In Paris, I think often about time
Dear friend,
As I’m writing this, I am sitting on a park bench in the gardens of the Palais Royal in Paris’s 1st arrondissement. I’ve been here for hours, first reading then people watching and now writing this note to you, though I really don’t know when (or if) I’ll ever send it.
This is my first trip back to Paris since I was last here in September 2019. I was stopping by on my way home from a friend’s wedding in Tuscany. Time seemed to stretch before me in a hopeful way back then, promising that good things were coming, that I had all the time in the world to find a new path if I so desired. That I had everything I needed to make a big leap into a new future. That time was on my side.
Though I am now only two years older than that September, I feel a gulf of difference between my relationship with time back and then and time now. In many ways, I am much, much older than the woman I was then. Time, for me, has taken on new shape. It drags like molasses but I can’t seem to catch a hold of it. I no longer feel like it is on my side, and the brightness with which I used to say “anything could happen!” is now a caution, a warning to shrink away from the world, to assume that the future holds new terrors.
But here, in this garden, just beyond the influencers and tourists perched precariously on the black and white columns in the Courtyard of Honor, repeating smiles and gestures for the camera, I can reconcile with time if only for a moment. I can order a coffee at Le Grand Véfour and wonder about the many people who have done just that very thing since the late eighteenth century. And I can walk across to Café Kitsuné, a newcomer when you consider the centuries that have passed through this place, and get an oatmilk flat white on ice. I can sit on an old green bench, carved with the words of writers and thinkers from centuries past, reading on my Kindle and listening to the boisterous conversations of high school kids. Just to my left, on a reclining green chair facing the fountain, is an old man with his book, and just beyond him are a young couple and their small child. This place is where I feel that time moves with us all, on our side, willing to let us last.
Thank you for being here.
