A World Through Her Eyes

Journal Entry - May 16th 2022

I love you most ardently, Paris. 

Every fibre of my being yearns for your touch. Oh, how I know I owe it all to you, may you please wait patiently for my return, and may you welcome me back with open arms, the city wind breathing a sigh of relief down my neck, my body a little more worn in than the last time we embraced, as if I am finally where I should have been all along. 

May you remind me of my youth, and may the bittersweet tang of nostalgia collect itself in the form of tears in my honey-brown eyes, a wall of translucent tears glossing over and reflecting your beauty in them. 

I found myself in you. 

The late nights, the everlasting loneliness yet the neverending comfort of the city. I had not been touched so lovingly even by my mother, you nurtured me through the strangers I didn't know, and the strangers that didn't know me. The greatest privilege you allowed me was to just observe them and offer myself up for examination. I picked up their quirks, their walking pattern, their eye movements, their voice, and their manners, injecting my veins with the identities of hundreds and making myself a product of Parisians. In return, stuffing my old self in the dark corners of each speakeasy I visited for someone else to find when the dusk turned to dawn. I often wonder where I am now. Who has me, who picked me up and injected me into their veins? I wonder about the life the remnants of my old self are living, as I write this. I wonder if I found them again, whether I would politely ask for them back. Or if I am better off. Did I find myself in you, or did I lose myself in you? 

Tell me when I come back. But then that was another problem, I never understood you. It was always the language barrier, this gibberish you would spew at me. I begged you on many occasions to tell me what I was doing here, why, who I was, and where I was going to go after our relationship ended and you would always respond in French. I studied the language for three months before we met and I still couldn't decipher what your response was. If I were to guess what you said, it would probably be:

"Silly girl to speak into nothing and expect it to do all of the hard work for you. To ricochet your loss of identity into my chamber, and expect to know all the intricate detailing of YOUR being. What you are asking isn't within me, and it isn't FOR ME to find. It is for you. I am just keeping you company along the way. Don't litter pieces of yourself in the city for the sake of forced growth, save yourself until the right disposal site'. 

Something philosophical along those lines. And I would reply with tears staining my porcelain cheeks because I will miss you regardless if you couldn't help me. 

There's more I found in you. Here's a list: 

There's the late-night dinner talks with a friend, whilst a mouse runs across the floor of the restaurant. The rainy days, when it was suddenly your turn to shed yourself onto the people within you, damping them with your sorrows. The following scorching hot days as your way of apologising, but we all have our bad days, don't we? Then there was Le Carmen, the cult club, the picnics, the arrogant French, the ignorant French, the crepes, the seine, the postcard stands on the side of the seine, begging you to pick them, so that they may travel with you to see the entirety of the city too. The metro lines, as if they were the neurological pathways of the city, spread thinly through abysmal tunnels underneath the bustle of the world above. I remember always thinking that I would love for the metros to stop running one day, to rest, so that I could venture down each tunnel for as long as it took me and see what else I might find out about the city. I would wonder if I would come across any dead bodies laid on the side, bodies of past people who also had the same idea as me. 

And then the Eiffel Tower, so tall, so sensually puffing out its chest, and rearing its head past every building that you could see it from whatever point you were stood in the city. And you just knew she was spying on you, checking in on you, and should I have ever felt a moment of loneliness, where my own company wasn't enough, she would rear her head around in seconds, as soon as she sensed my sadness to comfort me back to myself. 

Each memory I have listed is a situation in which I detached a piece of myself and replaced it with a piece of you, Paris. So that you might remain burrowed within me for all eternity. Even when I am in the ground, maggots will feast on my corpse and taste you. 

I will see you again. I have to go fit the last five months of my life and everything and everyone I have picked up along the way back in the same black suitcase I came with. Something tells me it will not be able to hold it all, so I may have to think about leaving my dressing gown behind. Otherwise, the zipper could break, and I would lose it all. I don't mind leaving a few of my belongings with you, just as long as I find them again when I come back. Because the feeling of leaving something that has been owned by you behind is a feeling truly hollowing, one that may curse me with desperately attempting to fill up the space it left, only for myself to conclude that nothing quite fits in that space the way the thing I left behind did. Then what, Paris? 

Then I have lost parts of myself in you. 

And after my departure, my return will never find you the way I left you, because the privilege of time being at a standstill in this world is not owned by anyone. 

It's why I write. How I describe you here, how I explain things about who you were to me, how I write about you in the pages of my journal on how you made me feel, what you did to me and for me, will always be. The written words of my past are at a standstill, time cannot erode them away from me, and therefore, what I say, is what shall always remain. That fickle thing of time cannot penetrate the pages of my journal. 

I have to go now, I am only hours away from taking my last breaths in you. 

Until we meet again, take care of yourself and I shall do the same. I will write more about you soon. 

Sincerely, 

Amara