M is for March

Ciao Paris

I’ve accepted a job outside of Paris. Meaning that, for the first time in nearly five years, my feet are itching to take me out of the city that has been a very kind and welcoming home. In French, you say “Ça tombe bien” meaning “It falls well” or merely “it’s good timing” and that has been the response of friends when I tell them about my new job. The Olympics are coming this summer, and as much as I want to witness the chaos, I equally do not want to experience feeling wound into a tourist trap (working in hospitality you can only imagine the planning that is going into the Olympics prep already).

It’s funny how the longer you live in a place the more you imprint certain feelings on certain areas, consciously or not. Repeated journeys become second nature, standing at the back of the metro as you know where the good exit is, hanging right so you can shave four seconds off the journey home. Muscle memory digs its claws into your subconscious and boy does it dig them deeply. Instead of retraining my muscle memory this summer by exposure therapy, I’ll be taking the much less mature route of avoidance for as long as it takes to wipe the city clean from the malaise. My approach to life is much like my approach to cooking; haphazard and sometimes slightly lazy but equally zealous; all or nothing. I want to be able to sieve my brain and dust the memories that I no longer want to keep into the bin. Alas, I hate sieving, I think it’s messy and unnecessary and sieves are fucking annoying to clean. And therein lies the conundrum, I know what to do to feel better but it feels like the path of most resistance, so instead, like Beth from Little Women, I am taking to the sea.

I won’t remain cynical for long, perhaps my attempt of learning how to surf will knock that out of me, the waves washing away the bitterness that lies in the wake of a breakup. All that to say, for the next month and a half, I will be working on a different muscle memory, eating my way around Paris even more than I do now. Flexing my overdramatic tendencies and eating everything “for the last time”, despite knowing full well that it is not the last time.