I've spent quite a bit of time in the City of Lights over the years, going way back to when I was fifteen years old and lived with a Parisian family for the summer. I can't claim to know it like a local, but I dare say that this city and I are much more than acquaintances. Paris will always pull at my heartstrings.
In November and December, I had the good fortune to spend eighteen days in Paris, over the course of two separate visits. The first trip was a solo writing retreat, during which I tucked myself away in the 6th arrondisement to take advantage of the momentum I'd gained writing my novel. By this point, we knew DS would be returning to work soon, so the moment was mine to seize!
The second visit brought the entire family to Paris during New Year's week.
It came to pass that I was in Paris the night of the terrorist attacks on Friday, November 13. I'm not entitled to be melodramatic about this fact. Not when so many people experienced such loss. Yet, these events affected me deeply. I was scared, and remain skittish three months later. I've learned this is how it goes, as I also happened to live and work in Washington, D.C. on September 11, 2001. I still have irrational, but manageable, fears stemming from this experience (for example, low-flying planes make my stomach do an involuntary turn).
In the case of Paris, I was eating dinner alone at an outdoor café in the arrondisement adjacent to the one where the attacks occurred. When I put together the timeline in my head later that night, I realized that I had just finished eating and paid my bill as the attacks started. I then walked home across the Seine to my hotel in the 6th. Tons of restaurants and cafés line the small side street where my hotel was located, and they were packed with Friday-night revelers. I could barely make my way through all the people who had stepped outside with a glass of wine to smoke a cigarette. I stepped into the lobby, and received this text from my mom in the United States: "Are u home? Just heard of the terrorism in Paris." Fifteen minutes later, the street below was empty. The news was out, and the city was eerily quiet.
As stark as this memory is for me, and also the following day when I had to catch my scheduled train back to Amsterdam, what really stands out for me is the week leading up to Friday's tragedy. Most of those mornings I went for a run in Luxembourg Gardens, which was near my hotel. Every single one of those mornings I found myself running alongside a unit of sapeurs-pompiers (firefighters), who must train there on a regular basis. Ok, perhaps I wasn't running alongside them, and it was probably more that they ran laps around me, but we shared this moment in time in this beautiful palatial garden on several crisp autumn mornings. That Friday morning, I ran with them. That Friday night, they were called to action in a way they could have never imagined earlier that day. I had watched them run hard and sweat. They wore dark, long-sleeved tee shirts with sapeurs-pompiers written across the back. They laughed as they ran in pairs and small groups.
I'm brought to tears when I think of them. Every time. For some reason, it is the thought of these men and women that hurls this tragedy at me like a punch to the gut. It was that shared moment that made the events real to me. So much loss of life. So much need for heroes. Not just in Paris, but all over the world nowadays. Still, it's important but to keep living. Not allow fear to play with your head. It's why we went back to Paris, as planned, just one month later to celebrate the holidays.
I think sometimes it's best to let the silence do the talking. Here are some quiet photos from my fall and winter trips to Paris, most of which I took during my morning runs, starting at Le Jardin du Luxembourg. #cityoflight
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