The Sepia Spectrum

Okay, so in my previous post (three years ago...?) about Paris, I omitted a very real portion of my trip. I romanticized it all and was horrified to deal with a particular something. Last spring, however, I took a Creative Nonfiction Workshop course, and I was separated enough from the subject to turn it into an actual story. I've put off posting it, but I think I'm ready to put it out there for more than just myself and other MSU academics to see. I hope you like it.

I have to tell you that the piece does put a much different perspective on my travels, and it's a lot of emotion that I held back while I was away. I was terrified of how I felt, so it was easier to keep it all inside. In juxtaposition to my other London and Paris posts, this is a polar-opposite. 

Here is The Sepia Spectrum:

I had arrived by train to platform six on one sunny yet appropriately chilly January afternoon. Three months of traveling alone before spending Christmas and the New Year with my uncle, aunt, and cousins in Oberammergau, Germany, had reminded me of how much human interaction meant to me. I stayed for a couple of nights with my uncle’s friend in Aylesbury when I made it back to the island, but now I was once again on my own. I knew no one in the city, and I had just climbed 97 stairs, carrying blue and white bags that weighed more than my person. London was my home for the next ten months, and it, like the rest of Europe, was going to make me work for acceptance.

In the months leading up to my departure, restraining my eagerness was impossible; finally, I was going to be able to leave the backwards mid-sized city that, I had sworn, was holding me hostage. I was going to be able to grow in all of the ways that were impossible in Missouri.  There was a hole in my heart in the shape of a question mark, and I had to fill it somehow; experience and culture and travel seemed like a legitimate mending material for my malady. The feeling that the rest of the planet did everything properly and that I had a lot to learn was pretty persuasive, too. I don’t know where that feeling came from. Maybe it was innate, like being afraid of large wild animals with sharp teeth. Or maybe I learned it somewhere. Either way, figuring out how to exist was what needed to take the place of feelings of personal American inadequacy, and lesson one was upon me.

In the bitter British wind, though, my vague dreams of ambiguous idealism were just as cold as Bavarian snow. I wanted to become something better. Every piece of me. The way I walked, the way I spoke, the way I reacted to people, the jokes I told, the culture I was comfortable with, the charm I exuded–everything had to improve before I could be happy. I wanted to be somebody else, and I expected to be able to become this other person by exercising my ability to be different than everyone else around me. And what better way to do that than to actually be from a different culture than everyone around me?

However, longing for change in a general sense is much different than wanting to have a better haircut or to know how to walk more elegantly. Feelings of insufficiency were never given labels; they were merely feelings and hard to remedy when they weren’t specific blights. Fears of the wrong words coming out of my mouth and leaving any impression that I wasn’t who I wanted to be deterred me from talking to people altogether. Plus, over the previous few months, I had developed pneumonia, which had made it almost impossible to speak to anyone at all. By the time I arrived in London, my voice was almost nonexistent, and I was so out of practice in communicating that I had difficulties finishing sentences while making small talk.

Cromwell Road was as long and winding as it was lonely. Betrayed and abandoned by my sense of direction, I walked for miles along streets that caused my American traffic instincts to make me dizzy. An espresso in a quaint little coffee shop warmed me up, but the atmosphere was as chilly as the breeze aggressively blowing the branches of the trees in Hyde Park. Local patrons and foreign tourists cringed with each Americanized syllable that had rolled off of my tongue as I ordered, thanking the man behind the counter. The last few drops in the tiny mug were still steaming when I left. With eighteen eyes trailing me, I wondered where I was exactly and how far I had really travelled to be this estranged. My rolling luggage fought the cobblestone sidewalk, reluctant to retrace my footsteps from minutes before and begging me to reconsider calling this place “home.” 

Dark with winter-afternoon sun, the hotel room was radiating cold in a foreign-place kind of way–electrical outlets halfway up the walls and hidden away in corners. I’m certain that they moved when I wasn’t looking. Even with little space to spare, the emptiness stuck with me and was difficult to warm without a friendly face lending some form of recognizable kindness. A face that would look at me understandingly for using “z”s and not using excessive “u”s in spelling. Or that would forgive my inability to speak in anything other than forced rasps with occasional breaking whimpers.

Three hours later, the door handle jiggled and the latch clicked.

“Hi, I’m Cait.” 

Cait and I were roommates for our study abroad orientation weekend, and we became friends of convenience in a matter of hours, a dynamic that didn’t change. It still hasn’t. At the time, we were content merely considering each other the closest thing to a friend that the other had, happy to provide company and a sympathetic shoulder when London seemed faceless and cruel. And we always played our parts well.

Characteristic-wise, we were on opposite sides of the spectrum. She’s a pale-skinned, firey-redhead with an array of other recessive genes and poor housekeeping skills; I tan just thinking about the sun, my hair violently rejects bleaching, and I tidy obsessively. In many ways, it was apparent we wouldn’t really be close friends–acquaintances, sure, but not particularly close–under other circumstances. She was a pseudo-hippie, in tune with herself and in London to study African culture and to expand upon her own Denver-rooted upbringing; I was fashionably vanilla and trying to find the “me” that was absent in Missouri. She was a surprisingly timid burlesque-dancing roller-derby queen who worked at Starbucks. I had a type-A personality, was a waitress at a tiny diner and a student with an overloaded schedule. But we did have a commonality that conquered our differences: she and I both wanted to see the rest of the world. In that sense, she was all that I needed in a companion in a foreign place. 

We decided that we would pair up to travel together. We booked all of our trips one evening and counted down the days until our adventures began. Soon, we’d explore, at the very least, the carefree culture and radiant tulips of the Netherlands, the mysteries of Egypt and its tawny dunes, the gorgeous green hills of Ireland, and the je ne sais quoi of France. We would point our camera lenses forward and never look back, thriving on being cultured, worldly, and full of purpose. More importantly, though, we would be un-alone. 

For most of our trips, it was cheaper to fly. Ryan Air and Easy Jet were both incredibly inexpensive and decent enough modes of transport when the price was taken into consideration as a serious benefit. Plus, flying usually gave us an extra few hours to play in whatever city on the day of our arrival. We would fly out early and arrive in the afternoon in the places that were even reasonably far away. For our trip to Paris, though, we decided that we should take the Chunnel so we could have an extra night of vacation. Plus tickets were, miraculously, less expensive than the taxes for our two airline outlets, so Cait agreed.

As we quickly discovered, no matter what form of transportation we chose or what luck we had in booking room rates and finding activities, good fortune largely bid us fair-well at the London city limits and left us roaming Europe on our own. On the day we left for Dublin, Cait forgot her passport (one of her flatmates was kind enough to bring it to her, but we both missed our flight while waiting for him), we had to wait eight hours for another flight, and just before boarding we had to evacuate the airport for a fire alarm. Then in Dublin, our cab driver was lost for almost two hours while looking for our hotel, Cait’s camera was stolen in the Dublin Writers Museum, and I got a bad case of food poisoning.

Our other trips offered little reprieve from the cruel hands of Fate and Circumstance: my camera was stolen after we were caught in a dust storm on our trip to Egypt. In Amsterdam, we had hostel mates who snored so loudly that Cait and I didn’t sleep for the entire week we were there, even with herbal and alcoholic encouragement pulsing through our veins. We had been drowsy and delirious all week and then had to return to work back in London. Even so, I’m fairly content believing that all of the memories I have of Amsterdam, the real and the ones concocted out of insomnia, are part of the authenticity of the city, as were most of our encounters in all of the other parts of Europe we visited.

In all of my hopes, though, our final trip would be different. Paris, to me, was the perfect place, a product of my phantasmic arithmetic, and I wanted to borrow it for my own for three days knowing I was returning it to my reveries unmarred. It wouldn’t need to be appreciated despite anything, it would be gorgeous from every angle because I was prepared to see it that way. Like an old movie: hazy around the edges with undulating string music behind every picturesque shot equating to the kind of magic unachievable in real life. Or whatever I was associating with real life at the time. I had dreamed about Paris and its unmatchable ambiance for so long, in love with the idea of its romanticism since I was ten or twelve. It was one of those dreams that breathed life into me and made me calm and confident, as if it were dreaming me instead of the other way around. 

Paris had entranced my psyche. I believed that anything was possible there, including my own transformation. I didn’t know the logistics of how it would work, but it would be my beacon of change that I was seeking. I would inhale the air, equal parts nitrogen and tobacco with a hint of oxygen, and become the person I was supposed to be–I couldn’t possibly visit such a beautiful place and leave with anything less than the charm of the city itself. In preparation, I packed the cutest outfits I could assemble while leaving room in my bag for souvenirs of high-fashion confections and sulfide-free red wines.

Seventy-three meters below the surface of the English Channel, echoes of the train pulling along the rail through the tunnel were muffled and breathy. Pockets of pressure squeezed into each of the train compartments, and the voice of Cait talking to another passenger became distant and hollow. The soft graphite-tinted walls of the tunnel and assurance of darkness awaiting when we emerged in France convinced me to stop fighting the weight of my eyelids, congested white noise lingering in the background. With earbuds playing accordion-heavy melodies from Amélie, I set my head in Cait’s direction on the grey and purple headrest as the sway of the cars rocked me slowly to sleep.

A soft hand on my shoulder woke me. It belonged to the man who had been sitting in front of me when we left London. He had a brown suitcase in his hand with his coat draped over his arm; everyone around him was gathering their posessions.

“Réveillez-vous. Nous nous sommes arrêtés. Nous devons sortir le train.” 

“What did he say?” Cait asked as she rubbed her eyes with loosely fisted hands.

“He said we’ve stopped and that we have to get off of the train. Merci,” I nodded in his direction.

“Where are we? It’s only 9:21, we can’t be there yet.” Cait began gathering her things as I squinted to see the platform sign through the window across the aisle.

“We’re in Lille. I wonder what’s going on. It looks like everyone is filing onto the train across the platform.”

“Of course, one of our trips wouldn’t be complete without something going wrong.”

Wide awake, we boarded the train adjacent to the one we had arrived on and found two seats that would let us face the front of the train. After I spent forty-five minutes in the Gare de Lille, Paris once again began tugging us toward her city limits.

Our original plan had been to check into our hotel when we arrived and then grab a late dinner. Those plans, however, were looking less and less as though they would be feasible with our set-back in Lille. French train-food was a decent substitute, though. In the dining car, €13 bought me a sandwich to split with Cait and two single-serving bottles of wine. We’d left Lille about twenty minutes prior, but had never picked up speed like we had in the Chunnel, so I had little difficulty making my way back to Cait, who was guarding our luggage. The train slowed even more but continued to creep southward as we ate, drank, and listened to the English rugby team behind us explain Star Wars to a little Indian woman. We didn’t even notice that the train had stopped in the middle of the moonless countryside.

Soon a gentleman with an informative tone and a French accent spoke over the PA system in three languages.

“Did he just say we’re lost? How can we be lost? We’re on a train. Can’t they just follow the tracks?” Cait turned her head away from me and looked outside toward the rear of the train, her head pulled by the whim of her darting eyes–like a child who was afraid of the dark. 

I raised one side of my mouth in a quarter-smile and made a single forceful breathy giggle with my nose.

“He didn’t say that we are lost. He said that we’re losing power and that they aren’t sure of our exact location between Lille and Paris. He repeated it in English, how could you not pick up on that?” I put my hand on the back of the seat in front of me and craned my neck slightly to the left to see if there was a queue for the bathroom.

“His accent is so thick, I can’t understand him.”

“If you would let yourself breathe at a normal pace instead of hyperventilating, I’m sure you’d be able to hear much more clearly.” 

“I can’t see anything out there.” Hands cupped around her eyes and pressed against the window, a long sigh fogged the glass in front of her. The attentive lengthening of her neck and the tilting of the back of her head hinted that she hoped a light would come on in the distance followed by a search party. She squirmed in her seat uncomfortably as the heater turned off and the air in our compartment chilled slightly and ceased to taste like recycled heat.

In a matter of seconds, the electric churning noises in the walls, floor, and ceiling of the train halted. All vibrations of mechanical life died. We watched as, from the front of the caravan of compartments, the cabin lights extinguished one by one. Soon we were sitting in complete darkness without so much as a star to reflect off of the tinted windows as the panes collected frost.

“They must be saving power for later or something. I’ll bet we’ll be moving again in a couple of hours.”

 

We spent the next several hours attempting to strategically position ourselves on the floor of the compartment so we could catch some sleep. Cait slept with her head in a position that would have looked awkward in a Picasso. I was kicked in the head by a rugby player four times before I gave up on sleep and decided I was okay with draining the battery of my iPod. When it died, I listened to music on my phone until it died, too. With entertainment quickly dwindling, though, I tried not to let my thoughts wander to the things I was going to be missing or the plans that we had made that were now dented, if not broken. Instead, I acted as though I was contently sitting in silence, pretending I was in a lavender field blanketed softly by darkness. 

As morning began to faintly tickle the sky, people started to stir. A petite man in a midnight-blue uniform was making his way through the cabin asking for all passengers to exit the train through one of the forward compartments, walk along the length of the rest of our paralyzed train, and board the train that was a few meters down the track. Everyone obeyed. 

As we trudged with our luggage, the first glimpses of morning illuminated the overcast sky and entire countryside with sapphire hues. The ground was soggy. So were my socks. With my coat wrapped around me in apparent haste and circulation in my finger dwindling under the weight of my bag, I surveyed all of the people with whom I now had a weird commonality. All of the passengers with all of their belongings in hand were only mildly silhouetted by dawn and the gleaming lights of the train ahead. Their breath rose like steam from an antique engine. Though we had this shared experience, they still looked different and unapproachable. Confident in the mysteriousness they exuded. Dozens of people escaping their histories and trudging into the uncertainty of their futures. In their shadows, I hoped that what lay ahead of them would recompense the past.

The new train was heated and well-lit and strong enough to transport all of the passengers  to Paris with the lifeless train in tow. We arrived at Gare du Nord at 8:00 AM, eleven hours after departing from King’s Cross. Eusrostar set up a complimentary-use-our-services-again-sil-vous-plait breakfast on the platform. Cameras, pens, and notepads with journalists attached were waiting just beyond the continental spread in a barrage–ready to inquire about who we thought was to blame for what the French would, for a day, regard as the worst service by an irresponsible something-or-rather.

“Quels étaient les conditions sur le train?” The reporter hid behind a camera; his stiff, journalistically determined arm thrust a microphone to my mouth. I had lost Cait while picking up a carton of orange juice; now she seemed miles away.

“Ça va. Je suis heureux d'être ici, maintenant.” I’m not sure if I was lying when I told him that the trip was fine, but my relief that we were finally there was nowhere near being a fabrication. We had fifty-seven hours remaining in which we had to cram sixty-eight hours’ worth of activities. Not impossible, but we’d just traveled the longest short distance in modern transportation and were ready to be thinking about and doing something else. As I shoved beyond the crowd, Cait’s hand found mine and put an individually wrapped ginger snap in it. 

“I figured we still had a ways to travel to the hotel.”

The Hotel Exelmans is in the 16th arrondissement, an hour and a half from Gare du Nord via Métro. We had to pray that they still had a room for us, explain the situation, drop off our luggage, and get out and see le monde before the whole day slipped away.

Though we were exhausted, neither one of us was ready to sit in a cab or lie in a bed or breathe air recycled by window units. So we sorted out our accommodations, left all of our chargeable electronics plugged in at our bedside, and yawning, stepped out onto Rue Boileau. Then we walked. I had a surprising knack for navigating the web-like streets of Paris–destinations called my name, and I made sure we arrived promptly. For some reason friendlier than the roads in London, the inviting streets lured me in the right direction at almost every turn. 

Even if we would have lost our way, who cared? We were there. Paris.

With my camera, Cait snapped what must have been hundreds of pictures of couples kissing–always with unimaginable passion in the foreground and Parisian perfection in the background. With each click, my cheeks flushed. I wished I was hiding behind the lens, putting bulky mechanical obstacles and glass-induced illusionary distance between myself and their intimacy. I struggled with borrowing the amorous moments of those people’s lives. They reinforced the romance I projected on Paris, but I still didn’t think that I belonged in it; I had yet to earn my place among the people. I envied them. I envied the beauty surrounding them–the city and their love. I envied Cait for being the kind of person who could be comfortable capturing the moments I couldn’t even find for myself. Where was the part of myself who wouldn’t push someone away the moment they attempted to truly connect with me? Or even to talk to me at that time?  Unaware of the distance I was attempting to put between my mind and my body, I did know that I had a lot of growing to do before I would be able to truly appreciate a relationship of any kind, even one that could be admired in a photograph. 

 

Dozens of lovers in our wake, we entered a quaint district of gypsy-like shops and cart-pushing vendors. As we passed by a tourist-trap storefront near the middle of the city, Cait saw a sign that intrigued her enough to stop and pull herself from my side.

“Oooo! We should go to Disneyland!”

“Are you serious? We’re in Paris for just over one-and-three-fourths days and you want to waste time at Disneyland queueing for rides and surrounded by American idealisms? Did the rugby players kick you in the head too? You have to be insane.” My response was harsher in tone than I had anticipated, but my tone rivaled my disbelief.

“I’ve never been to a Disney park.”

“I really don’t think that this is the time or place to correct that. There’s so much to do here in the city alone.”

“Well, I’m going to go with or without you. Do whatever you want tomorrow. I’ve been screwed over on every trip so far. We can’t travel somewhere without things going wrong. I can’t go to a museum without things getting stolen from me. I want Minnie Mouse ears and to have a magical time. Besides, I’ll be back here in three months with my sister and she wants to do all of the touristy stuff. I can do it then.” 

 

Turning on her toes so quickly that her flowing skirt tangled in the breeze momentarily, she walked away. She was in a foreign city where she could hardly communicate with anyone and she had just disappeared into the Métro station on the corner. Reasoning that she could take care of herself, I walked into a little café across the street. I sat down and sipped an espresso to replace the bitterness in my mouth with one that was more palatable, clanking the tiny cup against its miniature saucer and spoon after each sip.

 

I watched people navigate the streets that were adorned with beautifully manicured trees. They looked magnificent and perfect even though everything lively about them had fallen and been raked away. Young girls clutched their lovers’ arms as their beige six-inch heels carried them down the street. Groups of teenage boys creating their own tobacco-based cumulous clouds doubled over with laughter at God-knows-what. A funny little man talked to his dogs as if they were his children. Women passed in pairs with enthusiastic giggles and handfuls of shopping bags. More prominently, my lonely reflection stared back at me in the café window. She had been gone for only ten minutes, but I missed my travel buddy. 

I had no way to get hold of the only person I knew in the city, but I desperately wanted to apologize for being so testy. Everything Cait had said was, in a way, justifiable, and I wanted to share the beauty of Paris with someone. I still wasn’t willing to substitute Paris for Disneyland, but I was willing to attempt a negotiation. With the hope of a truce and a compromise, I finished my coffee and headed back to the hotel. If she wasn’t there, at least I could pick up my phone if she called me later.

I jogged with the longest strides I could muster to cross the Rue de L’Eglise and headed  down into the Félix Faure Métro station. Concentrated gusts of riverfront breeze blowing in from the tunnel’s opening to the south made the platform noticeably colder than the outside air. There were about 20 other people lined up waiting for the northbound train. They were all fashionably dressed, many wearing hats and gloves and scarves to protect them from the chill in the air.

There was a mysteriously stunning woman with wavy dark-chestnut hair at the far-south end of the platform, about ten feet down from me. She was next to a young man, but her eyes were staring into some far-off universe. He caressed the space between her shoulder blades with the tips of the middle and ring finger of his right hand. Crying, she leaned in and kissed him softly on the cheek.

As she slowly pulled away from the kiss, the sound of the train echoed in the southern tunnel. He lifted his right hand and put it in her hair behind her right ear as he pulled her into him softly to whisper in her left. She pulled away with grace and force, and he didn’t fight. He pleaded gently, lowering his eyebrows and tilting his head lightly, but he never uttered a harsh tone. Their interaction was beautiful in its intimacy, despite her demeanor that seemed to be distant and troubled.

My eyes were fixed upon them for almost a minute, and I began to feel incredibly rude. It was hard to draw my eyes away from the magnificence of their relationship, the poise that dictated their every move. I wanted to emulate it, to remember it and recreate it in my own life. I tried to imagine under what circumstances I would have an argument with someone where I would react like the mysterious girl on the platform. Who would be watching me from a distance?

To avoid intruding, though, I looked down toward my boots intently as the train swiftly pulled into the station. The second my eyes met the ground, however, I heard a shrill scream, a mixture of sadness, terror, and the brakes of a subway train. It still echoes through my memory at night. 

“Iréne!” 

As I lifted my eyes and threw myself two inches backward, I saw the young woman push the man away and leap in front of the speeding Métro. And then she was gone. But the rivers that had carried her inner pain were still there–instantly speckled on every surface inside of the tiny train station. Her silence had erupted into a million resonating screams and cries from the other people on the platform. The shock resonating throughout the tunnel chased away any breathable air. For a moment, all was deafening yet silent.

My body was useless. The world moved before my eyes in both slow and fast motion, but I couldn’t move. The gentleman who had been with her was crying hysterically, repeating her name. Lurching over his knees, he fell to the ground. His mouth was open, spit running from his bottom teeth, mixing with his tears on the gritty, oiled concrete. Some of the people who were standing north of us on the platform were screaming and covering their eyes and hiding their faces. Others were rushing to the driver’s car to examine the situation more closely. Mothers and fathers were clasping their children closely, shielding the eyes that may not have yet understood death–as if any of us really do, regardless of age or experience.

When I found the strength to move, I rushed to the gentleman.

“Comment vous apellez-vous?”

I had never had to react to a crisis of this magnitude before, and I had no idea what to do. I could barely understand what he said between his gasps for air and his haunting sobs, but I wanted to know his name. 

“Jean-Luc?”

“Ouais.” 

I knelt down and put my hand on his shoulder to calm him down. I held him as he shook through his sobs and held him closer as he was paralyzed with their release. 

Authorities arrived shortly after the driver called in. They interviewed everyone. I told them all I had observed, though I didn’t really want to. I wanted to make sure that Jean-Luc wasn’t accused of pushing her, but I didn’t feel as though it was right for me to talk about their personal affairs, even though they were portions that were publicly displayed. So much of our lives can be taken out of context that way, and really, most of what I had witnessed was beyond my comprehension.

I never saw Jean-Luc stand up. With a grey woolen blanket over his shoulders, soaked in tears, sweat, and saliva, he remained kneeling with his eyes transfixed toward the ground.

Three hours passed before anyone was allowed to leave the scene. I was covered in flecks of blood. They had once been ruby and vibrant but were now subtle, brown, and lifeless on my jeans, boots, and white coat. I had to get out of those clothes. Carrying the memory of Iréne was more than I could handle; let alone the tiny molecules of her soaked into my sleeves.

I softly stepped up the stairs of the Felix Faure Métro station and I walked for miles until I found a clothing store. Not wanting or able to speak a word to anyone, I grabbed the first shirt and pants that I could find and locked myself in the fitting room, crying silently but uncontrollably. In the mirror, I noticed that I had dots of blood on my face, neck, and hands. Using my old clothes, I harshly and quickly scrubbed my face and redressed myself in clothes saturated only by the inks and dyes from some factory in Bangladesh. And a few of my own tears. 

Outside of the store, I threw my clothes away; Paris could keep that part of me. My heart disregarded every third beat for the entire two-hour walk home as the violent memory of Iréne flashed at the entrance of every Métro station I passed. 

Grey clouds were stacking themselves in the sky by the time I got back to the hotel. When I opened the door, I was relieved to see Cait lying down, sleeping. She woke up to the sound of the lock clicking into place.

“Hey.” I don’t know how I remembered how to speak. It just came back to me.

“Hey. What happened to the clothes you were wearing this morning? Where’s your coat?” Her voice was soft and mildly raspy.

I knew I should tell her, but I couldn’t bring myself to believe what I had just witnessed. “Are you up for a walk around the Eiffel Tower tonight? I know it’s kind of dreary outside, but we had talked about it earlier, so I thought I’d ask. If you don’t want to go, it’s fine. I could just really use a long walk. ”

“Sure.”

Shaking and wondering if I should tell Cait what happened, I took my time showering and getting ready. We both dressed in preparation for the rain that was beginning to spatter the windows overlooking a little courtyard. 

We walked the 3.1 kilometers to the monument. Although we were both completely drenched, there was no mention of taking a cab or the Métro. It was dark, and we acted as though strangers who were coincidentally heading to the same place. For our our entire walk, we really were strangers, each of us knowing so little about what was going on in the other’s mind. I walked a little bit ahead with the map. Cait stayed a little bit behind. Neither one of us attempted to fill in the gap between us, and neither of us spoke a word. 

I couldn’t tell her what I saw earlier that day. I wanted to forget about it, and I didn’t think that I would be able to say the words if I tried. The tragedy of the scene had pressed me into a state of shock, yet another part of me was terrified of the girl inside of me who pushed people away. I had pushed the world away when I wanted to transform myself, and I had pushed Cait away when her expectations for the city of my dreams were what I had considered trite and inane. How much distance was there going to be between me and whatever leap was next?  Or, at least, how much distance would I create?

Hazy, romantic Paris was absent in our stormy trek. It wouldn’t transform me with a glow of idealism; nowhere was Utopian. And Utopia’s perfection still wouldn’t have made me feel any closer to who I wanted to become anyway. All that was there were rippling reflections of city lights in rain puddles in the street. Real sepia lights in gritty, oily pools of water.

When we made it to the base of one of the legs of the monument, I stopped. All I could do was look up at the glowing symbol that had been in all of my European daydreams. It was so much bigger than I had imagined it could be, but no matter how hard I wanted it to, it couldn’t erase the images in my head, though they were less frightening in its gravity. I had come to Paris foolishly expecting to discover how to be what and who I wanted to be. Instead I was forced to face what I could become if I didn’t wake up and realize that the change wouldn’t miraculously occur; lasting metamorphosis takes focus and time and acceptance of what is there to begin with. Romanticism doesn’t battle life’s bitter fidelities, and it’s not supposed to. At the very most, it can distract you from them, but it never makes them disappear.

In the Paris I built in my mind, the distance and the fog and the lights had masked it, but in truth, reality had always been lurking not far below. It was a real place, and my realizing so was inevitable; the place in my dreams was a million fantasy-worlds away. 

In the silence, Cait walked up beside me and hooked her arm through mine. I placed my head on her shoulder and she rested her head lightly on my temple. The lights of the tower, for that moment at least, spoke in quiet opposition to forgetting the dream completely. The structure shimmered and produced its own halo, amplified by the falling rain.