Paris

I ended up in Paris in two Februaries over the course of four years. The two weeks I spent there render my heart broken to this day and unable to forsake the romantic ideals that pervade my conscious.

It’s impossible to say whether I was in love with Jackson or whether I was in love with Paris itself. During my first visit I was barely a teenager at fourteen, incapable of understanding what it meant to hurt and what it meant to love someone else to the point of one’s own destruction. Over three years I received e-mail and snail mail and post cards from far away places that I wished I could go- it could have been wanderlust, or it could have been missing him; it felt the same. There wasn’t a single moment when I forgot, one day he’ll come home. But this was no longer his home. I viewed it as a kidnapping, as a forced act of abandonment, despite him having no say in the matter of leaving this place for that one- still he was leaving me. My body remained where it had always been, but my heart has never returned. Still.

My home was never special- my home was lacking. His home was beautiful and romantic, history and allure through every threshold. His home had become the stations of the Métro, the Boulangerie with the chocolate croissants and sesame baguettes his mother sent him out to buy, and the foggy rows and rows of graves inside the guarded walls of Père Lachaise. My heart became lost among the dead there, and on the cobblestones my spirit lay down to rest.

New loves I find can’t compare to the love I had in Paris. No song I hear is as beautiful as songs heard while we walked beside the Seine and through the neighborhoods he knew, where no one else went. On rainy days, I can still smell Paris. I can smell the wet stone buildings, the dampness of my clothes that I had to change out of back at his place to warm up again. I can still smell the laundry detergent he used in the apartment, and I see the long hallway to the living room, shadows asleep on the wooden floor between doorways, and lazy winter light coming through the French windows in his bedroom. When it snows, the first few snowflakes that touch me return me to La Défense and the Grand Arch, and his voice in my ear saying, “I’ve hardly ever seen it snow it Paris! It must be special because you’re here…”.

Inside the walls of La Cathédrale de Notre-Dame I questioned God as I walked hand in hand among the candles with my lover, and we were young; we clung to one another like the frozen blades of grass on the lawn behind the Nave. We stopped on the corner across the street and bought cups of warm spiced wine that filled us with heat and desire for a closeness that can’t be expressed in words or writing or song. Since then I have not experienced a desire so strong and I ache to feel it again.

I have never felt as heavy and light simultaneously as I did walking down endless winding streets and through the quiet halls of the Louvre. I felt weightless with the breath of an infant love I held in my lungs until I could no longer bear it, weighed down with the imminence of my departure and journey back over the cold Atlantic, caught between ocean and stars.

Paris in the summer, Paris without him, was like making love with a stranger- everything thing looked different and yet somehow felt painfully, exactly the same. Every breath felt too big in my lungs, all the trees were green and vibrant colors flooded my eyes like a brand new world, the sun glittered on the water in the Canal Saint Martin- and the quiet heartbeat of our winter was like that of a dying child in my arms. It was too young to die but too weak to survive; starving, thirsty- but I could not let it die. I cannot let it die.

All photos by Joni Hayward

Photo 1: View of the Eiffel Tower from Île des Cygnes (former island) in the Seine

Photo 2: A grave in Père Lachaise Cemetery, 20^th arrondissement,

Photo 3: French windows in Jackson's apartment, Avenue de Wagram,

17th arrondissement