The day after I come back from my spontaneous Naples trip, I take myself to a NeoNess gym in Bastille, a leisurely twenty-five minute walk from my island apartment. I don’t know if I sign up in a desperate attempt to impress a boy, to punish myself for making the mistake of wasting precious pasta calories on terrible spaghetti, or…I don’t know, to be healthy. But there I am, trying through broken French to explain that I don’t have a French bank account and that I’ll pay be credit card every month. I manage to make it through and get a little red plastic card and set off on my first weighted workout in three months and it feels so good - watching dubbed Lucifer reruns while I’m on the treadmill, doing crunches on a Bosu ball, and feeling so cramped watching people in the weight room not lift but play on their phones. I go three or four times over the next week and a half.
And then the news comes that on Friday, all the restaurants are shutting down. And on Monday, you’re only allowed out of the house if your job is essential. It’ll only be for a couple of weeks, but that weekend, Tayllor and I meet up to go in search of specaloos ice cream, traveling to four different ice cream shops on my little island and in the 3rd and 4th arrondissements. It seems like the rest of the city isn’t taking confinement seriously; despite officials suggesting social distancing, everyone is out soaking up the first sunshine in months and dangling their legs over the quai walls of the river. Already, I see Instagrammers shaming those meeting people outside their home group and not wearing masks, those who don’t know what’s going to happen and take what last look at the outdoors and the ones they love they can. Two weeks is a long time to not be around people.
At first, I tried to keep myself occupied. I started making a daily to-do list. Monday, March 16: workout, put away laundry, clean apartment, lunch, reading, movie, yoga, dinner. Meals were to-dos because any thing that warranted a check felt like productivity. Even the mundane and thoughtless things got their own check boxes because I knew that I would feel unaccomplished and lazy if I didn’t have anything to show for all the unaccomplished and lazy things I did. Slowly, the to-do lists stopped getting done and eventually stopped being written. I bought a guitar - something sure to take up time and something I had wanted to learn to play for some time. I could only spend five minutes on it each day before I wanted to rip my hand off both from my inability to reach all the notes correctly, from the calluses forming on my fingers, and the fact that all my nails had been cut short to make space for the calluses. I bought palettes of make-up to play with and got bored one prolonged selfie session in. I started memorizing and performing monologues and poetry but wanted to have people to work with and stopped. Reading was difficult - my mind would wander to nowhere in particular and I’d find myself rereading the same paragraph over and over. It’s hard for me to binge watch television so that was out of the question. I knew that I should use all this time to do what it was I came to Paris to do: write. But, like every one else stuck inside, I was unable to string together any semblance of intelligent thought, let alone get it down on paper. The novel I’m working on was open but empty. The dialogue for research for a screenplay went untranscribed. Thousands of photos sat unedited on my MacBook. I wasn’t able to go anywhere or eat anything I didn’t make so I couldn’t very well work on my blog. Nothing was happening in the world around me, in my apartment, or in my head.
It’s a strange thing, suddenly being stripped of your ability to go out and explore. Two months into my trip and I had managed to feel familiar with the city and could see myself home without consulting a map when I was in the river-adjacent arrondissements and had even managed a twelve mile run all the way to the Bois de Boulogne before I was abruptly restricted to a less than half mile radius and for less than an hour. At the end of March, confinement was extended to mid-May and I told myself, “I got this. I got through two weeks, I could do two months.” But then I started to realize that I had saved for four years to come see this city and not the inside of my tiny Parisian flat. I had already nearly spent three weeks trying to recover from a sprained ankle and what I now self-diagnose as Covid. The agonizing realization that the majority of my trip would be spent cooped up was heartbreaking and dealt a major blow to my mental health. The unfairness of it all - being trapped when all I wanted to do was see the world - was so overwhelming, I neglected the fact that I didn’t have to worry about keeping a job, didn’t have to worry about contracting this virus, didn’t have to struggle with seeing people since I already lived a solitary life. A dream I had realized was in the stage of shifting from something sweet to a nightmare. I started crying constantly from the sheer frustration of not being able to go out to museums or restaurants or gush over the Parisian light. I couldn’t experience Paris like I wanted to and that lead to spirals of bitterness and anger at things that had nothing to do with the pandemic: I got mad at my mother because instead of spending a sixth of my trip in lockdown if she had contributed more, I was now spending a third. I got mad at how just living on an island stole distance and time outside from me. I got mad at the weather for shedding the dreary winter and bringing the sweet spring when I couldn’t enjoy it.
I got so lonely. I felt I couldn’t connect with the small handful of friends I had made in Paris while we group chatted on WhatsApp. I hadn’t had a hug in over a month. One night, I tried to think about the last great hug I had and it wasn’t the last one. I replayed it over and over in my mind to the point that I couldn’t tell if I had remember it correctly (later confirmation from the hugger said that I did and that’s something I’ll hold onto forever). I missed being held. I missed hearing my friend’s voices in my ears, feeling them right next to me. I missed people existing beyond the square of my computer or phone screen. I missed listening to conversations I couldn’t understand, or moving around people stopping to look at a painting. I missed the clink of silverware on plates and park gates clanging shut. I missed feeling the sun on my face as I leaned back on a picnic blanket or a soft breeze pull my hair across my neck as I walked between buildings.
I went from missing to mourning. Not just all the travel and the eating and the museum going, but more the opportunities that were supposed to happen with others. I was supposed to go with my mom to Jerusalem and slip a hope into the Wailing Wall and buy za’atar from the market. I was supposed to run the Paris Marathon with Melissa and was supposed to go on a tour of the Louvre Wine Cellar with Jessica. Most painfully of all, I was supposed to walk along the Seine with Jason, my best friend who has never left New England and has never experienced another culture. I was looking forward to showing him my city more than anything, to see his eyes light up as we walked by the windows of the haute couture ateliers and patisseries, to be there when he experienced eating a macaron in the Tuilleries, to hug him as we strolled over the rainbow crosswalks near the Hotel de Ville. I mourned the experience of his first trip outside America and the chance to be beside him as he took it all in.
My friend was breaking lockdown rules every day: she managed to walk to and from the Louvre, which is a forty minute walk one way from her flat in the 11th and well outside the 1 kilometer restriction, changing her address to those of coworkers and updating the time on her attestation. In April, we started meeting up, even managing to walk 9 miles in three hours once, a feat I still marvel at because we talked the entire time and her legs end where my ribs begin. As an avid rule follower, it felt nice to push the boundaries of what I was supposed to do. The worst that would’ve happened is I would’ve been fined, but any act of rebellion was treasured. So was the time outside and all the movement. It was a nice combatant to the loneliness and laziness I felt when I was in my apartment. Those walks saved me and my sanity.
Celebrating my birthday was both exactly what I thought it would be and completely different. I expected to be alone for my birthday. I just didn’t think I would’ve been in my house with no other human interaction save asking for a baguette from the boulanger for two months before and six weeks after. I didn’t expect to have friends in Paris that would want to celebrate with me and only one of the group of expats I belonged to FaceTimed me that day. But my thirty-third birthday, spent by myself, was the best I’ve ever had. I search for taco fixings, tequila, cointreau, and limes to celebrate Cinco de Mayo. I substitute creme fraiche for sour cream, romaine lettuce for iceberg, and used a tumbler for a margarita glass. I put on my favorite little black dress and a full face of make-up. I had invited friends to send videos of them drinking or taking shots to celebrate with me and only Joli did, but she’s one of my favorites so I felt loved. I got to see Jason, Melissa, and Jessica through my computer and had a marathon heart-filling FaceTime with Andriana as we drank together in my time zone and hers. Despite the pandemic enveloping the planet, my thirty-second year was incredible and on that day, I knew my thirty-third would be even better. Two days later, I broke lockdown rules again and made my way to Tayllor’s flat so we could bake a cake and celebrate.
Mid-May, lockdown was lifted and we could travel up to 100 kilometers. I walk to the Bois Vincennes, strolling through fields of red poppy and watching the bumble bees flit among the long grass and flowers. Thirty minutes after Macron announces we’re free to travel, I book Airbnb’s and trains to Nice, Bordeaux, and Cannes. I need to get out of Paris and after cancelling a trip to Budapest, I try to make up for lost travel. Americans can’t visit Europe because no country wants people from a place that doesn’t seem to care about it’s dead or the health and safety of its living, so the pages of my travel journal labeled Vienna, Prague, Amsterdam, Dublin, Lisbon, Berlin, Iceland, and London remain empty except for too-optimistic dates in June and July. I have to move all the plans and wandering I was going to do into a little box in the back of my mind to be re-opened in the distant future.
Eight months after the first initial confinement, France is suffering it’s second wave of the Coronavirus. Schools are open, but restaurants and bars are not. From Seattle, where I’m now living and just as unemployed as before, I look with envy at the pictures Tayllor posts, telling her how I wish I was back there to experience fall in Paris. She responds with, “No, I’m glad you’re not here. It was so hard for you last time.” I’ve sat on this blog post for so long because it was and still is so hard for all of us. I always strive to bring escape and hope to the stories I tell, whether they’re my own or someone else’s. But we can’t escape the pandemic. It’s still going on, still raging and sucking all the oxygen out of our lives and growing bigger and more fatal every day. How can I provide solace to the few readers I have who are struggling just as much as I am with feelings of helplessness and mourning missed plans and physical touch from those who make our hearts sing? How can I not verbalize the feeling of complete and utter incomprehension on how to get through Covid-life and instead, bring some sunshine and warmth and that feeling of being somewhere amazing? The answer is I can’t because I lack the emotional capacity right now. The only thing I can do is share the truth of my experience and hope it makes you, my reader, feel less alone in the most lonely time of our lives.
Comments