An American bleeding on Blvd. St. Germain: the uncensored 1st chapter of my Paris memoir
The next great American novel this is not, but I've dug up a long forgotten draft (unedited, in its original form, added onto). My life in Paris was a mess & this is the opening chapter. Enjoy.
L’Ennemi
Ma jeunesse ne fut qu’un ténébreux orage,
Traversé çà et là par de brillants soleils;
Le tonnerre et la pluie ont fait un tel ravage,
Qu’il reste en mon jardin bien peu de fruits vermeils.
Voilà que j’ai touché l’automne des idées,
Et qu’il faut employer la pelle et les râteaux
Pour rassembler à neuf les terres inondées,
Où l’eau creuse des trous grands comme des tombeaux.
Et qui sait si les fleurs nouvelles que je rêve
Trouveront dans ce sol lavé comme une grève
Le mystique aliment qui ferait leur vigueur?
Ô douleur! ô douleur! Le Temps mange la vie,
Et l’obscur Ennemi qui nous ronge le coeur
Du sang que nous perdons croît et se fortifie!
— Baudelaire
The Enemy
My youth was all a murky hurricane;
not oft did the suns of splendour burst the gloom;
so wild the lightning raged, so fierce the rain,
few crimson fruits my garden-close illume.
now I have touched the autumn of the mind,
I must repair and smooth the earth, to save
my little seed-plot, torn and undermined,
guttered and gaping like an open grave.
and will the flowers all my dreams implore
draw from this garden wasted like a shore
some rich mysterious power the storm imparts?
— o grief! o grief! time eats away our lives,
and the dark Enemy gnawing at our hearts
sucks from our blood the strength whereon he thrives!
— Baudelaire translated by Lewis Piaget Shanks
Point Zéro: Everything you and I both have ever gotten wrong about Paris
Once upon a time I spat at the American dream and the American dream spat back at me. That’s how I found myself bleeding on the floor with a mangled leg after being run over in Paris on the boulevard St. Germain barely three weeks after moving to the city.
For years, I tried making sense of what happened after the accident since everything about my life in France seemed to just get progressively worse.
My life in Paris was something in total disharmony and out of sync with all the other stories about Americans in Paris. A baguette could not cure my misery. I was not involved in a whirlwind romance with a charming Frenchman who swept me off my feet (they were all painful in their own way). Macarons did not rain down from the sky in a pastel purple lime yellow haze.
I had thought I was entitled to a certain type of charmed life in Paris and instead I had a mangled fucked up leg dealing with a mangled fucked up bureaucracy while dealing with mangled fucked up hijinx caused by mangled fucked up people.
So I decided then that all I wanted to do in my fucked-up sorry spat-on state of mind was to write a novel in Paris about Paris a hundred years or so after all the other sad white American drunks started the tradition.
The words you are reading are draft numbers I’ve lost count more than four years later, but hey, better late than never?
Yes, I admit that I was partially and mostly to blame for my unrealistic expectations, but honestly, could you blame me? It’s Paris. It is motherfucking Paris. It is not London which is ugly, musty and brown, much like many of its pubs. It is not Berlin which is schizophrenic in infrastructure and layout. It is not Amsterdam which is where I decided to go live next because I wanted to further my education while biking next to tall hot guys who look like 90s Calvin Klein ads if you put black and white filters over their photos. It is Paris and thus it is in a league of its own. I guess I could take all my crazy stories and turn them into something, but what?
First I wanted to write a novel. Then I realized I have no fictional bones in my body. Then I wanted to write a novella. But I thought memoirs couldn’t be novellas. So what could I do with my story? Is it really a memoir if I’m writing as I’m speaking to myself? Is it really a memoir if what I’m really desperately trying to do in the end is grasp onto a few remaining memories? Is it really a memoir if I finally finished writing this out of the fear I would one day die without having written this goddamn book about that goddamn time?
Okay, no fiction, no novella, I don’t even know how a memoir works and I can’t be fussed to Google it (I am busy teaching myself many other languages, including Dutch, Python, and SQL, print(“Thank you very much for your understanding”).
I was also mature enough by the point of this current draft that I was done trying to make this anything but what it was: simply a recount of my time in Paris and what happened plus or minus my views (that I wrote down back then) as well as my views on it now (edited across a vast time and space of multiple untitled Google documents). Indeed, this piece of textual work may be the longest relationship I’ve been in in my life so far.
I began writing about Paris right after the accident in fall 2016, but it was never quite to my satisfaction throughout the years, much like my relationships with emotionally unavailable European men. In both sets of sheets, I was never fully fine with the situation but I would pick it up and drop it off depending on its convenience. I did this a lot in my early and mid twenties - for years I fettered around with lofty thoughts, for years I had drafts of chapters, for years I felt my memories were preserved scarred and scattered around the cloud and Google docs and journals and notebooks in all manners virtual and paper and so on and so forth and bla bla bla. For years I said “it’s been YEARS!”. And how the years go by: trauma transforms, things don’t matter anymore, you ask yourself: have I moved on? Am I severely depressed? Would this book be better if I developed a drinking problem that would really exacerbate and bring out that honesty we’re always parroting around in society as a necessity for authenticity? Would the calories be worth it? Should I start with tequila or vodka? How many therapists am I going to keep employed throughout my lifetime? Is there a way to chart that or program it into some data analysis for economic impact? Forget Lifetime Customer Value. You need to take a look at Damaged People Lifetime Value.
Believe me, I had all good intentions from the start with my writing, but it was all a big defense mechanism. The best defense mechanism. A fabulous team was behind this defense mechanism, the greatest sort of engineering for creating one big walking open wound of a person in a defense mechanism. The best, simply beautiful work of a defense mechanism. It was a big fabulous incredible amazing superlative fueled defense mechanism that wouldn’t result in a finished book of whatever sort because I struggled. I struggled with writing this book for years because I wasn’t telling the truth. In my writing, I wanted to make Paris good. I wanted it to have been good. I wanted Paris to be good when it was never anything but bad. The tragedies kept piling on, the universe said you are not supposed to be here, you are supposed to be like in Amsterdam eating cinnamon buns or something, this is just not happening (attribution: to my friend Sharon). While the universe spoke, I did not listen and accordingly, my life fell apart first beginning with my bones and then less literal but more abstractly painful. I had come to Paris on my own terms but I left Paris on the terms of an anonymous bureaucrat. Visa complications have a way of ending things before you’re ready.
My ego said you cannot die not having written at least one goddamn book about your goddamned life in goddamn Paris.
My life in Paris may have been complete and utter shit especially in comparison to the other expat stories I felt like I had willingly embraced: Anglophones in love with an image of France and Paris in particular. We are a privileged lot, cooking and spying, bringing up bebes, language this, language that, blablabla, note to self: look up plethora of Paris novels, sickeningly good, and insert them here. But I never managed to fall in love with a Frenchman and get married (they always had too many other girlfriends to ever take me seriously as their first prospect), I never got a plum job that cemented my move as a Grown Up Real Adult Professional. I don’t have romantic memories of Paris as much as I have feelings cemented in pain and hardship soaked and fermented in alcohol and anti-bacterial cheese that few if any Americans will ever purchase at Trader Joe’s (why they keep stocking Roquefort is beyond me but I don’t mind, it was the only speciality cheese left during my most recent grocery run during the pandemic and for that, I am immensely grateful).
In fact, the last time I was in Paris, I was weeping profusely at the international border handing in my visa papers before boarding a flight back to Los Angeles with my tail in between my legs. On the plus side, I was crying so hard at the airport gate that they upgraded me to their version of business class, so there is always a silver lining.
All it took was modern society’s first pandemic for me to pick up writing again in March 2020! I began writing this book again after the coronavirus/COVID-19 pandemic began for one simple reason: I realized that I did not want to die one day without having written this book. The words began to pour out of me, hands gliding across the keyboard like what I imagine elegant piano playing would sound like, that is if I knew 1) how to play piano and 2) could play it elegantly even if I knew it.
That’s when I knew I needed to get this out of me, regardless of it it ever got published or another pair of eyes saw it, much less read the thing in its entirety. I just needed to get this thing done so I could be done with it, much like how I became done with Paris right as I decided it was fine for me to visit again after the final nail in my coffin - my visa ending in administrative burden. But then my trip got cancelled as the world discovered itself in a pandemic, and mayhem ensued. Flights grounded, phones ringing off the hook, dying breaths, family reunification and mayhem, pure mayhem - except for in words, so take me right back to what I needed to finish and kill off before life someday itself killed me and robbed me of my chance to say these things.
An old saying popped up in my mind - go to a cemetery, take a look around, and think about all the unrealized hopes and dreams behind the tombstones all around you. It was profound for me then, it was profound for me yesterday, it was profound for me now, but it wasn’t profound enough as a global pandemic was in its stereotypical way of raising the alarm to level redder than red. Maybe
Le temps mange la vie and this much is true: the pandemic alerted me to it. I was barred from visiting Paris again almost two years after my departure. In a funny way, just as I was feeling ready to confront the past again, it was barred from me. And so I had to make do and pick up where I left off: with my memories and with my book documenting it. Et voila, nearly four years after my journey began (what a startling thought: I have had an idea for a book that I have been half-assedly writing from the earliest stages of a horrific accident that upturned my life through my recovery through my blablablablaa and jesus christ, what did I do all this time except for live without writing it down as I always said I would?)
The cashier at the grocery store was startled that strawberries were in stock, made a motion to her coworker to take a look, and they admired it. I was startled to realize that my memories were still in stock, not as vivid or poignant as they used to be but rather like bits of solid concrete details floating in otherwise what is ether which is constantly getting murkier. So here we go, and here are my stories.
Originally I had been deadset and insistent on telling 20 stories for all 20 arrondissements. Then I realized of these 20 stories, just a few of them really mattered. The rest were filler and white noise, but I was not sure of myself as a writer nor my capabilities. I don’t think I’ll ever be, but I believe a reader and myself can agree to one basic principle: neither they nor I should suffer reading through half-assed writing for the sake of writing. If you’re bored, then I’m boring.
After all, the only difference between living and dead Americans in Paris is that the dead ones are respected. I say this with authority, having woken up one morning in a Parisian hospital room all-alone after an accident that changed my life and its trajectory, initially leaving me unable to walk. Years after the accident, I can acknowledge that it indeed divided my life into two distinct phases: Life Before the Accident and Life After the Accident
As a person whose early life was lived in reaction and by being reactionary, I was used to independence, mobility, and ability. I was not used to being incapacitated, and I was not used to be disabled in a hospital room in a foreign country and relying on the help of total strangers. In retrospect, it all turned out to be a bit of a rough experience, this whole almost dying in Paris thing. Yet the closest I ever came to death was the best I was ever treated in Paris, starting with the customer service friendly folks in the ambulance. Such friendly, cheerful French people are willing to speak English with me immediately – that never happens in Paris.
No one smiles and starts out avec anglais with you. This whole mess, all of it, began after I was transported to the hospital as a result of a moto m’a renversé sur le boulevard St. Germain.
Ani se fait renverser, renversé the more poetic way of saying in French that I was run over by a motorcycle that crushed my tibia plateau, my shinbone, the most important weight bearing bone in the body, leaving me unable to walk. While I was hysterically crying on the floor after a bunch of Parisians ran to pick me up and move me out of the lane since I couldn’t move at all, the firemen in the emergency vehicle tried calming me down by telling me they wanted to practice their English with me upon finding out that I’m American (it took me a year to understand that they were only joking and not actually focusing about the irregular past tense forms of ‘speaking’ and ‘eating’ morphing into ‘spoke’ and ‘ate), it turns out that I would later go on to learn French with morphine slowly trickling into arms and failed romances between legs with men whose names I could not initially pronounce.
At times I wonder if it would have been better to have died in Paris than that morning where I woke up alone at the hospital in a new country unable to walk, unable to speak the language beyond a few words at the bakery “Je voudrais une baguette, s’il vous plait, je voudrais une croissant, s’il vous plait, je voudrais marcher encore, s’il vous plait”), unable to do anything but be bound to the hospital bed, unable to contain my silence any longer – unable to do anything except for finally break into piercing hysterical sobs when the needles stuck dripping in me seemed to never have enough morphine and when I ventured to ask for more in my elementary boulangerie French, a nurse curtly explained it was simply not possible before she walked out the door, 23 hours blinking green against the shadows, my only light source. And in that night, I kept waiting quietly with tears running down my face for being a fucking stupid American girl having moved to Paris exactly a month before in search of adventure and cultural immersion. How little had I known that everything I had ever wanted from this city would be given to me in the strangest of ways as I came to realize this was another chapter in an immigrant song defining my life in America and my new life in France.
When I think about everything that happened, I feel that I am perpetually in search of lost time with my all of my stories about Paris before and after the accident – the Paris of before, the trips as a student to the city and then deciding to move to the city, all of those encounters of the Paris that enchanted me, all of what seems like a life elsewhere, imagined – a world orbiting away from mine, a lifetime I’ve known to have been my reality once but now so far divorced from whatever reality I am when I look back.
My life in Paris split into two significant episodes – life before the accident and life after the accident. My life after the accident began that awful first morning waking up to the fluorescent lights of the Hôpital Cochin unable to walk.
While it wasn’t the end of the world, it felt as if it was the end of the world I had known before getting struck down.
I am going to attempt to put into words just exactly what happened my first year in France, but before I woke up alone in a hospital room being spoken to in a language I had only previously utilized to the best of my ability to buy baguettes when I was twenty-four in 2016, I had known Paris a lifetime before. It was after my accident that I began to realize things I had not seen or heard before, sort of like discovering new notes or parts of guitar riffs from a song you hadn’t caught the first 357 listens. This is my immigrant song in two parts; now written from a garret on Avenue Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the irony of leaving America to try to start all over again somehow only to end up writing this book living on a street named after an American president not at all missed on me. But maybe I’ll get this first fucking draft finally fucking done after all of my fucking around, should I feel some of my long lost American efficiency again in the land of wine, cheese, protests, 35 hour work weeks, 5 week vacations, and 13 plus days of national holidays.
When I think about my short life so far, I realize that the first half of my life in the United States was spent trying to figure out the second part, which was spent fleeing America and everything it stands for. So I went to France, where French fries remained Belgian and no one talked about anyone’s freedom or right to own a gun. They do, however, spend an endless amount of time complaining about taxes. None of this could have been known to me when I came to Paris; I had always held a specific vision of it in my head, not so much of Amelie Poulain but more so of forgotten possibilities – I could have almost been a European myself once, a long long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.
It was in the 1990s. Twenty years before I almost died in Paris, I first encountered the city as a toddler with a fever asleep on a train passing. or I imagined a train passing, or it was in a story - but I don’t remember any of it. Somehow it stuck with me, but I was wrapped in a blanket, burning up, and thus my first experience of Paris was veiled, something I cannot remember nor grasp.
Perhaps that’s why I found a strange pull to the city and insisted on returning as soon as I could to live there nearly twenty years later, only to end up bleeding on the street and unable to walk as a result of it, finally experiencing the glories of French socialist healthcare and its accompanying hospital meals with cheese.
This was in the two decades before the displacement of people became a massive crisis tearing apart the fabric of the European Union while weaving together narratives on newsfeeds sharing photos of drowned children with their little bodies showing up on shores blankets strewn over them far too late.
When I was younger, ca veux dire la bohème, when I was a young woman in America not yet in France, I had not known it was possible for dreams to crush you. I thought dreams were supposed to just carry you forward. That was it. You have a dream, you have life, dreams motivate our lives, somehow it all works out as you steadily achieve these dreams and cross out the boxes with a big X: happy, healthy, the pursuit of liberty, a nice place to live, comfort, and Hot Cheetos - got it.
Not unmarried and single by 30, at least six months worth of living expenses as savings, zero credit card debt, and student loans paid off too. I got it, goddamn it! Perhaps that was the American dream, but really, in my naiveté, I thought that this was exactly how dreams were supposed to carry you forward – by the achievement of solving problems in a sort of linear fashion in order to feel more and more progressively enlightened, like a human Pokémon, catching it All. This was happiness, this was fulfillment, this was my blooming as a human being. This was how it was supposed to be. This was eudaimonia, a concept I had once learned during the few lectures I paid attention to in university. Eudaimonia, simply put, is flourishing and doing the best you can as a human being with your facilities. In the privileged coastal America I had grown up dirt poor in, eudaimonia was marketed. Eudaimonia was all around you, if only you achieved your dreams from your hard work. of This is what eudaimonia, this is what my human achievement and flourishing would have been.
However.
It was not.
It was in France that I learned that life is not linear and that success is defined on your own terms completely, however painful disillusionment makes dreaming more nebulous. Maybe it was existentialist, maybe it was survivalist, maybe it was a result of an infinite capacity for sorrow unleashed after what happened to me changed me forever.
Je rèpéte: once upon a time I spat at the American dream and the American dream spat back at me. Recall that the fundamental beauty of the American dream is impossible to attain anywhere else in the world – that of bitter Slurpees while sitting your fat ass down in front of the television with air conditioning blasting, it’s a free country and you can do as you goddamn please, so do I feel lucky - do ya, punk?
The fundamental beauty of the American dream is upward mobility wrapped up in the blossoms of hard work and merit aided by simultaneous comfort, convenience, and grandness – and 24-hour liquor sales, except for in the really scary parts of legislative America in the south. After all, have you ever spent a summer without air conditioning, as they like to do in sadist France? There is a gift to being an immigrant child in America that my parents never ceased to remind me of because of everything they never got to have when they were children, including this dream and its gift. I grew up believing in America and the American dream, and that the gift of the American dream was more than just money.
That is, the gift of the American dream is the gift of endless refashioning and possibility. It is reprieve from regimes, possibility and probability, and the natural scope of ability unleashed in a free market. As such, it is also the gift laden with never ending punishment from the spoils of self-making and refashioning from changing circumstances.
I committed violence to the dreams of my immigrant parents when I decided to leave America all for what was supposed to be a carefree time in Paris. It was anything but.
I am in an abusive relationship with the city that nearly killed me. So here is the next great American novel, the novel I kept talking about when I was high on morphine in the hospital. Here is the next great American novel in Paris. I thought the end of the world happened for me when I woke up in that hospital room merely three weeks after I first moved to France. And so in my crippledness and hereafter, I tried to live, write, and fuck like it was the imminent end of the human race. I still believe it can be the end of the world and that there is no greater city in the world than Paris to live, write, and fuck in in anticipation of the apocalypse.
Transcendent and transformative northern California was too soulful for me and autocratic about eating meat, and Los Angeles, sweet home Los Angeles, had become too much.
The sounds, smells, and sights of Los Angeles so familiar to me - of cars swaying by on distant freeway ramps, very good and very strong marijuana floating out of car windows to dry palm trees as quiet witness, of faint and stubborn orange sriracha sauce stains showing up everywhere – suddenly it all became too much, too familiar, too known. I had enough. I had to get out. So in a Gallic galaxy far far away (about 5596 miles to be exact), I thought I would figure things out only to discover there was nothing to figure out and I had no fucking idea what I was doing (and that I probably never, ever will). And Paris is gorgeous. Paris is the most beautiful city God could offer in the best of all possible worlds, so as a trade off, he made some Parisians the worst people in the world. London got the sorry end of the stick, being both ugly and rude.
So.
The next great American novel will be written in Paris. It will be written during America’s teenage years while rain is pouring and my head is throbbing from a phantom hangover.
The next great American novel will be written in Paris.
Wait.
Since time immemorial, professors have always advised against making such grandiose opening statements…but why follow the ill-advised opinions of those who joined the worst brothel in the world?
After all, academia is the only safe space that honestly advertises the degradation of its whores prior to their entry.
First, the fresh-faced, red-cheeked, perky-titted Botticelli blonde entering the Academy ™ begins her brutal intellectual undressing by shyly and eagerly agreeing to give an undetermined amount of time (usually spanning between five to seven years), a span where the daily stripping and whittling away of her precious youth and mind will gradually ravage her beauty into that of a pockmarked and anxiety ridden face. Following, the terse gaunt-faced, acne-marred, saggy-titted fallen whore of the Academy who more closely resembles Klee’s Holocaust angel becomes fixed with the steely gaze of a whore with hollow eyes but sound mind contemplating her futile escape from the brothel, instead knowing better, knowing reality, knowing a particular kind of intimacy in bondage to her bosses.
The whore of the Academy at this point in all of her whoring now has the bitter first-hand knowledge of an anesthetized whore’s existence when opening up every part of herself to be forcefully filled by others and having to pretend to like it. Terrorized and traumatized through complacency and ineptitude, the whore realizes any attempt to seek shelter elsewhere from the brothel will be futile for no one likes whores without hearts of gold, and those only exist in literary debates taught to undergraduates more interested in perusing ClassPass rather than abstract questioning of their moral capacities. Desperate and under the daily fear of annihilation leading to infinite hunger, the whore turns to her fellow damned lot of whores for support by additionally giving yet another undetermined amount of time (usually spanning between five to seven years) in order to finally secure a lifetime’s work of whoring spent constantly regurgitating the virtues of her stark nudity and of those around her. All of these whores are like Picasso’s whores of Avignon but unlike them since the whores of academia utterly lack any menace or rage within their being, for these emotions are only motions brought to the surface when they have the opportunity to wield a B minus over a B when grading students they secretly dislike on a 700 word essay assignment about Pasolini and his use of sexuality in interpreting Decameron.
The whore of academia stands nude in the cold dark night around a forgotten corner with her fellow sad naked whores, all of them occupying their time by repackaging and unpacking absolutely nothing whilst believing all this empty talk will somehow magically produce the emperor’s new clothes.
Psychologically speaking, the whores survive the frost by stubbornly and continuously believing their whoring work to be noble work, merited work, rigorous work, the work of whores who think they know best amongst all the other whores in their whoring professions also. The whores still hope though, holding onto the ferocious belief that one day over the rainbow, their pudgy, bulldogged, small-dicked and heavy-cane carrying enigmatic neoliberalist pimp wearing his fedora - a fedora with faded red, white, and blue feathers falling out and visibly haphazardly replaced quickly with newly printed shiny gold star stickers manufactured in China - will let himself finally out of mercy met out the funding for a new shawl or two for the whores to fight over in a feeble attempt to cover their bare asses in the cold dark night.
The cunts in my künstleromman, the fire of my loins, the people who have always advised me against making such grandiose and sweeping opening statements - these are academia’s sad and pitiful whores. They throw bricks from the ivory tower because they are so fragile. They are the neglected children of parents who bred from the deadly combination of rich and ignorant.
These neglected children who one day become academia’s whores are the pathetic and sad folk of privilege who understand they are bourgeoisie and trivial and have nothing else to offer to the world but their deconstructed sorrows. Yawn, yawn.
And so they cling onto their precious texts immortalizing it, hoping to one day become chair and publish a critical edition of it as the chief project of their life. Suffice to say, since the brothel of academia is a terrible deal compared to the multitude of other brothels in the world, we can disregard the academics and their faulty decision making telling us how to write and what to do. These whores would never make it in Paris.
The next great American novel will be written in Paris. This book is not that book. It’s a series of short stories about time spent in Paris.
The next great American novel will be written in Paris because even though I will fail to write that novel, as an American I can make grand proclamations driven by fear and insecurity. These proclamations are ambitious goals to change the world that will absolutely have to happen simply because I say so. These people never managed to get over Napoleon’s failure to conquer Russia exactly two hundred and four years ago on December 14th, 1812. Much like Napoleon’s devastating failure and its enduring effects, the next great American novel written in Paris is about the failure of unmet expectations and the devastation following it.
It will be written the night before the night I leave Paris again and it will be written out of a desperation — because I don’t know how else to remember Paris except with the meager and pitiful attempt of words. This novel has been written in order to remember Paris, why I came here, what I found here, and where it is taking me.
Most of this has to do with learning nothing was ever what I thought or wanted it to be - it was always so much more. And it was in Paris I learned this about expectation - its futility, its gracious inclination towards failure, and how this was truly for the best and betterment of myself in the end.
I am writing to tell you a marvelous and grand story of stories of the French encountering me, me encountering the French, the good croissants, the bad croissants, the wine, the art, the art of drinking wine at an art museum while being judged by Parisians who forgot they originally come from Toulouse or Nancy (les deux great villes of their own, really) - Paris, all of it, rhythm and melody and madness and hustle and bustle and metro smells and bakery smells and smelly smells and no Amélie in site - this is my Paris, the Paris giving birth to beauty, the Paris of great American novelists at every single hour and not just the midnight of predatory child molesters.
The Paris of Haussmann’s perfect geometry resulting in my endlessly walking around in circles - the Paris where when you live here you start to huff and puff under your breath at everyone and anyone in your way, regardless of their size, shape, age, nationality, or any markers of being except for they are being in your way so goddamn it and dégage will you already. This is the Paris infecting me every single day that makes me want to scream when I am asked for one more piece of paper by l’administration terrible française, or if I am to face one more making out always making out never stopping making out couple who really should get a goddamn room - this is the Paris rotting my bones and rotting my soul and so I ran away from rotting America to go into the slimy arms of the Gallic tribe and all of their bureaucrats, on s’embrasser. I must be mad to want to be here since the thought of leaving maddens me more than putting up with it.
Sex, hospitalizations, bruises, motorcycle wrecks, heartbreaks almost as bad than hospitalization, wrecks in my life almost as bad as the heartbreaks by the people causing them, closed mouth kisses, open mouth kisses, impatience, walks along the Seine, Roquefort, love locks, love lost, love rocks - this is the Paris I have known, this is the Paris I have lived. Paris, je t’aime because every other American girl here has a blog and a complementary cute French boyfriend except for me.
All I have are my stories. I am telling you the truth of everything I know about this city, every single piece and morsel and stale breadcrumb and cigarette butt lined way of it, the novel of my youth, the time I spent in Paris and what time has spent of me before, during, and after Paris - this novel and its words are begging you - DECONSTRUCT this.