B, our writer friend, says Paris doesn’t have much of a cocktail culture (this when, in a bistro with a name that in its fancy script looks like vagenda, they bring me a bottle of tonic water to go with my whiskey). But in a little place in the Latin Quarter I have a “Dublin mule” - Jamesons, ginger, blood orange syrup, mint - and it is the best drink I have ever had.
We’re sitting outside, eavesdropping on some southern accents whose relationship I cannot quite decipher while a busker plays “Just The Way You Are” on the saxophone, and I feel myself start to unclench in the way I only can when I step outside of my real life.
B also says the cheeseburgers in France are the best he has ever had. This, I will give him.
Could I live here, I ask myself, as I always do, in one of these high-ceilinged appartements whose huge windows open onto a narrow, barred balcony overlooking the street, on which somebody is always smoking? My Duolingo pidgin high school French, a notebook and some house plants and my little calico cat? The answer is yes. The answer is always yes, as if the escape isn’t the point. As if I’ve ever kept a house plant alive. As if the holiday turned into my reality wouldn’t be corrupted by the omnipresent dread, this shapeless “constant horror and bone-deep dissatisfaction”.
I quote the TV show You’re The Worst to my therapist a lot. I have a therapist now, and it is the most validating shit ever. I can’t believe I waited so long.
What happened was, I cried at work - proper uncontrollable, unstoppable sobs - twice in the space of a week. It was over things that weren’t pleasant, sure, but nothing I haven’t taught myself to control my emotions over. But I realised something wasn’t working, so I asked for what I needed and I got it. I recognise that response is a particular privilege and one that isn’t open to everybody.
But as I wrote to Stoo the other day, I’m so fucking sick of being strong. I’m messy, and crabbit, and remembering what it is to feel alive. Just a wee shitebag, doing her best and trying to have a few laughs along the way.
Yannis, our Uber driver, is 6’5” and sweet, a big bear of a man who makes me sit behind the driver’s seat and who can only fit three passengers in his tiny car. He wants to come to Scotland because the people are tall like him, he says: he’s seen the athletes on the television, with the big log things. We eat ice cream sculpted to look like flowers, a macaron in the centre like the nubby head of a peony. Outside the shop, a woman sits on a blanket with a white rabbit. The rabbit is nibbling on a lettuce leaf and has a full, big carrot for afters, like the kind you’d feed to Bugs Bunny.
Everywhere there is art, there are books, there are buildings older than everything you know in which someone has put a McDonald’s. Big green bins by the Seine fold out to become second hand book stalls, while the book shops themselves are so sacred that sometimes you need to queue to get in (B, it turns out, is huge here). I buy some Baudelaire because I’ve been reading Patti Smith’s Just Kids, and Les fleurs du mal sounds sexier than the slim volume of Rimbaud.
Find what you love, let it keep you alive. Lord help me, I’m trying.