Francophone community and of the language that has helped me to form bonds and friendships with people the world over, but especially in France. Inevitably, when I talk about my time in France, I do tell stories about the occasional mishap like my phone landing at the bottom of the canal de l’ourcq or the places I enjoyed eating or my travels to other countries, however my tales always circle back around to the people I met and came to love.

Honestly, I think the French, especially Parisians, are the victims of an undeserved reputation of snobbery, but this stereotype comes mostly from tourists and short term visitors who have neither the time nor the patience to hack through France’s shell — not to mention a lack of language ability in many cases. Speaking French allowed me to be à cheval entre deux mondes, to insert myself a little further into the culture, to understand a little better its quirks that outsiders might deem rude or weird or ridiculous, as well as giving me the chance to get to know and even befriend an entirely new, wonderful people. Even if some interactions were only in passing or lasted only a few sentences, the fact that they occurred in French made them all the more genuine because I believe that you can only truly know someone if you can speak to them in their native tongue, brimming with the deepest emotions and untold secrets and words that make up a part of that person’s personality that an outsider will never quite have. Knowing streets, restaurants, monuments, and metro lignes is certainly impressive, but truly knowing a place, I believe, is understanding its people. Especially for a legendary city like you, Paris, it is the Parisians who make you who you are — beautiful, stoic, a tad disgruntled, and unyielding. I am lucky that so many of them opened their arms, their mouths, and even their homes to me, that I could be a part of their worlds, all the way down to encounters with passerby au hasard, like the woman who got out of her car to point me in direction of the metro on my very first day, or the man who chased me down half a city block in the Latin Quarter to return a bow, of all things, a decoration that had fallen off my purse. I always say I travel in order to learn more about the world, and who better to learn from than its people? Every person I spoke to, or in some cases just passed by, in France passed along to me another modicum of insight about the place, about you, with whom I have been in love with for so long and continue to be after nine months of real parisian experience and even after all this time.

There are other less human-focused elements of you that I recount in my story-telling although they are no less alive, such as how Paris is so often bathed in grey — grey skies, grey buildings, but how grey is also the color that suits you best. Or how I learned to do my best thinking only once my feet took over to match the burning pace my mind usually runs at and took me wandering down street after street each one a world unto itself. I could talk for hours about my favorite perch by the Pont Neuf or the places I can call my old haunts, the places I still yearn for. I could talk about you for days on end and never exhaust my repository of lessons and tales. Haven’t I been talking about you, Paris, for as long as I can remember? Will I ever stop? You play too grand of a role in my beating heart and in every breath and step I take to ever fall to any sort of second place in my heart. 

So when people ask about you, although sometimes my thoughts springboard off of my tongue unfiltered and seem garbled and nonsensical, I try to paint you, Paris, the true you in the best light possible, and that you can only be found through rambles, through conversations, through embracing you with no regrets.

So what do I say?

I say Paris is so much more than the grandiose and the over-publicized sights and sounds that have saturated media since media began. Paris is a cocktail, a colorful mélange of places, people, experiences, and emotions that most people will never know.

To me, Paris is the cottages of Belleville draped with lilacs; the street art oozing from the walls of the Marais and the corners of the 13th; the smell of espressos quickly gulped down by older men having their morning chat with the bartender.

Paris is the must of books who have seen 200 years - or even just 2 - crowded into hushed bookstores; the tinkling of beer bottles and laughter drifting up from the bords de la Seine when it’s warm; skidding down the hills of Montmartre during a rainstorm; the rumbling of conversations that burst forth from streetside restaurants and balconies long into the night. Paris is a city where living is an adventure, a sense. Paris is a city where I breathe easy, like I can nowhere else.

This city that I cherish, however, deals its fair share of ugliness. I saw it in the way people turned themselves from beggars on the metro, staring out the filthy windows at nothing. I saw it in old, rich, white, Parisians (checking the boxes of any or all of the above), who stepped away from dark-skinned teenagers in tracksuits, or the tents on the edge of the Canal de St. Denis, filled with people scrabbling for their right to live, but who don’t fit the typical French model (so some people don’t think they deserve life at all).

Paris is not the famed great lover to all, as books, postcards, and starry-eyed vacationers paint it, yet it is the most poignant example of what love is to me: an overwhelming affection for its beauty, but a comprehensive understanding of anything and everything that could and sometimes does cause me to fall out of love. And, foolishly, I love it just enough (or not enough-I can’t decide) that I believe, sometimes, I can effect some sort of change and make the perfection I believe so lacking there.

Perhaps where you, Paris, are concerned, I suffer from strains of idealism, but what can I expect-given the ugly, the beautiful, given myself, and given you — the city that despite and because of everything, I call my first love, and who will always be my greatest one. 

*

Dearest Paris,

Just know I’m not done with you quite yet. We’ve only just finished our first chapter together.

You still have my entire heart. You always will. 

Attends-moi.

Love, Lily

About the Author

Lily Keener is a senior French Studies major with a minor in International Studies. She is passionate about languages, history, and writing. Her preferred genres to write in are poetry and creative non-fiction, although someday she hopes to write and publish a fiction novel of her own.