Seventy-five days

They slipped right through my fingers like sand.

The past seventy-five days, during which I've been a habitué of Paris's 10th arrondissement, has slipped through my hands like sand that I've tried to pack, mold, and shape. I imagined bringing that sculpted narrative back to the U.S. with me so I could show everyone an experience they might recognize and relate to. They'd see meaning in it, and they'd agree that I'd really accomplished something by coming to Paris. I'd return to it years later to remind myself, long after this trial of a foreign life has become a distant memory, of what it was and what it meant.

But those days were dry sand. Just slipped right through my fingers.

Each day flies by now. The gorgeously crisp late autumn afternoon always turns to evening too early. For once I'm the very model of relaxed observation, planted and content on a café terrace.

Then a chilly breeze breaks my intense focus on the pleasures of the table or distracts my delight in the passing street theater. I lift my eyes past the now-dull stone facades around me to a line of graceful zinc roofs, the only bit of Paris that by late afternoon is still touched by a yolky golden sun about to sink into the horizon somewhere beyond the Arc de Triomphe.

One more day, without fair warning, is gone.

But seventy-five days are a great bounty. They're three empty bottles of olive oil. They're sneakers chucked into the trash after hundreds of miles walked. They're a wonderfully unquantifiable beauty and pleasures consumed.

Seventy-five days are countless news cycles, entire political earthquakes in the U.S., that I have enjoyed the liberty to avoid. My attentions have necessarily been focused instead on the critical task of securing the bare necessities: the best local coffee, the just-right baguette (crackly exterior, airy interior, pas trop cuite), and an all-needs all-day café-bar that really feels like home.

Seasons departed and arrived in these days, from the lingering heat and languor of August to the clean, perfect crispness of continental autumn, right on through to the earliest whisper of grey, damp winter that will finally, temporarily but resolutely, turn this city of terrasse-glued extroverts inward.

Seasons have passed within me, too. We said goodbye to life in a steaming, intense, despairingly expensive New York what felt like many months, not days, ago. I don't feel like a New Yorker anymore—though I'd do anything for a bacon-egg-and-cheese and a stiff martini.

I don't feel Parisien, either, of course. That'll be a long time coming, if it comes at all.

I'll be content to be what I am on this day: me, but resettled and evolved, enlisted in the ranks of the global hopeful who believe in ourselves and in smashing through lines on maps.

May the days be long and may the curiosity remain insatiable.