I get by. But words and phrases float over me. They’re darkness—they’re clouds. No matter how pretty they are, they don’t light up my day.
As I leave on Friday, my mind drifts to a book I read years ago where a blue-haired girl is gifted languages by her adoptive father every year on her birthday. It’s a fantasy tale, but nevertheless by the time she’s eighteen she speaks many languages.
And she doesn’t have to learn them.
The gifts he gives her simply turn a switch in her brain. She shifts from not understanding a word to comprehending each one.
Lucky bitch.
I want that magic pill.
When I near my flat, a bus rumbles past me, and I stare in its direction, trying to read the billboard on the side of it. A giraffe wears a red trench coat, and the only word I can make out is art.
Because it’s the same freaking word in both languages.
I try and I try and I try, but the letters swirl and dance, and it’s as if I’m at the eye doctor, squinting at the EFGD in the eye test but seeing only squiggles.
When the green bus rolls away from the stop, a cloud of fumes sprays from its exhaust. Coughing, I rub a hand over my eyes.
I resume my pace, turning the corner of my block. I blink. Something feels funny in my eye. Like a bug or a piece of dirt. I rub again as I pass the café where I met Griffin for coffee. When I look at my curled fingers, there’s a filmy circular lens on them.
I stop in my tracks, spin around, and look for a window. Something to peer into as I pop my contact lens back in. But it’s already drying in my hand.
I consider jumping in frustration Rumpelstiltskin-style, but instead I woman up in the middle of the sidewalk, holding my eyelid open, and pop that bad boy back in my eye.
Ouch.
It hurts going in dry like that.
But I’m near my flat, and I have contact lens solution.
Eighty-four steps later, I correct myself.
Since I don’t take my contacts out every night, it slipped my ever-loving mind to bring contact lens solution to France, and this eye hurts like the dickens.
I trudge back down the steps, around the corner, and to the pharmacy.
As I scan the shelves, it’s as if I’ve hit a brick wall. I don’t know the words for contact lens solution. I don’t know how to find the solution because EVERYTHING LOOKS DIFFERENT HERE.
That means I’m going to have to go to the counter and do that thing I detest. Fail.
I’m going to fail at speaking the language. I’m going to fail at accomplishing this most basic errand.
My confidence frayed to a thread, I make my way to the counter and ask for contact lens solution in a hideous amalgamation of broken French and English.
The quizzical look on the pharmacist’s wrinkled face tells me I’m botching it. I take a deep breath and try again. Pointing to my eyes, leaning my head back, acting out what I need. Soon enough, he understands me.
When I’m back at my flat, I rinse the lens and put it back in. I pour a glass of wine and head to my roof. Sighing deeply, I flop down in the chair as the pink sunset tugs the sun beneath the horizon. As I take a sip, twilight starts to settle in, casting the city in a soft, pale light from the Seine all the way to Sacré Coeur.
There’s so much I love about Paris, and yet it feels even more foreign than when I first landed here more than a week ago. I’m like a fish trying to swim upstream, but I don’t know which way the currents will pull.
From my vantage point, with buildings bathed in a warm, gentle glow, everything feels possible. But I know that once I venture down the stairs and beyond the pink door, it’s like a battlefield on the streets. Of beauty and frustration.
I’m going to need more than charades to survive in this city.
I reach for my phone.
Joy: I’m drinking wine on my rooftop. It sounds perfect, but I still miss you.
Allison: I’m on my lunch break eating at In-N-Out Burger. If you’re jealous of me you’re crazy, even though it is In-N-Out.
Joy: The one American food I miss.
I switch gears and track down the email of a perfume blogger I connected with in Austin through an online forum of other scent-obsessed gals. An American living in Paris, Elise has become an Internet friend, and when she learned I was moving here, she told me we must get together. She’s been traveling for work but said she’d return this week, so I send her a quick note and then gaze at the skyline, wondering what everyone else is doing on a Friday night here in Paris while I’m all alone.
Wondering what Griffin’s doing.
My phone dings. That’s quick for a reply.
But when I open the text, I see Griffin’s name.
10
Griffin
I probably shouldn’t be thinking of Joy as I run eight miles in the late afternoon, cruising through the Luxembourg Gardens for the last bit, as a hip, new band blasts in my ears.
I definitely shouldn’t be thinking of her as I shower, after crushing my previous personal best for those eight miles.
I absolutely shouldn’t be picturing how she’d look in this shower with me right now. But it’s such a fantastic image that I cut myself some slack as I take care of business.
I suppose that also means I shouldn’t be thinking of texting Joy as I jog down the metro steps and squeeze onto a crowded train heading to the heart of Le Marais tonight. But given where my filthy thoughts have taken me on my travels so far today, checking in with her hardly
