My (Part-Time) Paris Life: How Running Away Brought Me Home by Lisa Anselmo

Author:Lisa Anselmo
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
Tags: #pw3, #bio
ISBN: 9781250067470
Publisher: Thomas Dunne Books
Published: 2016-10-11T00:00:00+00:00

Thirteen

Living in Exile

I woke up in a strange bed, in a strange apartment. I rose, groggy, my feet moving me into the living room, slapping on the cold parquet.

The bells of Notre Dame struck ten.

My luggage was where I’d left it, in the middle of the living room, but at some point the night before I had put the perishables in the refrigerator—with the exception of the wine. That, I polished off sitting at the small dining table, looking out at the pigeons kicking up a fuss in the ivy—fighting, or doing “it,” or whatever. Anyway, they’d had more fun than I.

There were clothes that had to be dealt with. It comforted me that the closet was a good size and stocked with nearly two dozen hangers and four deep shelves. The little things went a long way. It was a nice apartment, for sure; I needed to have gratitude about that. In time.

Right now, I was looking out at heavy, gray clouds rolling in and lamenting the scarves I’d left at home.

I ate a yogurt standing at the kitchen sink. Halfway through the bowl, I reminded myself to savor it, my favorite flavor found only in Paris, what I’d waited two months to enjoy again: rhubarb.

A cup of tea. A warm shower. The bells of Notre Dame struck eleven.

The clouds brought the cold and damp with them. I zipped my jacket tight around my neck as I stepped outside. Goose bumps popped up over my bare legs. The display on my phone told me it was fifty-seven degrees, in August.

The queue for the bell tower of Notre Dame wrapped around the entire garden to Quai de l’Archevêché. Tourist families huddled together for warmth, undaunted by the weather. I thought of Ma, how every vacation had to include a visit to somewhere historic—Williamsburg, Gettysburg. All those endless lines we waited on, the plaques she read aloud to us in a voice choked with emotion.

Did those tourists appreciate the history around them or was this just something to be checked off the to-do list? Did they know how lucky they were to have each other?

I walked along the river, moving at the pace of someone with purpose, but it was just muscle memory from my former life. I told myself to slow down, look around. There was nowhere to be.

But I didn’t know how to be nowhere.

Tension gripped my shoulders, my neck ached, my chest tightened. It’s the cold, I told myself. I had to buy a scarf, but all I could find were souvenir shops.

“What you want, lady?” a man at one of the shops asked me in pidgin English.

“Scarf.”

He indicated a rack of long cottony scarves imprinted with some kind of a pattern. “Five euros.”

I whipped one off the rack without looking, sending the display spinning round and round, the tails of the scarves flying in the air.

“You want something else?” the man asked, shaking a large metal ring of Eiffel Tower key chains. “For you, lady, three for seven—”

“Just the scarf.

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