When we arrive at the Airbnb on Rue des Rosiers, we’re a half-bottle of wine deep, drunk from paper cups in the back carriage of a train from Bordeaux that smelled of reheated spaghetti Bolognaise. Our luggage looks tired, and we are wet from April rain. Tomorrow, we will be homeward bound. Twenty-four hours in Paris is enough, right? We don’t stay long enough to drip onto the aged hardwood and instead, stumble out into the afternoon cobblestones, the air scented with falafel and peony-wrung perfume. Here, people don’t stare at us like they did in the countryside; in fact, they barely see us at all, and it’s thrilling, that city feeling of indifference.
Anonymous, we find a bistro with vaulted ceilings that remind us, oddly, of our grandmother’s wood-beamed house. We peel dry chicken from its bones, the strings sticking between the gaps in our teeth. At least the wine is wet, the air is wet—otherwise, we’d shrivel and choke and so, to stay alive, we swallow hard and quick. Our plane leaves in ten hours.
We end up at the Lizard Lounge with its home-brewed beer and loud rock music and ash pink lighting and people who buy us lemon shots in glass mugs. It’s interplanetary, this enclave of worn wood and 2000s basement disco and cigarette smoke stashed between splintered lines of cherrywood surfaces where no one asks us where we’re from. We leave the ash to settle into the creases of our jeans, a memento that we can wrest into an urn when we go back, because we can’t stay long; we have no time for dancing but we do have time for to drink beer from the northern coast in a caricatured American diner and in that midnight hour as we watch the arms click around a neon clock that says ‘it’s five o’clock somewhere’ in garish font, we think about how far from home we are.
How we could simply never go home, and that, some people who are just like us but not like us at all, never did.
