Un Noël perdu dans Paris - Pierre Lapointe
I lived in the 18th arrondissement of Paris for most of 2022, and this song feels apropos: a Christmas lost in Paris, searching for signs of you.
In last year’s countdown, I wrote about applying for a French visa out of a sense of aimless optionality. One of the things I found difficult, in my third year of grieving the person I’d hoped to spend my life with, was that I couldn’t wholeheartedly invest in new relationships or community. “I think there will come a time when I have grown so used to that loss that I’m ready to throw myself into constructing a new life,” I wrote, “But not yet.”
And, if I wasn’t ready to construct a new life, why not explore someplace other than my hometown? Better still if it would allow me to improve my French and enjoy the comforts of a city where 94% of people live within a 5-minute walk of a boulangerie.
The early verses of this song capture some of the loneliness walking around a foreign city, realizing the vanity of your hope to have been transformed by your mere relocation:
J’croyais que d’être seul en exil
Me donnerait un peu d’élégance
P’t’être que j’suis encore trop fragile,
J’crois que j’ai perdu mon assurance
There's a vignette I think of often, from the first chapter of Alain de Botton’s The Art of Travel. London gloom has brought on a bout of seasonal depression and de Botton finds himself “intensely susceptible to the unsolicited arrival one late afternoon of a large, brightly illustrated brochure entitled 'Winter Sun'. Its cover displayed a row of palm trees, many of them growing at an angle, on a sandy beach fringed by a turquoise sea”. He travels to Barbados and finds himself facing a seaside sunset framed by the promised palm trees, but then discovers, to his horror, “that I had inadvertently brought myself with me to the island”. Mere relocation did not dislodge his malaise.
The effect was gradual, but my time in Paris seems to have dislodged some of the malaise that I brought with me. In Toronto, working from home during the second pandemic year, the branches of my life in which Zach was still alive felt so nearby. I moved into my apartment on Bloor Street, and it felt all wrong; why wasn’t Zach there, helping me unpack? I would walk past restaurants we’d eaten in, the board games café where we’d drafted Magic with my dad, my favourite Korean cake shop that I’d meant to take them to someday. Paris held no such associations.
Instead, living in a foreign country and language provided an abundance of novelties. I think I had forgotten what a balm newness can be, perhaps especially after the stale sameness of my lockdown years. Unencumbered by easy comparisons to lives I’d wished to live, it became less painful to look ahead to the branching life paths open to me, instead of always gazing sideways at the branches that had been cut off. I’m heading back to Toronto tomorrow, and feeling a little less lost.
Wishing you newness, should you want it,
Tessa