Bordeaux and Palmiers

For me, it’s hard to say when a place stops being just somewhere I’m camping out and becomes a real home.

Sure, I say that I’ve “lived” in a myriad of places, from Toronto to Cannes, Andover to Royan, but the places where I’ve really and truly felt as though I could hang my proverbial hat have been few and far between.

I guess it comes from moving so often: when you feel as though you could leave a place at a moment’s notice, you never really become a fixture there: you never really connect with it. I may have lived in Toronto for a year and a half, gone to school, even gotten a job there, but was it ever really my home? A place that I could imagine living farther into the future than my next plane ticket? I don’t think so.

Cannes, which I loved so much it made me move to France… even Cannes wasn’t really a home for me. I know I’ll never be French, but being French has nothing to do with being cannois, and I was never going to be that either.

Paris’ sparkle has worn off… and I’m OK with it. It has stopped being the place with the lit-up Eiffel Tower and quaint streets… I have to look for them now. Sometimes I don’t even notice how beautiful the city is until I’m looking back through my old photographs and I see–really see–the sorts of things that surround me on a daily basis.

Maybe it takes being far away to know. Maybe it takes remembering what it’s like to do your grocery shopping and take out your trash and buy your toilet paper in what is meant to be the most romantic city in the world for a person to realize just how amazing it is.

When I left Paris this time, I left it in the way that I leave only one other city: New York. There was no goodbye, just a “see you later, until next time.” There was no adieu, just au revoir. Because I’m slowly coming to realize that no matter how much I carry on about hopping the next place to here, there and everywhere, Paris has carved a space into my heart, and I don’t think that there’s any way to get it back.