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Bonjour, Paris!

I’m doing everything I can to be with you. I’m doing everything I can to be with you without losing myself. In fact, I’m doing everything I can to be with myself, which I found in you, through you. You of all people know how important myself – I meant this journey – is!

Strange dreams, twisted plots, and unusual plans I’ve been actively going through with main-character energy, and in the process, I’ve been drinking all sorts of different coffees from different households and cafes like someone who’s too flexible to know what they want. But I know what I want, and I know the type of coffee I’m getting isn’t usually the most important thing in each occasion. It’s the connection with the people, the place, the moments that I want, and thus the connection with myself. So, thank you for the strong double espressos as well as excessively elongated coffees I ended up very happily drinking – you know who you are! As I know who I am.

I’m writing this in the same room as the first time I wrote to you for Imagined Paris about a decade ago. My teenage daughter is having a heavy cold, and lying awake happily next to me. This room now belongs to her, and she had asked me recently to change it to look as much as it did when I occupied it (more heavily leading up to the divorce), after previously going through a couple of different changes in wall colours and furniture over the years. This room doesn’t belong to me anymore, and I am a happy visitor, to this room and to those years.

My heart feels heavy sometimes, these days, only because the thought of freedom has been seemingly fast approaching yet is still not there. Freedom from things and places that do not align with the life I wish to create. The only way I know to lighten my heart these days is to let go of my attachment to the outcome of the work I’ve been doing and ask myself: ‘what’s the worst that could happen?’ and I’ll come up with the worst that could happen and accept it. That, and the mere existence of my son, my daughter and, as a bonus, my elongated and excessively supportive boyfriend – and any god knows they don’t merely exist!

I would say to everyone that I could see that life already; I have walked it in the streets of Paris where my heart feels so light, so open and so touched for seemingly no obvious reasons – and you’ve seen what I’m capable of with a heavy heart! I’m doing everything I can to be with that light, open, and touched heart, Paris, at all times.

where it all began, le 28 septembre 2025

je t’embrasse!

d.o.