midnight, goodbye.

from: paris

mom won the lottery and gave 500€ to me just when paris called and came to 480. 

like young patti smith finding the forgotten wallet with the cash she needed for the bus-ticket to new york, i too felt keenly saved by destiny.

i had persuaded my old patriot friend to join me in the city before i finally went home for christmas, and after an 11h train ride from bologna to paris (with a pitstop in milan where i bought a new black moleskine to document my travels), i had arrived. 

and the city was as lovey as i remembered it. 

i got on the metro and found a spot in the front, just before the window with a view of the parisian underground, the magnificent sound of french all around me. chatelet, les halles, barbès rochechouart. to me the voice reading the subway stops felt like the voice of an old friend. 

speaking of old friends, i arrived to mine at one in the morning. she was in bed, pyjamas on, slightly delirious. i was ravenous, wired, and also slightly delirious. we chatted in bed over a bowl of buttered macaronis (our french staple), trying (but failing) to catch up on the last five months. we fell asleep in the small hours of the morning – awakening, much later, to a pink parisian skyline.

on the first crisp page of my new notebook i had written: 

midnight: arrived in paris. writing from the light of the white moon. tonight im going to dream about standing alone at the front of the metro, watching the lights from the passing platforms.

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the next four days passed in a stupor of realized daydreams. i remember, at the end of our trip, not wanting the last walk home to end; finding new backstreets, turns, and alleys. lingering on street-corners and crossings. but as reality has a tendency to do, it forces its way into moments you would least want intruded.  

but here are the moments that made paris the most real to me: 

seeing the early morning light hitting the powdered white buildings and falling in love with the city all over again. the spires of sacre-coeur that first morning from the kitchen window. the first trip to the boulangerie, my patriot friend rehearsing her line for the order all the way up the street: une baguette et deux croissants, s'il vous plait. the hot apple cider and vin chaud from the christmas markets. the coming home after a long day and reading aloud from the new dolly alderton book, my head on her lap. the feel of my chin against the soft white fur coat i found at the local market and wore (religiously) the rest of the trip. watching a nora ephron movie with red wine and chèvre crisps on the couch, leaving the curtain pulled aside and the shutters open to wake up and fall asleep to the city skyline, our small private luxury. 

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we were back in our old neighborhood again and we revelled in that fact. revisiting our old spots and haunting our favourite streets. chez marianne for the unforgettable pastrami sandwich and the best soupe à l'oignon in the city at terminus nord. suit-lane and the sneaking elevation of montmartre. there was 90 steps up to the sixth-floor apartment and 92 down to the metro-platform, and we made those flights of stairs every single day. 

at the alice neel exhibition at centre pompidou i saw her second portrait of frank o’hara. teeth like tombstones, said the accompanying quote from the painter. i wondered why they showed this second (more unflattering) one with the dead lilacs and flushed skin rather than the first version; with purple flowers in bloom and the poets striking profile. the no. 2, made in half a day, expressed his troubled life more than the first, said the painter. 

later, walking into shakespeare and company, the first book i see is o’haras lunch poems staring up at me from its red and blue cover. i think i would rather be a painter, wrote the poet once. i don’t know what to make of that line, thinking of him as someone who paints a picture with a striking set of words and spirited line breaks. 

but it occurred to me then that i had’nt read anything while i was there, when past me had read a whole stack on my previous stay. i had hunted down wide sargasso sea by jean rhys but had not cracked it open once, instead the only thing that captured my attention was a large hard-cover edition from a retrospective on georgia o’keeffe i found in the airbnb. there was an essay by griselda pollock. in it she quotes from a biography on the artist: 

her example is as simple as the evidence: it is that she cared intensely about what she did each moment and, most important, that she allowed that caring to show. 

both neel and o’hara and even o’keeffe produced works where the intense care was as much on display as the work of art itself. 

painter or poet, all i ever want to do is care intensely about something.

and that the caring shows. 

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on the flight home, in-between countries, the sun setting below the clouds –

i opened up my notebook and began to write with as much care as i could muster. 

so heres to onion soup, parisian skylines, and old friends

(the latter of which i will write more on in the next letter).

see you then,

love,

e.