Dispatch from Paris
in which I'm walking more than I usually do at this point
“Sometimes I walk because I have things on my mind, and walking helps me sort them out…
I walk because, somehow, it’s like reading. You’re privy to these lives and conversations that have nothing to do with yours, but you can eavesdrop on them. Sometimes it’s overcrowded; sometimes the voices are too loud. But there is always companionship. You are not alone. You walk in the city side by side with the living and the dead.”
— Lauren Elkin, Flâneuse: Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice & London
Bonjour from Paris, where my Health app is currently telling me “You’re walking more than you usually do by this point.” Makes sense, considering I’ve walked for hours every day for the last three days, unlike my activity in the last three months, which has largely consisted of moving slowly from room to room in my apartment.
My Health app reminds me of social media and my failed romances — a mixed bag of truth and lies. If you believe what it tells you, yes, you’ll accurately learn that I spent the winter sitting on my ass in Chicago and I’ve learned how to move again these last 72 hours.
But it also tells you I haven’t had a period in approximately five years, a particularly funny discovery I made today, considering I traveled here with practically a two-month supply of tampons just in case, and my period arrived mid-flight, I suppose sometime while I was above the ocean. As I’ve said before: “My period comes due with the rent, & I’m not a fan of a late payment.”
I’m trying to remember why, in June of 2020, I was momentarily inclined to track my menstrual cycle on the Health app, only to never do so again. It’s hard to say. That summer, like everyone, I was just trying to figure out how to stay alive — and what that looked like — balancing my free time out of the apartment with solo weekday walks around my neighborhood and weekends sitting on my then-boyfriend’s balcony with him and his roommate, consuming a steady diet of El Jimador Reposado and Tecates. I told myself the two of them (the guys, not the tequila and beer), were part of my small, safe pod. Another lie.
TB (Then-Boyfriend, that is, not tuberculosis), unlike me, is an extreme extrovert, and of course was socializing elsewhere, too. Meanwhile I was going back to my apartment during the week, taking my silly little walks and pretending I didn’t know the truth of it all, ignoring his lies and mine, when I’d known for a year we weren’t the right fit. We’d have our moments, though, especially when I’d show up prepared with a new bottle of tequila, or when he’d wink at me across the table as he’d roll his next cigarette or joint.
Here I am in my hotel in the Latin Quarter of Paris in 2025, and I’m back on the balcony in Ukrainian Village in Chicago, circa summer 2020. All because of my damn Health app.
Time passes. I think of TB (aren’t all exes kind of like tuberculosis?) and I’m not angry at him anymore. Maybe more importantly, I’m not mad at myself anymore, either. We’re long free of all that, now. I hope he’s winking at someone from across the table from him who gets him in a way I never could.
Either way, I’m here in Paris for a writing workshop, but so far, mostly walking.
Some months after I was inspired to track a single menstrual cycle on my phone, and around the time TB and I called it quits, I decided to start studying French again, yes, on another app, Duolingo.
I didn’t realize at the time that my nightly Duolingo habit was a distraction from my grief — not grieving that relationship, god no, I was too livid to grieve that, yet. My nephew Jackson had recently died in a motorcycle accident. And so I turned my thoughts to French each night to turn them off from my heartache. Duolingo was a smarter distraction than all that El Jimador ever was, I know that much to be true.
Those nights, relearning simple French vocabulary again, I couldn’t quite think too far outside myself, my apartment, the boulevard just outside, and the side streets I circled again and again. I wondered if the pandemic, like my loneliness, like my grief, was a permanent state.
I didn’t know the way out. I couldn’t, yet.
Yesterday morning I walked through the Luxembourg Gardens, which might arguably be one of the most magical places in the world. It was Sunday, and still overcast, early enough that the gardens were quiet except for the morning runners. For a brief moment, no one but me was at the Médici Fountain, for chrissakes!
I walked away from the fountain as a couple approached, wanting them to have that same gift. As I circled the pond with the boats, and as often happens when I’m traveling alone, I was smacked with pain, missing my mother. The sadness crept in, a familiar frenemy; as I wiped tears from my eyes, cursing myself — you’re in Paris, stop it — an elderly man who had been staring at a little red sailboat looked up, and at me. He smiled at me like he’d never been sad a day in his life.
I kept walking, past a trio of women doing some type of movement exercise that involved covering their eyes while swaying, slowly, in a circle. I laughed, my own cackle startling me, as if it were coming not from me, but from my mother standing right next to me. Just then, a parakeet flew in front of my face, and landed on a low branch nearby.
A parakeet.
I walked out of the gardens and treated myself to a late breakfast at Le Select, before I walked some more, to Montparnasse Cemetery, to visit Simone and Susan’s graves.
By the time I got back to the Luxembourg Gardens, the sun was shining, and the place was packed.
Today, after yet another long walk that my Health app kindly tracked on my phone, I stopped at the Stravinsky Fountain. The last time I was here, the fountain was closed, blocked off. And yet here I was, back again so soon, the breeze hitting my face as I openly laughed with delight at the mermaid sculpture spraying jets of water straight from its enormous, brightly colored breasts.
Earlier today, at the first day of my writing workshop, someone mentioned that expression, “everywhere you go, there you are,” and I suppose that’s the truth.
For now, I’m in Paris.
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