How to Move to Paris

(Also, get that passport renewed)

Hello I just want to say thank you so much for subscribing to my essay series while I figure out Substack. Every time I see that someone has subscribed, I send that person as much positive energy as possible, if you are into vibes there could not be a more copacetic situation. Below is Parts I + II (Part I previously published in the Welcome Email, but a bunch of people said they missed it).

I thought I would just share something I read and loved so much before the essay begins, and it is this, a passage from Sheila Heti’s Pure Colour that has been haunting me since I read it: “People once valued the sky, but only because they had nothing better — because they didn’t have websites. It was hard to tell which was right: either the sky was more valuable than a website, or a website was more valuable than the sky. If she gathered together the amount of time she spent looking at websites, and the amount of time she spent looking at the sky, then her life was clearly answering which was the more valuable, for her.”

Moving on:

How to Move to Paris

1. Sleep in. In twelve years someone will explain that to sleep in is to faire une grasse matinée, to have a fat morning — though this expression, a favorite of French language books, is less and less popular than the hipper, more courant traîner au lit (“it means you are staying in bed, not sleeping but just being too lazy to get up,” according to your future favorite website, wordreference.com). 

That knowledge, though, is still a good portion of life away, and so you are just sleeping in, American-style, on a mattress on the floor of the closet in the Brooklyn apartment you share with Cedric and Sam, your two best friends from college, staring up at a perfectly blue September sky. 

“D, get up,” Cedric says, banging on your door, which you ignore, thinking of all the times you have banged on his door, when he was too busy playing Madden to answer your question about your haircut, or your joint Amazing Race application video, or if he would pay for cake mix if you baked a cake. 

In a half-hour, wondering what the day might bring, you will get up and find Cedric and not Sam but Matty, your other best friend from college, staring out Cedric’s bedroom window. While yours looks east, across Seventh Avenue, toward an oversubscribed brunch restaurant and Prospect Park, his looks west, to downtown Manhattan. 

A man you have never seen before, identified as Donald Rumsfeld, is speaking on Cedric’s television, but neither Cedric nor Matty are paying attention to it, they are just staring at the mountain of black smoke where the Twin Towers used to be. 

“What in the world,” you say. 

Matty has come to your apartment because his television service had gone out sometime between the first and second plane. The Time Warner customer service representative had given him the blow-by-blow — first plane, second plane, first tower, second tower, Pennsylvania, D.C., God knew what was next — over nearly 90 minutes as they troubleshot his cable connection, and once he realized they would not be able to fix it over the phone, he came here. In a few days, you will realize that of the four of you, Matty is the only one who knows someone who died: Bobby McIlvane, a friend of his from a publishing internship. You had met him once at a party, and liked him. He had looked a tremendous amount like your high school boyfriend. 

“Did you call your parents?” Cedric says. 

You call your parents, at their office in western New Jersey, close enough to the Delaware River that when it floods, your grimacing father will drive out to his facility, to ensure that the water hasn’t encroached upon his astronomically expensive pharmaceutical packaging machines. 

“Daddy came in from the car and was white as a ghost,” your mother says.

This is especially notable because your father is not exactly white, nor not exactly not; the celebrity he most resembles is James Earl Jones, though Jones’ eyes are blue and your father’s are not brown but black. Your grandfather abandoned what might have been his family, and so your father is 50 percent Dutch and 50 percent mystery. (You are a quarter mystery.)

Your mother passes the phone to your father: “Don’t go anywhere,” he says. “Don’t do anything stupid.” 

“I’m with Cedric and Matty,” you say, knowing he will be pleased to hear this. 

He passes the phone back to your mother, by which point you are crying. 

“Stop crying,” your mother says. 

You spend the rest of the day, the week, the month, the year, with Cedric and Matty and Sam, going to vigils and parties and bars, and it seems to you that something has shifted: that there is no before and no after — which suggests a single, changed thing — but that one story has concluded and another story has begun, like train tracks that cut off suddenly and then pick up thirty feet to the left. 

The four of you are at the tail end of your generation, or the very beginning of the next, in-betweeners, and most of your older, might-have-been cohorts have married, had kids, established themselves, while the four of you were just beginning. In a way, you are the lucky ones, you think, because it is not too late to be open to this alchemy, this unmooring, this certainty that everything is uncertain, that there are no guarantees you won’t go to work one morning and die because of someone else’s agenda. There are many people, with many agendas — political, cultural, sexual, racial, environmental, financial — who wouldn’t mind at all if you died, if it meant that they will get what they want. 

Part 2. 

Four years later, you are at your boyfriend’s house in North London. It is three days after the Fourth of July, when you found a £50 note on the floor of the Tesco at High Barnet, a gift it is clear was delivered by God himself to a patriotic American.