Dear Paris,

somewhere to begin again

You won’t be surprised to learn that I talk about you. I think most people talk about you sometimes, regardless of how well they know you and whether their relationship is parasocial. Can someone have a parasocial relationship with a city? I guess the concept makes about as much sense as this, writing a letter to a city when in reality my words are for human eyes. I’m mainly writing for my very human desire to make sense of my experiences and what they mean to me. This is illogical to some, perhaps, but others wouldn’t bat an eyelid. You, Paris, would hardly even notice. This is fan-mail; musings destined to turn to ashes before they even reach you.

Humanity is obsessed with you, Paris. Whether it’s in a dreamy, wondering way, or in a tone that dismisses you as dirty and overrated. There’s jealousy there, maybe. I lean towards the former but I do so with caution. You really are worth the hype, I think, but I'm also realistic about how it feels to exist in you. As a tourist, at least. I’m always a tourist, as you know – I'm just another foreign speck, capturing photos on aesthetic corners, getting in the way of real life moving.

You were the first foreign capital city I visited and you weren’t exactly a breath of fresh air, but you were new and exciting – I felt alive in your big arms. I remember you more vividly than I recall childhood memories of London, because London was close geographically yet I hadn’t experienced it as London. Arriving in Paris, however, really was an immediate realisation that Paris was Paris. Extraordinary from the get-go, a core memory in the making.

My perception of France, the only country I had any proper perception of, consisted of visions of the alps and croissants and tartiflette and now, there was you. The Eiffel Tower sparkling at twilight and streets that felt like film sets I’d simply stumbled into. Everybody walked differently, with a kind of poise I wondered if I could grow up to have – a wondering that got quickly squashed. I visited Disneyland with my parents and brother and couldn’t get over how clean the sparkling pink paths were, or how magical the castle was, with turrets galore. Everything was big and bright and so unlike ordinary life.

We’ve had multiple encounters since then, whether it was arriving again with my family via car or attending a Year 9 school trip with anxious eagerness. Somewhere, there’s a selfie of me at 14 with a beret and a moustache stuck to my upper lip. I think it was taken by turning around a digital camera – if I’d seen myself maybe I’d have second-guessed clicking the capture button. I remember battling my sexuality with each day that passed that week, because there was a girl in my GCSE French class who made my heart flutter. Then there was a group conversation on the coach about being gay and how weird that was and it made my cheeks as red as the beret I’d worn the night before. I turned away to look out the window, the road a blur. In the city, I remember running across one of your Parisian roads when I wasn’t supposed to, because that was outside the boundaries, but I was desperate to buy this t-shirt as a souvenir. I held onto the t-shirt for over a decade, as the Paris print faded with every wash and wear, gradually forgetting its origins of longing and naivety.

During my time at university, I visited you in winter with my ex and saw a new year in with Disneyland fireworks. Saw the Mona Lisa across an overwhelming sea of heads and cameras. Sat right near the stage at Moulin Rouge and got drunk on wine – surreal. Walked grey streets in a big, puffy coat. I visited again that summer by Eurostar, whilst she studied there for summer school in a heatwave, and I got to see Versailles for the first time, wearing a Mary Poppins dress my friends had generously bought me in California. The place was a painting and I actually felt elegant. I was practically in costume but my smile was real, because I was in Paris, and I had adventure in my life. I watched incredible fireworks and lights on Bastille Day. I took photos in a park with a pink beret sitting on my head. I dragged my feet around under the sun and saw the city dissolve into mania when France won the World Cup. Chaos exploded and I didn’t know where to look.

Four years later in August, I got to you from Warsaw via bus, arriving outside a crappy hotel’s car park, which is where I first met Mairéad. I was volunteering on international summer camps, recovering from an eye infection, and about to embark on a week-long trip back to Warsaw, visiting Paris, Brussels, Amsterdam, and Berlin along the way. Mairéad was my coordinator, who’d come in from London, on a high after a Coldplay concert. I saw Disneyland again with a group of five sweet teenagers in tow, entertaining them in excruciatingly long queues for rides with smiles stuck to our faces because still, we were in Disneyland! I followed a walking tour of Paris and hovered outside my beloved Shakespeare & Company bookshop, aching to go in. My mum also happened to be in Paris at the same time and I managed to catch her by the Sacré-Coeur Basilica in a whirlwind of a happy moment after weeks apart. The city sparkled and we did with it, like a dream.

Mairéad and I perched next to each other on a river cruise, people-watching and waving to everyone sitting on the bank. We joined in with kids’ screaming whenever we went under a bridge, and laughed every time. We saw the sky turn golden, decorated with hanging clouds of candy floss. That evening, I sat on the gravel by the bus with my fellow volunteers and Mairéad, listening to opinions on life and religion and relationships. She had incomparable charisma, and I looked at her when she wasn’t watching with an instinct I hadn’t named yet, telling me something.

Mairéad took me back to you only a few months later, as a surprise. In an unsurprising turn of gay events, it had taken us less than a month to fall in love, so this wasn’t exactly unwarranted. I got to return to Shakespeare & Company and scratch that itch of entering, like I had done as a teenager, browsing at a leisurely speed. It was winter and we hopped on a river cruise in the cold – the sky dark, but lit with white and yellow lights. It was windy and I couldn’t stop grinning. I ate a cheese board inside a beautiful Parisian restaurant; Mairéad fixated on a rat with pizza between its teeth; and we held hands going home on the metro. For our next visit to Paris, the following summer, we were both working for the company we’d initially met through – we completed a Eurotrip from Paris-Warsaw all over again, being reminded of beginnings. We stood in the same crappy car park and everything, and I haven’t been back to Paris since then, not yet.

I’d love to learn more about you from the people who know you as home, because to me you’re the opposite, the epitome of “destination”. Amazing food, a gorgeous language, and people full of poise I still get struck by, like I did as a child.

Some people think you’re overrated, and boring, and represent a false sense of romance. In my tourist’s eyes, you hold real romance in streets and moments everywhere. Maybe I'm biased, because in one of your ugly car parks on the city’s outskirts, and then on a beautiful boat ride on the Seine, there were two women learning each other’s smiles, music tastes, eye colours, and views of the world – it was me and her, and we were beginning again.

You hold many beginnings, Paris. I notice you in pictures of proposals, strangers’ confessional letters, my own fading memories, and the way your landscape departs France to hang on families’ living room walls for good. I think your beginnings are your best treasures, for they can never truly be stolen, even when buried under the present.

I can’t thank you enough for all you’ve given me.

Until next time, with love,

Em 💜

25.07.26

taken on my school trip from the coach (2012)

taste of tartiflette