Le Sigh

Paris is so much quieter than New York City. My ears feel like they're at the city spa. Appointment at the Turkish bath house, if you will, if you want to make it New York. At the pharmacie, if you want to get Parisian.

I lost my voice somewhere between the château and here. My first errand in Paris was not a café, not the Seine; it was finding a pharmacie and pointing at my throat, like a woman with no words, which I was. I showed them my translated list I wrote out in a notebook and they came back with something chalky and eucalyptus and deeply French. I let one dissolve on my tongue while someone in the stairwell sang like it was the most natural thing in the world. And it was. Le sigh.

Conventionally speaking, my first solo meal in Paris was a disaster — though to be fair, I arrived at it barely whispering. The bread came with a mysterious chili oil I investigated out of curiosity, which was a choice, considering I can't get myself above Mild. I thought I'd ordered the pizza with goat cheese, walnuts, and honey. Google Translate had other plans, and whatever I actually said out loud was apparently convincing enough. With my lips still burning, the kind French waiter arrived with one topped in olives, artichokes, and mushrooms. I typically turn down two of those and feel neutral about the third. I kept the pizza on the table. It's not their fault I ordered wrong! And by they I mean the olives. At the end I asked for tea, quietly, hopefully.

Mom would be shocked. A mild identity crisis over my behavior, eating all those black beauties. Hi Mom!

I still don't know how to say "sorry, I don't speak French" in French, which feels like an important phrase to walk around with. The dogs here know more than I do. Things I need to learn before I fly home:

• "Sorry, I don't speak French" for when I'm asked for directions — it must be my chic outfits. Le Sigh.

• "Are they friendly?" for when my desire to pet the café cat becomes too much to bear.

• "Do you have tea?" so I can keep finding my new voice.

The waiter recommended iced. I replied with my preference of hot. It came iced. I was wrong, he was right. A French pastry really is an experience. I watched my server set three napkins down on a wooden platter, having to abandon one not cooperating with her. I asked for my tea ten minutes later so it could be hot on my walk. They understood completely and did not execute. Maybe they tried. Maybe they didn't. Their dark chocolate dipped madeleine I was talked into getting makes up for it tenfold. Holy shit.

I wouldn't call the French friendly. No, no. They are something much deeper and more meaningful. Kind. Kind with high standards. Hi, bonjour, nice to meet me.

Outside, Paris went about its business. A young woman deep in her headphones, the weight of something private moving across her face. Parents splitting four croissants three ways with their son. An old French man shaking his head slowly at a trendy line — the particular disapproval of someone who has watched this city change and change and change. A couple kissing in the middle of one of the old pedestrian roads that survived the Revolution, the ones too narrow to widen, forcing everyone to walk around them. Nobody seemed to mind.

This afternoon I went to see The History of Sound at Pathé Les Fauvettes, a film so beautiful it feels like home. Paul Mescal and Josh O'Connor. Sixty years of a love that never quite got to be what it was out loud.

It opens in a small wooden house. Rural Kentucky, 1910. A father who knew how to play violin. A porch no bigger than my couch where a boy named Lionel first opened his mouth and let the music out — and that was when Rome became true. Not when he arrived years later. Not when his voice finally filled the chapels. When he sang on that porch. He just had to go and do it. And doing it meant saying goodbye. To Kentucky. To his dying mother. To his greatest love. He had to release everything that made him in order to be of this earth. The porch gave him the world and the world cost him the porch.

Then Boston. 1917. A bar full of suits with no thought to the power of a song that can travel across acres. Then a stranger at a piano plays the song from his Kentucky porch. That's how David finds him. That's how they find each other — through a song that already belonged to both of them before they met.

The film understands that sound holds what words cannot. David and Lionel loved each other at a depth that was real before the language ever existed, before the world had carved out any space for it to live. So much of what we know now went unsaid between them — not because the feeling wasn't there, but because the permission wasn't. David came back from the the world’s first war without words for what he had seen. A man who had spent his whole life listening, cataloguing, making meaning from sound, and the war gave him noise he couldn't make into anything. So he went quiet. He removed himself. Not because the love died. Because the instrument broke.

The man who loved him spent sixty years listening for him anyway.

Sometimes a cry feels like a jostle, something swirling and spilling over the edge. The one in that Parisian movie theater, a handful of strangers in the dark, felt like gravity — like a creek in a Kentucky forest, dancing down the rocks, down the hill, for you to take a sip along your journey. Parisians can ache. They understand how beauty moves you. You're allowed to get washed away here.

“Silver Dagger” followed me out of the theater. The song that tied David and Lionel together — an old Appalachian warning about love that can't quite be allowed, passed down through generations, carried through backwoods and slavery and generational pain until it landed on a porch in Kentucky where a boy learned what his voice was for. Songs that survive that much don't need accompaniment. You feel the chord beneath them without it being played. It's already there. It was always there. Notes that arrive the way your hand slides seamlessly into a pocket. Unhurried. Already yours.

I didn't want to take it off repeat. So I didn't. My feet just kept going — and Paris let me. In New York I have to wear headphones like armor, a necessary shield against a city that takes up all the air. Here I didn't need them. Paris was my white noise. Kids chasing pigeons away from their croissants. A teenager eating a slice of cheesecake with his bare hands. Others playing ping pong in the park while smoking cigarettes. Chicness with modesty can't go above a certain decibel — Paris would never allow it. Through the Panthéon, past Notre-Dame, through history I wasn't paying attention to because I was inside a folk song. Whistling along the way I used to. The city was just what was outside the music. Ambient. Already yours. Le sigh.

At dinner, I watched a professional conversation happening across the room. Positive engagement coursing through their stance, their facial expressions, their tone. I found myself wondering how good of fakers they are. Then wondering if it really matters. That's where I saw standards in practice — curated, maybe. Probably. My dessert certainly was. The meringue was insane. Who cares either way?

The family across from me had the look of a Christmas card — the kind we all grew up wanting. "I promise we didn't drug them," the father bantered with the room, as the children giggled and we smiled along, thinking of the memories they're making. Then the giggles took a key change, behavior that didn't go along with the decor. The waitress corrected the son's French. He couldn't have been more than seven. His mom straightened her back and gave him the world: "We show politeness when we are corrected on our French. Think about your traveling."

Meanwhile, at the table beside me, a dad told his younger daughter, "You should write that in your diary tonight." She said "I will!" with pure sunshine — already knowing what to do with a feeling. Then, campaigning the dinner table for more empathy on behalf of his eldest: "Alright guys, she's been in France for 36 hours." Le sigh.

I sat there with my rabbit pasta (you heard me) and thought about correction. About how the kindest thing a city can do is hand you the wrong order and let you discover you needed it. About how they hand you a menu and when you ask if you can have something on it, they reply, “of course”. About how standards performed with enough love eventually become indistinguishable from standards lived. Paris doesn't explain itself. It just makes the meringue that good.

The offer letter arrived while I was eating snails, watching Parisians in the rain. Goldsmiths University, London wants me to be one of their Psychology of Arts, Neuroaesthetics and Creativity students. I read it. Put my phone down. Kept eating. There was a "well, yeah" moving through me that I hadn't expected to feel — my high standards finally closing the gap with my low expectations, right there over escargot in the rain. I told the people who needed to know. Then I put the phone back down. Le sigh.

I came here at the end of something enormous and I am leaving changed in ways I don't have words for yet. Maybe that's the point. Maybe the words come later, and right now it's enough to have been here — eating the wrong pizza, getting the right madeleine, walking home inside a folk song with tired feet and a full heart.

Paris rebuilt itself once so that what was hidden could be seen. Wide roads out of narrow ones. A city that learned to carry its own history without being buried by it.

I think that's what a sense of place really is. Not where you're from. What you're willing to carry forward.

Le sigh.