Welcome to The New Classic, where the past and the present merge, to form a new future.
Once that no one can see coming...
Join Angelo, Vanessa and the rest of the gang three and a half long years after that fateful night.
Lo kept count. V didn't...
Moodlist Quand Tu Souris - Paradis Do It - KAYTRANADA Thunder - ChloexHalle Stormy Weather - Tinashe
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(please note that this is a sequel. these books are deeply intertwined, so I highly recommend you read the first book "AT WHAT COST?" before proceeding, if you haven't already 💕)
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Paris, France Two and a half years after Vanessa left
It was really the city of love.
None of those closest to me would have said I was the most romantically inclined man in the world, but there was something evocative about it.
And I could admit, it captivated me.
Today I decided to take the scenic route, using the Metro to get around. It was so different to the US. The underground trains were old, and some of them had a latch you would have to manually undo to allow the doors to open. But that was part of its charm.
There were no voiceover announcements of the next stop. You simply had to unplug and pay attention to where you were and where you needed to be.
The differences were all encompassing.
Instead of the term first being denoted as 1st, it wasdisplayed as 1er, due to the French translation being premier. Advertisements were less pharmaceutically driven; instead, there were many ads about different phone providers and their ability to connect the residents of the city to lands they long left behind, at a better rate than their competitors.
Right now, the train cart was filled with people. You would think that a city like Paris would be monolithic in its population; almost inescapably white. But that wasn't the case from my observation.
I saw Hijabs and Kippahs, Ankara fabrics and Ao dàis all over, speaking to the colonial and continental history of this country.
I could see why she chose this place.
It was fun, to see fluent French coming out of the faces of an Algerian girl chatting with her Ivorian boyfriend, or to hear a Vietnamese woman barely singing a little lullaby to her sleeping baby.
I was surrounded by people who were brought to the same Metrocart by an imperialistic regime that saw its heights long before anyone on the train was born.
And I fit in.
I wasn't racially ambiguous. Although light, it easy to quantify me as a black man. I'd had a few people coming up to me in rapid fire French, asking for directions or some other kind of assistance. When I scraped the little bit of the language I bothered looking before arriving here together, to let them know that I, indeed did not speak French, it came as a surprise to them.
