Blue Dress Hot Mess

Series: The Paris Diaries: 19/02/25-20/02/25

Notes for the confused reader: Gabriel (Gabe) is a dog, not a child. This is a collection of pieces from my notebook, typed up; as such, some is written in real-time, some with the benefit of hindsight. It is fragmentary, but so is my mind. If something says (FA) in brackets, read: French Accent.

19/02/25:

I begin to know my way around Paris; I begin to ignore Google Maps and find my way home on my own. The sunshine is dusty today; it is a reflection of my head.

You do not need to go to a museum, here. Art is all around you, in every shop window, on every building, above every door and on every person’s face. Paris is a city whose ordered network of boulevards flows gently, imperceptibly, quietly almost to the point of silence, with the deep red blood of art. Every rue is a vein, pulsing. It is not grotesque; rather, it is beautiful. Like the first beats of a child’s heart on the hospital monitor. Fed by the history of the city, it feeds the city with culture in return.

We have been in the city a full week. It feels strange. How much I have grown, learnt, thought, written, seen, done. I feel more like myself than I did before. It feels oddly simple, just to inhabit me. I wrote last night that I tell better secrets in French (being a little drunk helps too, just to ease the lucidity of the tongue). I do not know if it is the pure musical beauty of the French language, or the ability to hide behind my foreignness and therefore falsely veil my absolute honesty. I am the inconnue. I am, without question, sans doute, wholly, honestly her.

20/02/25:

Paris rains. She has drawn a grey veil over her tired eyes, and she chooses this Thursday, February 20th, to be a day of rest. I am reading Ernest Hemingway. According to him, if a writer is ever stuck, they should simply write down a sentence they know to be true: like ‘Paris rains’. Except this cannot be true, since it is grammatically incorrect. But I like it. I like the way it sounds. I like how neat it looks, two little words on the page. I like the way it tastes (like dark black coffee, but only because I am drinking some as I write). Finally, I like what it means: Paris is a dowager. She has character – she is very strong-willed – and today she has chosen to rain. All must obey her; or else get wet and suffer. Gabriel and I are going to put our hoods up and walk to the Jardin du Luxembourg.

I think there is a small chance I have broken my toe. The not-quite-smallest one, on my left foot. At the very least it seems quite badly bruised. I have decided to paint it. In some perverse way I think that will help. Like making a girl put on her dress and make-up after a break-up. My logic is flawed, I know. It’s a version of ‘Girl Math’.

Gabriel and I spend whole days doing nothing. We observe humanity at its most exposed, simply because we have nothing to do but watch. At once everything and nothing passes us by. We met a man (with tortoiseshell glasses) with a grey French bulldog in a navy blue coat who rolled on the Metro vent with a grin on her frog-like face which would rival the Cheshire cat’s. We listened to a grandmother educate her fawn-haired grandchildren about Hermès, while they stared in ill-concealed lust at the scarves on the Boulevard Saint-Germain. We listen to tourists argue about the route to their hotel, and we get lost down cobbled streets and find ourselves suddenly, dramatically, alone. In the heart of Paris, we are isolated on a island of our own thoughts (separate thoughts; mine likely of the beauty which surrounds me, Gabe’s of the cigarette butt down the drain). The heaving, surging sea of the City crashes in waves around us – commerce and heartbreak, art, aspirations, history all rippling off our little island’s shore.

Paris has been a network of veins, a dowager, and a sea. She is all these things; she will be more things in the future, I am sure.

Yes, we observe humanity at its most exposed. There was a funeral outside Saint-Sulpice. I think it the greatest melancholy of the human condition that we have not yet, in all our thousands of years, learnt how to grieve. We do not grieve love correctly, I am certain of that. And the end of life we treat with untouchable, distanced sadness, like these mourners huddled in the damp dowager’s grey drizzling cloak outside Saint-Sulpice on a Thursday. They looked like flies. All black, all eyes. They looked like they were the bearers of the bad news, not the partakers in it. They wore those little self-pitying smiles which do nothing to hide their ultimate guilt of being alive, and which they put on in pretence for the sake of their families. It is for the mourners alone that the death is an ending. They alone (collectively, but alone) must write their next chapter without the person in the box. So them gathering outside Saint-Sulpice, like flies, uncertain, covered in guilt-ridden smiles, is them hovering their pen over the blank page.

We must all do it, some time. C’est la vie, literally, not written prettily across a straw bag you take to the beach in St-Tropez. I am doing it now: my pen, hovering, over a page.