A Darker Color

A Sharp Distance

It's a long story—goes a couple generations back, my grandparents sometimes living here before the Iranian Revolution but full-time after; back further even, when Iran still had a king; back to my grandfather and his military scholarship in Paris; longer still, to Iran and France and their educational partnership—but the short of it is this: my family has owned an apartment in Paris, which has seen varying lengths of habitation by different relatives, since 1974.

I have been coming to Paris since I was six months old. If plopped in any district except maybe the 20th, I can find my way home without a map or a metro because my mother and I used to walk everywhere in the city. It was a point of pride for us, how many miles we could tick off in one day. I still do this, even by myself. How many miles, how many street corners, how many cafés? How long to walk to St. German and back? Madeleine? Montemarte?

The 8th Wonder

Every visit I have made to Paris since age eight has had a sound track. An album—maybe two, but usually only one—that I'll listen to the whole time I'm there. Every street in Paris is layered in songs. Every street in Paris is layered in ghosts.

Fourth grade was the year I left my walkman on the airplane with my Avril Lavigne CD still inside, and my mom bought me a new one, walkman and Avril both, and a Jennifer Lopez CD to boot. That was the summer just after my grandfather died, and everything we did was to exorcise his ghost. My grandmother used to hide my favorite dolls in the highest shelves of the closets, so that I could find them later and love them all the more for having missed them so much, so that each time I see a plastic bag on a high shelf, I wonder if there is a half-dressed MyScene doll inside it, still waiting for that little girl with the bowl cut who loved her once.

The summer before senior year of high school––a summer of teenage angst and nights up late hiding in the galley kitchen until 2 am, binge-watching Criminal Minds on my laptop––I had just watched Notre-Dame de Paris in French class. I could only find six songs from the musical on the iTunes store, and played them with the ferocity of Quasimodo ringing his bells until my mom and aunt sat me down in the living room and told me they would buy me the DVD of the musical, if only, please be to God, that I would just promise to wear headphones and never belt out along to Dance Mon Esmeralda in their presence ever again. Sometimes, I still catch my mother humming it, off-key and irate that she remembers it at all.

M A N I A by Fall Out Boy is quickly shaping up to be the soundtrack of this particular visit. It is a good soundtrack for firsts—first trip in four years, the longest time I have ever been away from Paris in my life; the first time my partner is coming to Paris with me, an experience I have daydreamed about since I was a punk-ass teen who wore snap-on bracelets as chokers and cut her own bangs in the sink every four months; the first time I have ever come to Paris on my own, for any length of time, just me on an entire continent. It is a good soundtrack for a haunting. It is a good soundtrack for what might be the last soundtrack Paris and I have.

If You Were Church

It is unwise to walk around Paris without a pack of Kleenex—there's something on every corner liable to move you to tears. It hurts, sometimes, to look. Paris is limestone buildings and deciduous streets, cobblestones, peonies as big as apples in the planters. That musty sweet smell of the metro. Cigarette smoke. A woman's vanilla dark perfume. Everywhere, gardens. Everywhere, memories.

It used to be the limestone buildings that got me, so sweet, so hopeful, their cheery domes rounding up into dark rooftops, breaking out over intersections like the crest of a tall wave. Now, it is the cattails along the boulevard across from the American Church of Paris, soft and green like fleece. Now, I tear up while the street makes the traffic a music of horn and engine purr, and the cattails dance and dance, and they are so brave, planted among the elms, the sun dappling light on them as it moves across the sky.

Time Capsule for the Future

Once, when I was small—four, maybe five, little in any case—my mom and grandfather took me to a park on the Seine. I'd been sitting near this meshed fence that separated the park from the river bank, coloring on a scrap of newspaper my grandfather had given me. It was back when I still thought crayons were people––back when Red and Yellow were girls, and Red would get jealous if Yellow sat next to Blue in the crayon box. Purple had gotten a grass stain on his paper. So I got this smart idea to push Purple through the fence. He was just small enough to fit. All Purple needed was a bath, and once he was clean, all washed off in the Seine, he would come back and jump up through the mesh, and I could keep coloring.

I waited. Purple didn't come back. When I looked down into the riverbank, all I could see was grubby brown water. Purple was gone.

There is no soundtrack for this, only the rushing water, the first foot-taps of a hard rain, my mother laughing. The song that Paris is always singing on with its cafe clatter whistles, its traffic under-breath hums, its metro station snaps.

Somewhere, at the bottom of the River Seine, buried deep in the murk of the river bed, is a single purple crayon. My first ghost.

Reality and the Wrong Side

I am walking past Champs des Mars and then there is my mother, her eyes still doe-dark and soft, on her way to Invalides where she teaches an English class on Thursday nights. She has just graduated from Leads, and when she smiles, her eyes crinkle. I recognize her only from pictures. She still worries her nails when she is nervous, doesn't quite look people in the eye when they speak to her. She loves the Beatles and Mozart and she plays them on the cassette player in the apartment at night, while she eats as much cheese as wants where her mother is not there to scold her.

A few feet behind her, a little girl with a bowl cut in a red parka. Her favorite part of Invalides was Napoleon's taxidermied horse. His soft snout and dainty tail flicking up. Her mother picks up the little girl and wraps her in her jacket, tells the little girl they are going to find a taxi, it is too cold to walk home now. Her mother hums a Persian nursery rhyme about a woman with a red-brimmed hat named Anghazi.

I reach out a hand but they are gone.

At night, sometimes I catch her in glimpses, especially near the kitchen. She is deer-lean, one hand resting on the door frame, badly chipped black nail polish, or maybe every finger done in a different color. Her smooth arms. She has not yet notched ogham into her skin, has not yet made her body a parchment for others to read. She is listening to the Spill Canvas, she is getting ready to go to St. German for dinner. She is standing in front of the bedroom mirror, holding one earring then another up to her face. She is laying on her grandmother's bed, legs crossed at the ankles, typing stories about King Arthur. She spends hours building houses and designing her characters on Sims, but rarely actually plays. She is waiting for the sun to go down on the city. She is waiting for the Eiffel Tower to turn its lights off. She is waiting for all the lights to go quiet to sing to the city she loves.

And now, when this trip is over, I will leave another me to soak into the walls. Later, maybe a year from now, maybe less, the new tenants will hear the click of a Mac keyboard coming from the living room, a snatch of whispered song, “this whole damn city thinks it needs you, but not as much as I do.” In every seat cushion, a blue Bic pen.

Substitutes For Love

It takes one hour, and a particularly good crepe with nutella and coconut from a street vendor, for Tim to turn to me and say, “why don't we live here?”

And I'm not sure what sentence he means. If he is asking, really, for a reason. If he is saying, at the core, “let's live here.” If he means, others live here so why not us? Or, if what is he is really getting at it is that Paris is a city of ghosts, of my ghosts, and in this way, I have become the ouroboros, I am walking myself at age five down the river, I am holding her hand and yours, my love, and I am becoming my mother, pointing out, as she once did, as her mother once did, and all of us in tandem, we say, “if we follow the river home, we'll be there in just an hour.”