Week one pounded out artistic fates, beating blues and romance like the Beauvoir fiction I was predictably reading. I passed the days getting lost and crying because I was feeling found. There was magic, and there were clichés. Irony had no place in such fervour, and nor did Instagram. Serendipity hummed beneath the tar of streets dumdadum…books whispered beggings into basket-pickings, wiswiswis…Call it transcendence, elevation, or elation. I was alone, with reams of time, printing new, pressing paper.

Day Zero

7 pm, or 19h. Crisp European air in the aero port, where light lands ever clear. The promise of fragrance subtly sweetens the odour of clean. There is a sonic strangeness to the rushed, unscholastic French speech that pricks my ears like the not-yet-here winter. I watch the conveyor belt at Charles de Gaulle go round round round like a wind-up clock, its every rotation churning and earning the time that is just about to Become.

I look for my pink ribboned bags with horror stories of lost luggage sharpening my eyesight, stalking the ticking ritournelle. This is taking forever. With each second, my excitement engorges. The belt keeps buffering, slowly whizzing, testing the tension in this string…and in the wings, I wait for my cues. For the first symbols of the symphony I hope to write. My AirPods softly play French indie pop, as I absorb other people’s outfits (I am wearing a knitted fawn sweater, beige lounge pants, and regrettably, a Starbucks cup; I do not like to look like an individual before I have decided who I want to be). For some godforsaken reason, I cannot get the line I hopped off the plane at LAX with a dream and a cardigan, out of my head. I feel everything outside of me – the colourful children propped on trolleys, their flurrying but not hurrying parents, the swings of baggage retrieval, the announcements in the terminal – congeal into a solid Other. And there I am, dialectically dizzy, taking deep breaths in search of self. 

The wind-up clock conveyor is the anxious ambition of time and space. It is bristling the edges of my static skin. The clock is crowning, hours are birthed into the lovelocked city. My bags come, and they ask me questions. What do you feel? How much do you know? Where does it hurt? Peur. Peu. Peau.

The next two hours are mythical and mechanical. The taxi conversation inches me into my Parisian socialisation. When I sit in the grand black car, gaze held firmly outside the window, my eyes are etching everything, my lungs are blooming balloons. I am here, there, for now, forever, and I feel it all happening with the icy unsettlement that is awakened when you know that you will never be the same again. I have not landed in Paris with clean slate, heart unbroken, head straight. I have imported my strange frenzies, great expectations, and tortured longings with me, right up to my fragile but felicitous little apartment in the 11^th arrondissement that I am told I am fast approaching. The neighbourhood is animated by its masses, autonomous others engaged in their quotidian actions, and I think of how tomorrow I will be among them. This notion is wondrous. I reach my building. There is a nail salon, a florist, and about thirty thousand cafes right around the corner. I’m feeling a Dali type of crazy. Key under mat. An involuntary shudder. The elevator cannot fit both me and even one of my bags. My eyes water as I clamour into the quiet flat. I put the keys on a shelf, dangle my torso out the window, scatter my books on a bedstand, and fall with Icarian gravity under the covers.

I light a candle, scrounge up a diary, and it is this one. Great Expectations finally exist in the exterior, where, in fact, they swell so flamboyant and existential that they may well fling me into a flight of fancy. I know, in loose strokes, what I want: art dripping down my chin, culture raking my scalp, history holding onto me with two fingers and a warm sneer. The European heat wave has me sweating my bare skin onto the sheets, tossing my frame around like a crepe. I am too afraid to think what I am already feeling. I’m feeling… that there is heady anxiety, certainly. But deeper, beneath the bubbles, that there is something more frightening / there is a homecoming.

Day One

There’s a 10cc song that goes one night in Paris is like a year in any other place. I won’t bore you with pretention without confession, so let me leave it at this: dreams have flesh, memory has teeth, and Paris has magic. Some things must be saved for my memoir, after all.

Day Two

Today, I walk to the garden in the adjacent Belleville – a neighbourhood of artists, intellectuals, and immigrants. Parc de Belleville has canopies of vines hanging over steep staircases, verdant terraced picnic areas, and flowers bursting through bushes in colours that do not exist in India. The rain from yesterday has blued everything brightly, clouds puff with the people, sun rays glint with charm. As I walk up to the top of the garden through the forested steps, I hear two men talking behind me. One of them says, “and then she came back to my place and had some more wine and I showed her my next play.” I giggle at the outlandish Frenchness of this, and the other man responds to him, “very good, now are you going to tell your wife?”

When I reach the top, I am confronted by a view that a local told me yesterday is better than the famed Sacre Couer’s. I can see everything: the pantheon, Notre Dame, Eglise of Something, Les Invalides, and of course, the Eiffel tower. Which is before me for the first time in daylight, properly. And I am breathless like Godard, phone falling over photos, genuine awe engaged. Here, romanticism and commodification have an arranged marriage, and I am seeing through the films that taught me to love, just as I am falling in love.

I stare at it for a while, eyes wet as per usual, tote bag heavy with too much symbolism. I decide to unload at a café nearby. I’m clearly out of place speaking broken French and the server goes out of his way to help me out. (I studied French for two years in 9^th and 10^th grade, and for some perturbing reason, the fact that I won the French prize for conjugating verbs the best out of the only 6 idiots who opted to take the language has not quite prepared me for the mean streets of Paris. More perturbing still, the conversations I’ve had have not directly comported with the script Duolingo rehearsed with me over the summer.) Slowly – lentement, I plead –  he asks why I don’t speak French. Where I’m from. Okay, from now on we only speak in French. He will teach me French if I teach him English. Ça marche? I order the most vegetarian option on the menu with some difficulty and his patient encouragement. For the next few hours, every time he approaches my table in the terrace I assiduously practice a one-line monologue that falters when it is forced into dialogue. When he asks if I would like to go for a drink sometime, and I say yes, without honesty, but with gratitude.

Finally, in the early evening, I descend unto the park and join the people lolling and languishing in the last dregs of summer. I keep looking at the view, taking in the tenderness of the day like an IV dripping raison d’être. Somebody tries to ask me something in rapid French and I pretend I cannot be bothered to answer instead of admitting that I do not understand. If I do not yet have the Paris affect, I am wont to fake it. A while later, I talk with a suited young man who tells me that he likes my laugh, for it is so sincere. Uh, everything about me right now is horrifically and unerringly sincere. It’s my first week in France. I sit there for hours, reading, laughing, watching. So much movement. Finally, the light changes, and it’s due for sunset, and the clouds look like small breaths of wonder, suspended in the sun, softening the stark skyline. Rays break through, I feel amazed.

Day Three

I have thus far roamed the 19e, 20e, 11e, and 12e. These are the arrondissements of the city, which unfurl like a snail shell out from the Seine. Each has a different character, anthropomorphised by the Old Masters and the New Masters (what does your favourite arrondissement say about YOU? my ‘For You’ page prattles off). These particular neighbourhoods have given me a queer bookstore where I purchased Susan Sontag’s Notes on Camp and had chance encounters with accomplished dilettantes, it gave me booming kilo shops and skinny anarchist kids. Nobody here dresses like a FashionNova shoot, and people are not making TikToks near the turnstiles. The skins are vibrant, and the wine is cheap. Gentrification has not yet ruined Belleville’s arts. Rue Oberkampf still offers small dives overflowing every night with young boys sporting PSG studs tied around their necks, and anti-Sciences Po speeches wedged in their throats.

But of course, I do want to see the Instagram bait that Paris has to offer! I suspect these places will be crowded and not authentic enough for me, a real local, blasé, and edgy. Nonetheless, for day three, I decide to stop by a couple of famous areas – Pantheon, Notre Dame, Shakespeare & Co. – and then graduate to the Latin Quarter, home to the ever-contemplative university, La Sorbonne and ex-home to nomadic philosophers whose writings adorn many a college student’s dorm.

This trip to the movie sets of history requires me to use the metro. I take a train going in the wrong direction (something that becomes an innervate habit for quite some time) and get lost for about an hour. When I finally reach the Seine, smocked by the Sights of Paris you might find in a brochure or on a bus, I am at once wowed and withered.

Warm, gilded buildings are draped with Olympic rings, tricolour flutterings, and aged cobbled streets bloom into ochre landmarks. Indeed, the palatial opulence is intimidating. The instantly recognisable French gothic architecture still punches me in the throat with its puissance, despite its inflationary imagery. Yet, these sites – the Roman Pantheon, the under-construction Notre Dame – are mottled by their multitudes. I see the plastic neon selfie sticks and the families in matching red-white-black paris je t’aime t-shirts. I walk the arterial lanes piling on top of each other, clogged by metallic souvenirs that are the same in every store and ugly in any country. And for the first time in Paris, I feel out of place. It is such a jarring set change from my initial time here, it catches me off in a silo. And in the end, I feel (egregiously) as though either this city could not be for me, or it could not be for them.

I claw my way out of the polyester procession to reach second-hand bookstores in the Latin Quarter that are not without their multitudes. Just a couple of streets away from the centre, the noise has been dampened, but I am still feeling on edge, palpably, humidly alone. So, I focus all my energy on finding a book. I am looking for something pretentious, Parisian, and political. Which would be easy, except that all the books are in French (the titles, however, sound enchanting: Psychanalyse à l’Université, Les Argonautes, Une Avant Garde Feministe…). After three streets spent sifting through bargain bins, just when the discomfort threatens to overwhelm the magic, I find a Simone de Beauvoir fiction (in English!) that I have been meaning to read – L’Invitée or She Came to Stay. It’s a roman à clef of sorts, written as a warning to a woman who tried to come in the way of the relationship between herself and Sartre. The book polemicizes existentialism with a scathing critique of intellectual, narcissistic men and women who are living bad faith and bacchanalian. It walks the treacherous line between autobiography and fiction on which I have so often tripped. 

Tired from the tourism and the book search, I try to scout a quiet place to recompose myself – to reconvene with the magic that today has dreadfully missed. I settle down with my new purchase in a nearby café with crepes on the way. The sentiment of feeling alien and out of beat with Paris does not go away until I open the first page of the book and read the dedication that was penned by someone from somewhere else, for someone from somewhere else – and therefore, specifically for me. Feeling fate between my fingers, a flush grin washes over my face:

“À Margureux,

Maybe you’ll recognize some of the men in this book.”

Giddily, I get into it.

Day Five

One of the only actual things on my agenda for this week is to open a bank account so here I am at the bay-enn-pay branch I stumbled upon, my DeepL translation brimming from my lips: I would like to open a bank account. The young lady working there realises I cannot proceed in French, and her kindness fills the forms between us. She takes copies of my passport and Sciences Po paperwork. I give her the French phone number I had gotten earlier today. We progress into conversations about nearby clubs and cafes that I should definitely check out, plans for the future, and blessings for my time in Paris. I leave, expecting to hear back in a day or two.

I engage in what has now become a familiar ritual: walking down the streets, AirPods playing soundtracks more than songs, sunglasses on, pulse glorious, day unlimited. I make plans to wander, I make plans to wonder, and these are appointments I am bound to keep. About an hour later, my phone starts to ring, and on a whim, I pick it up. Darling. You have left your passport at the bank.

The lady assures me that it is safe, and that she is keeping it there for me, but I spew a series of I’m-on-my-ways and I’ll-be-there-in-literally-one-minutes until they lose meaning and she hangs up the call with the crazed, careless child. Only, as I attempt to walk back to BNP, I realise that I cannot find the branch anymore! For some stupid reason, I assume that the streets of Paris would be parallel like New York, that a wrong turn here could be quickly corrected there. I maintain that my Google Maps is singularly flawed in its navigation, always spinning around directions and arrows as though it were at war with me.

I walk with massive strides, pacing up and down the same streets, until I have the bright but shameful idea of emailing the lady and asking for the address. She replies promptly, kindly, and with the patience of someone who has known petulance. I scurry towards the address, and it is nearly closing time (17h, because, of course). The door is open and all the employees have lined up, and they applaud good-naturedly as I walk in. I am certain my cheeks are red as raspberries, bashfulness bowls me over. There is a chatter of ah she’s come! She made it! and as I meet the lady with my passport, an older employee gives me a speech akin to what Polonius gave Laertes, all about the dangers of Paris and how the metro is a horrid place where I would be robbed of all my belongings and how the roads were rife with pickpockets and political prisoners looking for their next kill. Passport safely in hand, I alert my mother as to what had transpired, and receive the exact speech from her once again. 

I do not mean to jinx things, or to invite catastrophe into my citadel heart. If I’m not careful, I will get caught in Paris’ cracks, ragged and rejected like the rats who could not make ratatouille. But the lightness of the applause, naive destiny and the mercury of a new home binds each breath. Promise dangles in this first exposition. Snafus come draped in charm, and my thoughts are fertile, little literary farms.

Day Six

I do not want to meet my school and college friends. This sounds horrid, but bear with me. As is clear from the very title of this journal, if it were possible to move into abstraction, I would pay any rent for romance. I did not know what making this whole thing Real would do – and how sad it is to be Lacanian today. Nonetheless, I decide to meet up with a friend from my university, and we swap stories of first impressions like telegrams from war on the left bank of the Seine. Hours pass as wine is poured, and as I share my experiences, they constellate into concrete. Telling someone filled out their guts – and somehow, this does not dilute them in my head. It only encourages excitement at all the living that is prophetically coming my way.

As I take off my makeup, still humming from the familiar, I contemplate how people change, and how people stay the same, how I will change, and how I fret over staying the same. There is a Hemmingway quote from a book a friend recommended to me over the summer, one that also appears in Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris (a film that captures the totality of my expectations for the city) that goes: “If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast.” A Moveable Feast, as Hemmingway titles his memoir, is full of gossip and gunk, internal references to particularities of Paris from the 1920s, and proclamations of urban grandeur. Perhaps between these pages, I will find that the wind-up clock chiming time has broken the laws of physics and metaphysics, that the wind-up clock can break depersonalisation and derangement. That wherever I go, these pages will stay with me. That this is the moveable feast of being and becoming, within whose bounds I am forever teetering. 

Day Seven

Tonight is the last night of my first week in Paris. As a happy incidence, I got my period this evening. The multi-coloured melancholia and mania that danced around me as the furore of a new city set in was understandable, but getting my period nonetheless helped clear up the chemtrails. Today, on day seven, something shifts. Enter calm. Enter, I know how to get to the correct metro. I hold one entire conversation in neat French. I look at a garden and a grass and I feel a sustainable kind of euphoria, true, but unrushed. Everything is not going to crumble into ash as soon as I touch it. I have time. I have tension. Together, with these I can make theory, even if tomorrow brings the worn motions of school and society. Today, I ate too many macaroons and bubblies, smoked too many cigarettes on mud, and oiled in too many obsessive lovedreams. A creaking building gently performed phenomenology in seven days, and now I call it home. I walked around streets and felt as though everyone was laughing at me, I walked around streets to feel like I loved everyone and everyone loved me.

Dear Paris. A floating fadingness clings onto its skyline, never able to see in the light of its magnificent fates, dying every day in fear of enduring and falling from heroism. In me, there is loneliness, and there is a moving-on, a making-more. There is the burden of history, and there is the magic of nothingness.

Right now, Paris is mine. Only I know even a sliver of it, and only it knows all of me.