A few returns
Chapter 15: The O’Hare shade of blue, the hotel in our Italian town, the letter H (magnificent), when everyone was rude, the titan of my childhood, impressions from my first day
Dear reader,
Hello from Paris! It’s sunny and cold. Anyway I’m excited to tell you about this trip — for now some first impressions, but next week who knows. Love from far away, xo.
The cheapest flight to Paris was a one-stop connecting flight through Chicago. This felt symbolic: I was returning to old places. In Chicago my flight was delayed by three hours. For the first time in years I became intimate with O’Hare airport again — the specifically depressing shade of blue, the Americanness of the line waiting to get into Chili’s. I used to get so sad in airports. They were where we’d say goodbye before the security line, a goodbye that was so physical, like the end of something huge. After that we’d text immediately after passing the metal detector. Loving at a distance does this to people, or at least it did this to me when I was twenty-two. Ten years later I love airports. They’re perfect places to watch people, to enjoy the guilelessness of Chicagoans, the grand decay of their grey city. In my hours at O’Hare I learned the friend I’d be staying with in Paris had started feeling sick, and that she might have COVID. I texted friends to see if I could stay somewhere else, only to learn that friends of friends in Paris were also sick. It seemed a miasma had descended upon the city, afflicting every thirty-something with a mysterious flu. I started looking for places on my own. There was a relief in this; a sense of meeting the city alone again, like I did the very first time.
I went back to the town where I was born for the first time when I was nine. I went with my father and I didn’t remember it from before. The feeling of Italy was familiar but it was different from the places I’d come to associate with being from somewhere else. In childhood in the summers, and then later in the winters, we’d always go back to Greece where the rest of my family lives. In Greece we’d stay with my family in Athens, or with my father’s parents in the village, in the old house which is now empty. When my father and I went back to our Italian town, we stayed in a hotel on the side of the hill. The whole town takes place along the side of that hill, a pastel ring of stucco around a beach and a marina. The hotel was the only one my father ever stayed in whenever he went back. He’s like me; when I like a place or a thing, I rarely want change. On that first trip back to our town my father always walked very quickly. It was exhausting being nine and walking so much. He’d hold my hand to make me match his pace, or he’d walk ahead without me, turning around every few minutes until I caught up. He was always like this, especially on trips. He had a need to see everything, and to see it very quickly, before it could be enjoyed. It was as if lingering too long would make the thing he loved disappear. I remember Munich, Berlin, Frankfurt in this way: in memories of his frantic walking, and his photographs of grey cities in springtime. We’d go to Germany often because he went to present his work at conferences. He’d carry his camera everywhere, a point-and-shoot Olympus he was very proud of. He’d say the name was Greek, even though the camera was Japanese.
On the plane from Chicago to Paris I was surrounded by French children under the age of nine. As I sat down and scanned the seats around me I wondered how they’d behave for the eight-hour flight. But I never heard them. Before stowing their bags their mother told them to take out their books because they would be reading during the flight. I loved this. I took my book out too. I read for a bit and then bought in-flight wifi so I could keep messaging strangers for a place to stay. The first person who responded was a woman in her thirties who lived in the 10th arrondissement. I would later learn that her convalescent period from the Parisian miasma had already ended — she’d been sick the week before. We exchanged details of my stay while I got through customs at Charles De Gaulle. I was halfway to the centre of Paris on the RER to Gare du Nord when everything felt suddenly familiar. I'd been on this train before. When I was seventeen working in Paris for the summer I'd wanted so badly to fit in; I’d studied the inflections, I’d practiced the incredible H that gets gutted and splayed at the end of a Parisian “merci”. As I approached the city by train all of it snapped back into place. It felt strangely like home. The white metro tunnels lined with dark green tiles were the tunnels I’d taken every day on my way to work in the 19th, and on my stop at Odéon station before going back to my apartment.
This trip is not the first time I’ve returned to Paris since living there. I went back for a few days the summer I was eighteen, with my mother and cousin. We were tourists, we spoke English, and everyone was rude. I’d been diagnosed a few months before the trip, and my medication made me constantly nauseous, swollen, and tired. I’d tried to go back to the places I’d loved, but I could never find the old feeling. I realize now that the old feeling was one of being immortal, of never thinking of how far I was from home, of smoking cigarettes on bridges at night. When I was seventeen I’d imagined moving to Paris one day permanently, because it really did feel like home. When I was eighteen and went to find that home again I was disappointed. After the return I never felt like going back, and I never went back until now, fifteen years after I left.
One of my favourite books is Elizabeth Gaskell’s 1855 novel North and South, about a woman from the pastoral English South whose family moves to the industrial North. She hates the North for its factories and brutal way of life, and she idealizes the South to hang onto her old life. At the end of the book she returns to the South on a sentimental visit to see her old home. She expects to relive the bright scenes of her childhood, but instead she’s disappointed. I love how Gaskell wrote it: “There was change everywhere; slight, yet pervading all … Places were changed — a tree gone here, a bough there, bringing in a long ray of light where no light was before … A sense of change, of individual nothingness, of perplexity and disappointment, overpowered Margaret. Nothing had been the same; and this slight, all-pervading instability, had given her greater pain than if all had been too entirely changed for her to recognise it. “I begin to understand now what heaven must be — and, oh! the grandeur and repose of the words — ‘The same yesterday, to-day, and for ever.’” A few days after the disappointing return, she re-finds her usual calm. She stops trying to force the memory of what’s gone onto the reality of what’s there, and finds that it’s still a beautiful place, where she’d once lived and been very happy.
My father walked quickly his whole life before he got Parkinson’s. As his body slowed down I worried his restlessness would get worse, that his need for movement would make him feel trapped in the body he could no longer control. But strangely in illness he’s found a kind of peace. Parkinson’s can change the personalities of people, and his emotions have become slower. He’s the patient in the hazy VHS tapes they taught in my medical school neurology lectures, with his hands shaking, and his body moving slower and slower. When he first started changing I was learning about those same symptoms in class. He’d complain that his writing had gotten so small, that his right hand had started to shake. I recognized what it was but I didn’t think it would become what it did. Now he’s no longer the titan of my childhood, the only adult playing soccer with me and my cousins on the beach. I’ve never seen a grown man yell “goal!” with the same innocent joy he did each time he scored against us, a team of three girls under twelve. He’s the one who sang ridiculous songs at our house, like the ones I still sing at mine, when everyone else was quiet in the same space.
I will tell you about my first full day in Paris. Woke up in the 10th. Jet lag — awake at 4:00 am to lie in bed in half-sleep (N1 maybe) and fall back asleep two hours later. So many texts. Burglar alarm went off in the apartment because I forgot the code (mortifying). Cochlear hair cells surely died. Went for a walk, passed three old men in matching jackets surrounding a black Mercedes, complaining in French about German engineering. Heard the sound of crows. Reactivated dating app, just to see: everyone is named Thibaut. Watched an old woman open her windows on the fifth floor to water her balcony plants, on a street called rue Jean-Pierre Timbaut (not Thibaut). Oberkampf (the sound of the word). Men and women over sixty getting their hair cut on Saturday morning. The sweetness of the garbage cans in the metro station that write “merci” on the front. Imagining the gloriously gutted H. Ten-foot tall Shen Yun ads on the wall. Durex condom dispenser at St Michel station (this is France!). Everything feels very natural, very familiar. I’ve actually always lived here, I never left. A throng of Italian boys in the same North Face puffer speaking loudly with their hands. Waiting by a tree for my friends to arrive. Watching a beautiful woman with two dogs as she says to one of them matter-of-factly in French, “your favourite little tree.” Smiling and telling her “bonne journée.” Big long walk, a new friend, it’s so cold out but he’s good at hiding it. A friend of my friend’s conceptual art show. Talking to the gallery owner about psychoanalysis. Dinner in a Chinese restaurant. Very long day. Cab home to Cher’s “Do you believe in life after love.” Catch up on voice messages. Longest shower of my life. I think I’m getting sick.
Love,
E