Tu vas bien? Tout va bien.
This city has normalized for me.
Not to say that it has lost its magic. There are still moments like pockets of miracle that encase me, clouds of thaumaturgy I sometimes find myself walking through. But this feels like I've grown up here, or rather, that my experience of Paris has grown up. Once upon a time, I thrilled at the history thrumming beneath my footfalls in every alley or down every street I traversed, in every chapel or bistro in which I found myself. I don't quite do that anymore. This city has turned from some artifact into a place where I have lunch and smoke hookah and am late to meetings and study and sleep and run errands and buy groceries and run into friends. It certainly doesn't have New York City's heinousness; there aren't the same pathologies at work. But the place is less new than it was when I arrived, this being my fourth sustained sojourn here. The surprise isn't my increased familiarity, it's that it hasn't (yet) dampened my appreciation for this place. The French spoken on the street is white noise, but this place is still very much a refuge, and my time here is very much a sabbatical. What seems to have happened is a submission of sorts. I don't feel so much that I'm trying to drive or direct my experience here. I'm not actively trying to retrace Baldwin's footsteps or revisit the museums I frequented the last time I was studying here or indulge in cultural spectacles I wouldn't find in the States. I'm instead meeting people and making friends, seeing a personal hero Ta-Nehisi Coates speak on two occasions and meeting there several people who knew me from the demonstration I helped put together back in December.
It is these new friendships and acquaintances that have spurred my thinking on this the most. I have personal relationships here that are unique to this place. Relationships with people who work here, native as well as expat. Some of these may blossom into professional relationships, but it seems a thing that I can do now without the added burden of having to acquaint myself to this place's biorhythms.
I could sense that this change had reached a particular point when I returned here in January and made my way back to my apartment more smoothly than I might have even back in New York, without any of the feeling that I had been somehow coerced into coming back. And my academic and personal routine resumed as though it had never been interrupted to begin with.
Hovering over all of this is my eventual return to the States. This place has mentally become my home, but I know that it exists that way in its own reality. I've acclimated to the temperature of the bubble here and that is why this situation is my new normal.
Maybe it is only in crossing that ocean one last time that I'll have realized how persistent and ever-present the magic here really was.
Not to say that it has lost its magic. There are still moments like pockets of miracle that encase me, clouds of thaumaturgy I sometimes find myself walking through. But this feels like I've grown up here, or rather, that my experience of Paris has grown up. Once upon a time, I thrilled at the history thrumming beneath my footfalls in every alley or down every street I traversed, in every chapel or bistro in which I found myself. I don't quite do that anymore. This city has turned from some artifact into a place where I have lunch and smoke hookah and am late to meetings and study and sleep and run errands and buy groceries and run into friends. It certainly doesn't have New York City's heinousness; there aren't the same pathologies at work. But the place is less new than it was when I arrived, this being my fourth sustained sojourn here. The surprise isn't my increased familiarity, it's that it hasn't (yet) dampened my appreciation for this place. The French spoken on the street is white noise, but this place is still very much a refuge, and my time here is very much a sabbatical. What seems to have happened is a submission of sorts. I don't feel so much that I'm trying to drive or direct my experience here. I'm not actively trying to retrace Baldwin's footsteps or revisit the museums I frequented the last time I was studying here or indulge in cultural spectacles I wouldn't find in the States. I'm instead meeting people and making friends, seeing a personal hero Ta-Nehisi Coates speak on two occasions and meeting there several people who knew me from the demonstration I helped put together back in December.
It is these new friendships and acquaintances that have spurred my thinking on this the most. I have personal relationships here that are unique to this place. Relationships with people who work here, native as well as expat. Some of these may blossom into professional relationships, but it seems a thing that I can do now without the added burden of having to acquaint myself to this place's biorhythms.
I could sense that this change had reached a particular point when I returned here in January and made my way back to my apartment more smoothly than I might have even back in New York, without any of the feeling that I had been somehow coerced into coming back. And my academic and personal routine resumed as though it had never been interrupted to begin with.
Hovering over all of this is my eventual return to the States. This place has mentally become my home, but I know that it exists that way in its own reality. I've acclimated to the temperature of the bubble here and that is why this situation is my new normal.
Maybe it is only in crossing that ocean one last time that I'll have realized how persistent and ever-present the magic here really was.