My One Day in Paris

on the journeys that don't go quite as we planned

Welcome to Pocketful of Prose, a community for sharing stories. This week, I’m recording from my hotel room in Olten, Switzerland. Hallo, Bonjour, Ciao! As always, links are in bold, and there’s an audio of this pocket if that works better for your life. You can also support this publication by becoming a paid subscriber.

Without further ado, today’s pocket.

After 36 hours of delay, Anna and I finally boarded our plane to Paris. We were supposed to be in Paris yesterday, but instead we were in North Carolina. My friend Andrea texted me that “some people have called North Carolina the Paris of the east coast,” but “don’t fact check.”

Sometimes our journeys don’t go quite as we planned.

We are traveling in a group of twenty, a mix of students, teachers and parents. I was concerned about traveling with so many people I didn’t know very well, but it’s been good for the most part. Chelsea, one of the students on the trip, keeps leaving her personal belongings including her passport in places she shouldn’t…on the airport floor, on the seat next to her, in the public restroom sink.  One of my friends traveled to Italy last year, and she had to fly home with a student who lost their passport, so even though I’m not an official chaperone on this trip, I, like the rest of the group, am trying to keep an eye on Chelsea.

We were supposed to have three days in Paris as part of our European tour where we will also visit Zurich, Lucerne and Munich. However, because of the delays, we only had one day to explore the city of love. I spent most of my delayed day on the phone with the airlines and the tour company seeing if we could add a few days onto our trip to make up for the days we lost. Our tour company helpfully informed me that I could extend our trip as long as I wanted. All I needed to do was purchase additional return tickets for Anna and me.

I was disappointed about the delay and the tour company’s response, but I couldn’t wait to arrive in Paris. I hadn’t been to Paris in twenty-five years.  When I was 19, I lived in Paris’ 19^th arrondissement for five months, studying at the Sorbonne, a dream of mine since I first started learning French in middle school. However, my experience was different than I dreamed it would be. I was lonely in Paris, moving there had stirred things up in me…homesickness, anxiety, OCD, depression… all swirled within me daily. I hadn’t yet learned how to welcome all the visitors to the guest house. The world was at my fingertips, but I just wanted to sleep in my own bed.

When our group arrived at Charles De Gaulle, our group leader told us we had fifteen minutes to freshen up in the restroom before we explored the city. Our group and another tour group took over the bathroom. Their group leader shouted that someone had left their passport on the counter. Everyone from our group turned and looked at Chelsea.

We spent the morning at the Louvre. Some among us hadn’t slept in thirty hours, the luckiest had cobbled together a few hours here and there. We were a dehydrated, hungry and slightly cranky bunch. Still, we were a dehydrated, thirsty, and slightly cranky bunch at the Louvre. Anna was excited to see the paintings and sculptures she had learned about in her art history class. The word baroque came up more than once.

We lunched on our own, and I took Anna and a new friend on a walk to the Jardin des Tuileries, which were lovely but mostly under construction. Our dinners are included in our tour which means they are not anything to write home about, so I wanted to have one Parisian meal which was worth coming all this way for. We chose a corner café with cosy white tables overlooking the street. The friendly waiter poured us water in tiny drinking glasses. As we perused the menu, I asked the girls what looked good to them. I made a few suggestions, and then when the waiter came, I ordered some plates for us to share, a quinoa, strawberry avocado salad, bread and burrata with pesto sauce, more water…

As I ordered, I noticed Anna looking at me and smiling. When the waiter left, she said, “You look so at home here.”

I considered this over our next course of tea and pastries, a lemon tarte that made my lips pucker, a hazelnut and chocolate crepe dusted with powdered sugar. My time in France included regular crepe cart visits, and I wanted Anna to have a taste of it.

Since we arrived in Paris, just a few hours earlier, I had been speaking in English. The waiter, like most Parisiens, spoke fluent English, and the restaurant was busy, and I didn’t want to burden him with my sloppy French.  The truth though was that I was slightly scared to speak French. So many of the conversations I tried to initiate when I was a student here ended with the person I was trying to converse with, speaking English. This made me feel like my French wasn’t good enough, like I wasn’t good enough. Hindsight has changed my perception of this, but at the time, those rejections created an echo chamber for my loneliness.

Anna and her friend though are determined that I say something in French. When the waiter brings us the check, I offer him my card and pray that the machine accepts it. It was my first time trying to use the card out of the country, and I worried that it wouldn’t work even though I called the bank. The waiter makes a joke in English about how nervous I am, and I respond in French. He laughs, and I feel buoyed.

This morning, at the train station, I took a deep breath and requested un thé noir avec du lait from the barista at the small coffee stand. She smiled at me and spoke to me in French. When this happens, I no longer feel like I’m the last person chosen for the softball team. I am so grateful that someone is willing to throw the ball back to me. I understood enough of what she said to piece together a reply. She continued talking to me in French until I paid when she politely pointed out that the I needed to hit F4 on the credit card reader. I would have had just as much trouble if the card reader was in English, but she presumed that language, not my antiquated tech skills, was the barrier and wanted to make things easier for me. However, after sharing that information, we resumed speaking in French. We were playing again. I wondered if she spoke to me in French because she could tell that I was having fun. I wondered if all those years ago, so many people stopped talking to me in French, because they could tell I wasn’t.

It's only one day in Paris, but it’s a river of memories, as deep and long as the Seine. It is my host mother who asked me at dinner to stop clogging the bathroom sink with my hair. It took forever to translate that, and afterwards I only felt lonelier. It was the meals I didn’t eat because my eating disorder made me afraid of food. It is the countries I didn’t visit because I worried, I was already spending so much money. It was the friends I didn’t make. It was the life I didn’t live because I so desperately just wanted to go home.

But the truth is, it was more than that, and being here brings that to the surface too. It was my daily walks through the gardens, and the meals I cooked for myself with fresh ingredients from the market, the candle I lit while looking out at the city from my big bedroom window. It was the church I found and my gratitude for mass in English. It was my many trips to the museums alone which I cherished because art always makes you feel less alone. It was the limestone buildings with flowers in the window box, the lights of the Seine on the river, the endless, inviting cafes with small circular tables and cushioned white chairs.  

From our cushioned white chairs, the girls and I fawn over the crepe, so delicate and delicious. I take small bites of the lemon tart, which is so sour I squinch up my face. I love that it is not too sweet. Sometimes just the right amount of sour is perfection.  As the girls and I eat and laugh, the wind picks up, and the sky grows dark.  The girls were seated opposite me, and the awning above us didn’t cover their heads. I feared we would have to leave our quaint outdoor table and our perfect lunch, but just as my fear formed, the large green awning extended seamlessly so that it covered an inch past the girls’ heads, and a string of charming lights turned on. The timing couldn’t have been more flawless.

This morning over tea and coffee, another mom told me that her daughter wanted to explore Paris yesterday, but she didn’t want to wander. She didn’t want to leave the comfort of our group. She didn’t know the city, didn’t speak the language. “I know they say everyone speaks English, but still…” she said. They ate at the McDonalds in the Louvre.

For so many years, I thought my life in Paris was a failure, but I don’t think of it like that anymore. Sometimes our journeys don’t go as we’ve planned, but sometimes it’s the unplanned journeys that shape us the most. Sometimes they really are “clearing” us out for “new delights.”

I raise my water glass to my nineteen-year-old self and all the dreams she didn’t quite realize.

I thank her for being there. If she wasn’t there, I wouldn’t be here.

Please stick around for some conversation in the comments. What resonates with you? What is your story about a trip that didn’t go quite as planned?