Blue Dress Hot Mess

Series: The Paris Diaries: 26/02/25

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.

It is the five seconds of sunshine on my face in the morning, as I stand on the bridge looking out at the Seine. It is the man walking past in a burnt ocre beret, so buried in his book he doesn’t notice that the lights are red as he crosses the road in front of the Louvre. It is Sacré-Coeur shining like a meringue kiss presiding over her city in the sunlight. She has half an hour of ivory-white glory before her inner-light diminishes to a more sustainable glow. It is eating croissants on street corners in the 10th while commuters’ lives go on around me and I stand, watching the sun kiss the tips of the rooftops, never creeping past the attic stairs to venture onto the floors below. It will be smog by 10am. By then, I will be in a coffee shop. 

I am in a coffee shop. It is 10:27, and I am drinking a ginger matcha latte and writing a letter to my future self. They will send it to me in a year. It is the kind of structured romance I would never have admitted I was wooed by; but I love it, I am in love with it, I will love it again when my letter arrives in the post, all the way from Paris where I have spent my February of being 21, living life just the way I want to live it, with a puppy and a notebook and a gentle feeling of being unseen and seen, everyone and no one in my own life, totally in control of my utter lack of knowing. There is no control. Except this letter will arrive. One year from now. I will no longer be the girl who sits alone in the cafe, writing. She has not got onto her letter yet, and she is nearly at the end of her mug of foaming green froth, which looks like Shrek’s swamp and tastes like bitter, delicious ginger. She writes in a pink marble notebook, and has blonde hair (though some have called it red), and seems to smile subtlety at herself every so often. It is a private, secret world she inhabits. Her black and white puppy sits at her feet, chewing his lead. Everyone and no one. All at once. 

The cafe has walls lined by envelopes, each in a pigeon hole bearing a number and a month. A million people’s words, packaged up in brown paper envelopes (Julie Andrews is singing). I think of other people’s hopes: of other people’s dreams. It seems odd that we should have been put on this earth all to dream different things at once. I wonder how many of those hopes might come true some day. You had the option to have the letter sent to you in one, five, or twenty years. I said 1 year was the least scary. There is a certainty in sending a letter: the words are on the page and your address – a real house, a real name, therefore surely a real person? – is on the envelope in bold black capital letters. Words have an unbelievable ability to prove one is alive. 

An English mother sits writing to her daughter, a letter which will arrive when she is 8 (she holds up her fingers to the three year old swinging her legs in the chair opposite, in a pink-knit cardigan with Bambi on its tummy). Ava, her daughter, has spotted the “little doggie, he sits on the floooor. I sit on the floor too?”. I invited them over to say hello. Gabriel kissed her all over and jumped up, meaning his face was the same height as hers. One little being and another. The same level of understanding. She planted a kiss on her mother’s cheek and patted Gabriel’s tail.

I must post my letter. It is full of one girl’s hopes for herself. It is egotistical and enchanted and it perfectly represents life, as it is, for me, on 26th February 2025. The world changes. Gabriel will grow up. I might fall in love again.