Day 184: Je M'en Fou, Je Suis En Paris

Paris, Day 13. The past week here in Paris has been all about people. Parties and lunches and meeting people at the airport. Playing all those ROLES you play when there are other humans involved: new girl, English girl, straight girl, helpful friend, third wheel, martyr, and frequently in my case, nosy and invasive writer.

This week, I’ve taken very few photos. I’ve skipped whole days my journal. I’ve lost sleep. The dishes have piled up and the low table where I’ve spread out all my drawings and ideas has gathered a whisper of dust.

My little Parisian life has gotten away from me.

My first week here, I came to the surprising conclusion that I was here, not to work on my book project necessarily, but to work on myself.

I did my writerly due diligence, of course, by taking notes and snapping pictures – all fodder for my second draft – but it didn’t FEEL like diligence. It felt like play. Evenings, rather than hit the town, I’d be huddled over sketchbooks with Crayola markers listening to Roberta Flack.

I filled pages with multicoloured scribbles and swirls. Plotting out my ideal life. Daydreaming about where I wanted to go and what I want to learn, see, do, experience. I spent hours in states of wide-open possibility and childlike imagination without worrying about what club I was going to hit or what Girl-Writer-In-Paris outfit I was going to wear.

My life stopped being about me being “an artist” or being “in Paris” and became simply about BEING.

I found Dana’s copy of The Vein of Gold – a book about digging down into yourself as a creative being. Finding out who you are and inhabiting your own authentic creative self. It felt like God himself had put that book under my nose, so I opened it up and stepped inside.

And then the phone started ringing. Dates and rendez-vous pulled me this way and that. I rushed out the door in the mornings and staggered home late at night. I got caught in the tractor beam of interpersonal drama and gossip. I stopped seeing the beauty in the city and only saw the shit and spit and grit. I wondered why I came and wished I could go home.

My calendar might be full, but I am emptied out.

And so today, after six days of lifting my skirt for every wayward friend-in-need, I am reclaiming my Paris experience. I’m doffing my Canadian politeness and people-pleasing availability and I’m turning the ringer off the phone.

My journal is open. My camera battery is full. The Crayola markers are beckoning and so are the spring tulips, glaring gargoyles and secret places I’ve yet to discover.

I’m not a chic party girl. I’m not the queer family’s second-cousin twice-removed. I’m not a map-toting tourist or a hard-nosed journalist. I’m someone who spends an afternoon arranging Sharon fruit for photographs. Who’d cross the street to fill her nose with the green smell of a flower shop.

Who could stare at a boat, any boat, for hours on end. Who presses her nose against patisserie windows and for whom the rainbow rolls of leather, fabric and yarn are more interesting than the clothing for which they’re intended.

My Paris is not cloud-scraping steeples or echoing cathedrals. It's not stylish, cultured people who all look fabulous and bored every moment of the day. Nor is it gilded frames around the masterworks of Western history.

It’s the faded dust-smell and polka-dot shuffle of bead bins and button cards. It's capturing mid-afternoon daylight not by F-stop but by feel. It's the tangy thrill of indecision over lemon tart or raspberry. The crush of the Wednesday market. Sudden silence down a tiny stone-walled street. An old lady in a fur hat. A new cheese. A quiet night.

This is my Paris. And I'm taking it back.