Melissa Leigh Gibson

Surviving Paris, Evermore

On the train from Charles de Gaulle airport to the city, I ignore the signs—the wall of congestion, the burning feeling around my sock edges—because Paris is rolling past the window. I scratch and I sniffle, sure, but my daughter is sparkling and I am busy searching for flickers of familiarity, so I write it all off as the effects of wearing too-tight jeans on a too hot day, and maybe also jetlag. But when we arrive at our apartment and I peel off those jeans, I discover that my legs are covered in hives. They are ugly, these hives, thick with blood vessels; on top of ankles swollen from a fourteen-hour journey, they make my legs look witchy and worn.

This is not how I pictured my return to Paris.

When I had planned this mother-daughter trip, what I pictured was my daughter and I cavorting across the Île de la Cité, sipping cappuccinos along the Seine, tracking down crèpe carts in Montmartre. I pictured the French returning effortlessly to the muscles of my mouth and Anna alight at her mother’s girlhood reincarnated. I would easily step back into my Parisian self—rounder and older, sure, but still in touch with the essence of this city’s (and my own) je ne sais quoi.

Instead, my first return to Paris after twenty-eight years has me lying half naked on a bed, itchy and drugged, while my twelve-year-old daughter pounds Orangina and rattles off all that she wants to do for the next seventy-two hours. Her bucket list does not include Benadryl and steroid creams.

* * *

At eighteen, I did the most daring thing I could think of: I flew to Paris on a one-way ticket. The plan was to spend the next however-many months living and working here. Not studying, not vacationing, but living. I had not returned for my sophomore year at Harvard, much to my mother’s panic. Life had gotten to be too much for me, and I wanted to disappear—not forever, but long enough to reboot my soul. And if I was going to disappear, why not disappear into a fantasy? Why not disappear in Paris? It was a dare, I guess, or maybe even a wish—either I will realize my own strength, or I will simply cease to exist. And I remember believing that strength would win out. 

The fact of that certainty is what I marvel at now. All freshman year, I cried and I drank and I slept through classes and days, cocooning myself away from the pain. I was sad in my bones, and some days a shadow of a thought might intrude that wondered what it would be like to just not be here anymore—to just not be anymore. I batted those thoughts away with vigilance, which only made the ache grow. Because then what? If I couldn’t stop existing, what could make the pain stop? The answer felt so easy when it finally came: Paris.

* * *

During our first lunch on what would become to us yet another leafy plaza, I tell my daughter that I hope desperately for her to know how lucky she is. We are in Paris to see Taylor Swift, and for the weeks before we crossed the ocean, I kept returning to this thought: I am the kind of mother that can make my child’s dreams come true. I want Anna to know how remarkable this is, that she has not just a mother but this mother, here on Place Dauphine right now, eating Nutella-filled gallettes and giggling along with her as the waiter mumbles some vowel-filled reprimand at us. When I tell her my hope that she knows her own fortune, she puts her fork down, looks me straight in the eyes, and assures me she does. 

Later, when she hugs me in front of the Mona Lisa and holds my hand across the city and cries at the opening bars of “Miss Americana,” I believe her.

* * *

Gold leaf against slate gray skies. Shit on sidewalks and window stoops. Hangovers that throbbed past sundown. Baguettes for breakfast, and lunch, and dinner, and breakfast again.

At eighteen, this was my Paris. What I’d imagined I was running to: a city of well-dressed women, sparkling architecture, leisurely meals in cafes. But I couldn’t afford the cafes, and the streets were pockmarked with poop, and everything had a layer of gray that grew thicker as winter grew near. I had packed what I thought were my hippest clothes: finewale bootleg corduroys, platform boots, my vintage red suede jacket rubbed raw by time. But the women of 1996 Paris, they didn’t wear corduroys or platforms or disco collars. They wore tightly knotted scarves, silky blouses and chenille sweaters, and maybe for edge, a polished motorcycle jacket. Their lips were always red, their eyes always flirting, their mouths always pouted. I know this because, with journal in hand, I would study them from the wall outside the Bastille Métro station, a yard away from the wrought iron café tables where they all sat with doting Frenchmen kissing their necks, palms, ears, while the women smoked thin Gauloises and stared disinterestedly at passerby.

I’d gone to that café for a cappuccino once, but I didn’t know what to do with myself, by myself. Instead, I’d taken up wandering, flâneur style, always ending at the Place de la Bastille, where I’d sit on the green subway wall and watch the world unfold before calling home to remember that I existed beyond this blooming emptiness.

* * *

I take Anna to the Bastille the morning after we arrive. The café is still on the corner, but the trees are fuller and bigger, which is what happens when twenty-eight years have passed. But also, it is late spring, and I was last here as the city was turning to winter, so maybe it’s not so much that the trees are older as they are, at last, in-season. Just outside the Métro station, I spin around noticing everything: the new Burger King, the many-colored market stalls, the gold genie of liberty flitting against charcoal skies. I point to the Opéra steps and tell Anna how we would buy the cheapest Côtes du Rhone, my friends and I, and then spend our weekends laughing and flirting from that dirty concrete. In the daylight, though, the steps are clean and family friendly, and there are well-dressed couples heading inside for a performance. It is not what I remember.

For all the months I lived here, I didn’t take many pictures, and in this moment, I want to remember. So I tug Anna towards the steps, but she is not interested. She is twelve. She wants the Eiffel Tower while I want to meander up this memory of streets to find my apartment and the bar where I first tasted pastis. I want to retrace cobblestoned steps until 1996 is crisp again and I can hold it open before her and say, this too is your mother. But I can tell by the way she isn’t talking, and the way she won’t really look at me, that she would rather not be doing this. She worries we’re going to miss everything else if we stay here. She whines at the Sunday market and drags her Converse past the houseboats, and she rolls her eyes when I start talking about how this was once a prison. She only wakes up when she sees an ad for a Starbucks, so I lie and say that 21 Rue de la Roquette was where I lived. I take a picture of this doorway next to where we happen to be standing, which is probably interchangeable with wherever it was that I stayed because it has the white stones and filigreed balconies and pigeons shitting on everything, and then I squeeze her hand and say we can go. For the first time that morning, she smiles, and she bounces back to the subway station.

* * *

The Eras Tour is one of the largest concerts in music history: 152 nights of a nearly four-hour show in fifty-four cities around the world. By some estimates, the concert will have infused over ten billion dollars into the global economy. It is nothing less than a global cultural phenomenon. But when it started, I could have counted the Taylor Swift songs I knew and liked on my fingers—a few bops, a handful of early country ballads. I was uninterested in Swift and her music. 

But “Bad Blood” and “Shake It Off”—released when Anna was just a toddler—were some of the first words Anna learned to sing beyond nursery rhymes, so when the tour was announced, life with a tweenager became an onslaught of love songs and break-up songs and beef songs. Anna started measuring life in Eras Tour tickets: new brakes on the car? That’s at least one ticket to New Orleans. Florida for spring break? That’s two tickets to Toronto, the gas to get there, and even a hotel room. I rolled my eyes at her calculations, but soon I was calculating for her, wondering if the weekend at the waterpark was really worth it. That’s how I finally returned to Paris. 

* * *

At the concert, I am surprised to find myself choking up. Here Swift is, emerging from a feather nest like a musical Venus while tens of thousands of people sing along. And here I am, wiping my eyes with the shoulder of my t-shirt before Anna can see me. Maybe I am choked up from the sea of voices hitting the notes of the first bridge, or maybe I am choked up as a mom whose own child is in ecstatic revelry next to me. But I am here, crying over a pop song, and all I can think is, I wonder if Taylor Swift’s parents are here?

Mama and Papa Swift are known for following their adult daughter on tour, dancing along and chatting with fans—no designer clothes, no surgically manufactured bodies, just two visibly middle-aged parents cheering on their kid from the sidelines. Especially when I look at Andrea, I see myself, chubby jowls and all.

It is no easy feat to give ourselves over to our children and their dreams. If I’m being honest, I’m not always sure that we should. But I am standing here next to my daughter, who is recording videos with other Swifties she has just met and is breathless when the Reputation era starts, and I’ve never seen her this happy or this alive, and it doesn’t matter to me now whether we ever found my apartment in the Bastille.

* * *

When I ran away to Paris in 1996, I was sure that being utterly alone was the answer to loneliness. I suppose this was why I ran to a place where I had only a child’s vocabulary and wild imagination to guide me. I arrived with two thousand dollars in my pocket, a one-night reservation at a Left Bank hotel, and a letter of permission from the French government to apply for work. I did not have a return ticket home.

That first night in Paris is still vivid: Jet lagged, I sat in my musty, over-priced hotel room and called every hostel in the city, trying to find a place to stay that I could afford and trying to muster enough French to accomplish this. When I finally found a bed, I took myself out to a touristy Latin Quarter restaurant to celebrate. Alone. 

The next day, I struggled to drag my suitcase to my new accommodations. Too much money for a taxi, too many stairs in the Métro, so I hobbled through narrow alleys instead. I arrived sweaty and overwhelmed. The lobby was filled with young people sharing beers, playing cards, chatting in French and English and German, looking more stylish than I knew was possible. My throat was too dry to even muster a greeting for the crowd that waved at me. I checked into my sixteen-person bunkroom, went to the shower, and cried.

It took about a month to find a roommate—Sylvie, a thirtysomething Frenchwoman who didn’t believe that I could really speak French and was perpetually astounded when I recounted phone messages from her friends—and a job—greeter and folder at the Jardin du Luxembourg Gap. In the interim, I made friends with Brits and Californians and Swedes; I found a favorite dance club; I fell in and out of love at least three different times; I memorized the web of the Métro; I became a regular at the Rodin Museum; and I calculated exactly how many midnight crèpes I could eat and still make rent. I found an old copy of The Fire Next Time at a bouquiniste, and while the sun still warmed the city in early October, I would read and underline yellowed pages from the banks of the Seine.

It was, briefly, my imagination come to life.

But also: I slept through my job interview at Shakespeare & Co. I bought bags of croissants and ate them in hiding, in my apartment bathroom, in a single sitting. I called my grandpa in a panic because I couldn’t remember how to make pancakes. I walked home alone from Sacré Coeur at 3am knowing full well I was gambling my life on a solo walk across a sleeping Paris. I made a weekly visit to the travel agent to see how much a return ticket was now. And I cried because I was alone, even in Paris.

* * *

I have promised Anna a trip to the Eiffel Tower. This is the Paris she has seen in movies, and she wants to take the elevator as high as it can go and get a selfie of the city behind her. I oblige, even though I’m still, all these years later, a bit disdainful of tourist Paris. I am at least relieved that she does not want to wear her new red beret on this excursion; she tried, but the unexpected May heat made the wool impractical.

While we wait in line for the elevator, I admit to her that I never visited the Eiffel Tower when I lived here. Seriously? she gawks. Seriously, I say; I didn’t want people to know I was an American, and I didn’t want people to think I was a tourist.

“But…you are American. And the Eiffel Tower is why people come to Paris.” She shakes her head at me, wiser than I ever was.

While we are atop the second balcony, a storm rolls in. We are unprepared. She laughs at all the hawkers down below, somehow magically equipped with umbrellas when it rains, water bottles when it’s hot, and Eiffel Tower replicas when you exit. Anna laughs. “They are like ninjas!” I laugh with her, even though at eighteen I was simultaneously terrified and aroused by these men who catcalled and begged me for marriage. All Anna sees, though, are umbrella ninjas offering her cover from the storm.

We had planned to have lunch at a cute neighborhood bistro, but with thunder booming around us, we do something I once thought unimaginably gauche: We go to the Eiffel Tower restaurant. Anna has her first mocktail, and she can’t believe that a croque monsieur is just the cousin of a grilled cheese, and she giggles at how fancy everyone is. We sit there for two or three hours, and we are still talking about that perfect afternoon all these months later.

* * *

When Anna was on the edge of adolescence, one of her best friends started pulling away. She was embarrassed of Anna: her quirkiness, her wild hair, her conversational interruptions about crochet projects. I began holding my breath whenever Emily came over, anticipating heartbreak.

That is, after all, how it went when I was her age. We were always breaking each other’s hearts. Like in eighth grade, when I was called to the principal’s office for what today we’d call bullying. My best friend since forever, Dana, was sitting on the other side of the office, eyes red and Kleenex in her lap. Basically my Anna’s age, Dana still played with Barbies and had no interest in boys or cheerleading or make-out parties. But I did. 

I don’t remember what I said about Dana, specifically, but whatever I’d done, it had made its way to the principal’s office, and now here I was, defensively arguing that we had simply grown apart.

The cruelty and the heartbreak were inevitable in my girlhood, but for Anna, they’re not. When Anna once recounted to me her best friend’s snubs, she laughed and said, “I mean, I love me. That’s all that matters!” She is, my daughter, absolutely, unapologetically, gleefully herself. (So much so that when I once tried to get her to brush her teeth and wear deodorant by telling her that her friends might stop hanging out with her if she smelled, she sternly explained to me, “Mama, if they are my real friends, it won’t matter what I smell like!” Great sense of self, kid, but also: Here’s a Secret.)

A small part of me sees myself in that confidence. I remember still when a Cool Kid once told me, “I just love that you are one hundred percent yourself.”  I think it was my lack of hairspray in 1989 suburbia that prompted the compliment, but I clung to it like that Cool Kid had seen into the core of my soul. But I also remember, how really not that long after, I was sitting on that Métro station wall, empty and pleading with Paris to fix my sadness.

* * *

We return to the Eras Tour for a second night. This time, it’s the Red Era that gets me: first, when Taylor hops down the stage as a carefree twenty-two-year-old, and then when she sings for ten minutes about a heartbreak that left her wishing for death. What I hear in her music is a dark thrum: about depression working the graveyard shift, about the clutches of melancholia, about how she, too, might dream of disappearing when life gets too much. Sure, she is the most powerful woman in music, and sure, she might wrap her pain in love stories, but it’s there. In interviews, she talks about her tendency to head to dark places, and her mom smiles softly next to her, chiming in that Taylor has always felt like an outsider. No one wanted to play with her when she was a little kid, she sings to us a few sets later, and even now, in this sparkling summer spectacle, she is begging the universe to send her someone who enjoys her company. Her oeuvre is anchored by a bassline of pain.

When Taylor moves into her meta-song about performing this tour with a broken heart, I think again about Andrea. What must it feel like to watch your child perform her wounds publicly while somehow, incongruously, singing and giggling and skipping toward fans? Does she feel guilty, Andrea? Does she wonder what she did wrong? Or is that just me?

* * *

I first saw a therapist halfway through college when my migraines raged and I was desperate for relief. The doctor sent me home with a bottle of muscle relaxers and an appointment at the mental health clinic. I went, reluctantly, and bristled when this stranger asked me about my family and my self-talk and suggested that my headaches—the constant pounding pull across my skull that made me vomit, cry, and sleep—could be fixed with therapy. I did not return to her office.

Years later, after I’d become a mother, I broke out in chronic hives. They lasted for over a year and made me wish that I could amputate the parts of me causing so much pain. I did not know how I could go on in agony like this. When every other treatment failed, my doctor gave me anti-depressants. Something about serotonin controlling our perception of itch. Within days, the hives were gone. And also, within days, I was playful again at bedtime. Within days, I wasn’t having my morning cry in the shower or doing mental gymnastics with my 401K to figure out if I could actually run away from my family forever. Within days of starting Zoloft, I felt like something essential had shifted inside of me. And that was the first time I thought: I have depression.

* * *

At the start of the Folklore era, Taylor tells the audience how she’s always written in a journal, every feeling she’s ever felt, whether for five seconds or five years, recorded in permanent ink. And how when she turns those feelings into this, this pulsing throng of devastation and joy danced for hours in the company of strangers, those feelings become something new. And we, this audience that has paid far more than we should just to sing along, we are an essential element of that alchemy.

I bought my first diary at an elementary school book fair—a hardcover book with a tiny locket that I long ago lost the key for. When Anna learned to write, I bought her the same journal, but sequined. Like me, she still has the diary, and like me, she long ago lost the key. Once, my mom found my journal—probably around the time I discovered Nirvana and teen spirit—and nervously asked me if what she read in it were true. I shrugged and said something about writing poetry that wasn’t meant for anyone to see. She never asked again, and I was more careful about locking myself away.

And now, Taylor Swift in her sequined boots and hot pants is singing things that maybe I wrote in journals, too. And my daughter is singing along. She is a marvel to me, this child, as I’m sure Taylor is to Andrea—and even I probably was to my own mother. But could I really sing along about her broken parts, just like everyone else? Or would I hold a piece of her close and silent in the hopes that, somehow, I was the answer?

* * *

For all the months I worked at the Jardin du Luxembourg Gap, folding sweaters at the entrance, I never said bonjour right. My boss, Amélie, would meet me at the start of every shift in greeting: Bonjour. I would greet her back, trying to copy her pronunciation. And I would fail. She would shake her head in frustration, “Non. Bonjour,” with a gesture of her hands as if to tell me I needed to tie that word up with some other sound, some lilting invisible syllable I could not replicate. I would try again. I would fail, again. And she would huff and repeat herself and eventually send me to guard the fitting rooms where I was less likely to embarrass her.

Bonjour. The first word I ever learned in French class. Apparently said wrong all these years. I could argue with the immigration agent in French; I could navigate flirtation in French; I could read Zola in French and dream in French and watch movies in French. But I couldn’t say the simplest of greetings: Bonjour.

I was not disappointed when the Gap did not invite me back after the holiday rush.

But I was left with nothing else. I couldn’t continue nannying for the fancy family whose children pelted steel toy trucks at my head. I couldn’t ask for a do-over at Shakespeare & Co. (“Sorry, I was depressed” seemed like a sure way to not get the job). So I went home. Out of work and out of money. And, if I’m honest, still lonely. Paris had not cured me. Paris had not somehow made me more happy or more alive. Even the Gauloises I tried over and over to take a liking to, they left my throat scratchy and my hands wreaking of stale tobacco. 

I left Paris twenty-eight years ago, and I have not been back since. Not until now, with my tween daughter, who insisted that I finally ascend the Eiffel Tower.

* * *

Anna is skipping along the cobblestones on the way to Shakespeare & Co. during our last day in Paris. She hopes we will find European editions of her favorite books. It is May, and the summer crowds are already here. She reaches out for my hand, staying connected through the throngs. As we wait to enter the bookstore, she is looking up: sixteenth century tilework, gargoyles, Hausmannian blocks. She tells me that Paris is beautiful. She says she wants another croissant. She says she can’t imagine living somewhere so incomprehensibly elegant. And then she says: “But I would never actually want to live here. It’s just … too much.” She tells me she wants to live in a small town eventually, one where she knows everyone and where there is room to stretch out and where she will always feel well tended. 

That is not what I ever wanted. Although, if I am honest, I don’t think I ever really knew what I wanted other than to not hurt. And now I am forty-six, and I am in Paris again, and I remember the beauty of this city, the months of flings and flea markets, hashish and Kir Royales, afternoons spent wandering Rodin’s gardens and reading Baldwin on the banks of the Seine. All of that is true. I remember this now, and think that maybe at last, like Paris, I am finally in season. 

But I am also standing here scratching one ankle with the other heel, reminding myself to breathe through the itch of the hives and worrying if they are returning for good or just this weekend, and my daughter is holding my hand and rattling off book titles, and I know that there is not actually anything magical about Paris. It is just another place where we can be, imperfectly, alive. Only now, together.