The text blinked my phone awake as I washed the dinner dishes. “I booked my flight!”
My stomach hit the kitchen floor, oh dang. We’re really doing this.
Over the past five years, my friends Julie and Emily poured their talents and time into hosting artist retreats in Europe, with lucky me tagging along when I could to cook. Weeks brim with flower arranging, landscape painting, lingering over meals: the stuff of dreams (and hard work). 2020 stifled much, including our Italy retreat, leaving us stateside and stagnant. So when last fall breezed in with lower Covid cases, countries opening up, and the tantalizing low prices of airfare, the three of us couldn’t help scheming a Paris trip. Not for work, but just for us, just for fun. What if?
A dreamer to the core, I’m willing to allow an idea to billow around, iridescent and huge, never popping against the walls of reality. But Julie’s text meant business. This trip was happening. My insides crackled with the hollow tang of anxiety.
After two years of shutdown, virtual school, Zoom, and unknown, my entire being feels a little foreign. The edges of my world shrunk. Could I still do this—travel alone, leave my kids and husband for an entire week, navigate another language?
We live like this don’t we? We make ourselves and our worlds small to create some feeling of safety and ease and control in our lives. We tell ourselves stories beginning with “can’t” and “shouldn’t.” Maybe, especially in the South, it’s easier to define oneself by families, beliefs, neighborhoods—by status. Where do you work? Where do you live? Are your kids on swim team? There’s a longing to pull our communities tight around our shoulders, a blanket of comfortable control. We cocoon into ourselves forgetting to look up and around at how varied and wild and huge this world really is.
I unearthed my passport, relieved it hadn’t expired. “Allons-y!” I texted back. Let’s go.
It’s not a great time to travel, or even very safe. I got a booster shot a week before I left, stocked up on masks, and took a test before leaving. As a mother of two, I made charts—charts!— communicating everything from carpools to meals to after-school activities. I filled our freezer with food. I whittled my wardrobe down to what would fit in a carryon bag. I cried the whole way home after dropping my kids off at school. My shoulders didn’t relax until the seatbelt sign went off over Newark. Maybe I’m not meant for this, I think. This is supposed to be fun and exciting.
Do you want to feel uncomfortable, misunderstood, like a permanent outsider, and the butt of more than a few jokes? Go to Paris.
Don’t turn the page. Yes, Paris is a dreamboat of a destination, a pastel meringue of beauty and surprise. The chance to go on a trip (on a whim of all things) is a capital-P privilege. I live on a public school teacher’s salary! I get it. But travel is a dream and a dirge. A foreign country stretches and humbles and challenges. That’s why I wanted to go—to remind myself that I can navigate all the tiny foreign obstacles that make travel so tedious and so worth it. I wanted to wake up.
Because here’s what I know: when you travel, you don’t meet the other cooler, European version of yourself upon taxing to the gate. Parisienne Beth didn’t stop off the RER train at Gare du Norde, fluent and sophisticated, brave and bold. Beth from Greenville, South Carolina, did, albeit wearing more black. I met myself in Paris: bumbling, uncool, capable me. I’m not glamorous, well-dressed, or well-spoken. Sometimes when I’m excited or nervous, I talk too loud or make a dumb joke or accidentally record a 45-minute video of a ceiling during the fanciest meal I’ll ever eat in my entire life. I was holding a crystal coupe of real Champagne while wearing a dress from Target.
Travel doesn’t make you new, rather the opposite. With new perspective, home becomes closer than ever. People in crowds look familiar, faces from home rise out of a crowd coming out of the metro—but here where they couldn’t possibly be. I film the rushing waters of the Seine flowing under a stone bridge, think of my husband and ache to have him beside me. Aggie, the bookstore cat at Shakespeare and Company, makes biscuits on my lap while I write. Silas would love this I scribble on a page of my journal. I buy a pink marzipan pig at a patisserie, knowing how much my mom always loved them. A woman in a café rolls her own cigarette, bored and beautiful, her red lipstick perfect, her motions practiced and sophisticated. Thank you, Paris, for being Paris. I wish I could show you, I wish you were here. You are here. My entire life seems to be both far away and closer than ever—the entire world so large, so connected.
Maybe we can’t all travel right now. But the world is waiting for us when we can. Sometimes I drive to school pick up a different way just to break some of these well-worn paths in my brain, to shake things up a bit. I’ll write in a different room of the house. These micro changes might be all we have for this season, but I want to say as I write this in an apartment with a creperie downstairs and a metro stop around the corner, the world is still here, waiting for you, waiting to transform and teach and shake us up a little. In the best ways. À bientôt, Paris. Until next time.
