I am not the first writer to love you, and I know that I will not be the last.
I know you like quiet girls know paperback books. I know you the way young lovers know each other, meeting by chance on the street fifteen years later. You are a dream in and of yourself, you are artwork I can touch, you are intrinsically warm even when winter dusts itself over the Eiffel Tower.
Something about you speaks to the creative types, an energy that can only be felt, not described; it's a humming that echoes somewhere in the back of my head, a calling, a whisper. You tell me that your streets are hallowed, blessed with the stumbling footsteps of writers who came before me, and I feel their inheritance best when I walk with you late at night. You shimmer for me, from the strobe-light heartbeat of the Eiffel Tower to the gentle glimmering of the Seine, throwing gold and silver into the dark water. They call you the city of lights because there is not a word for what you really are, nothing strong enough in English, in French, in any language I have studied: it is more than light. It is effervescence, but weightier, so much and all at once.
You close shop windows and restaurant doors on Sunday, fold into yourself. You offer waitresses and shopkeepers a gentle reprieve, and you offer me voyeuristic evenings walking down Boulevard Periere, families gathered around dinner tables, laughter floating over the rues and quais until they mix into a bright and incomparable symphony. You are known for your writers, your artists, but there is music here as well.
Your artists are among the luckiest in the world. They are famous for garrets in attics of Montmartre apartments, tucked into corners where they cover their hands in yellow paint in hopes of creating beauty like you have gifted them. You ushered in the birth of impressionism, you created art from your very breath.
You encourage eager footsteps. You are a city best loved through walking, finding small joys behind boulangeries, small libraries tucked inside green doors and under wrought-iron balconies. Grand churches sprout from your chest, echoing in their emptiness, Notre Dame watching like an older sister. You promise beauty on every turn, and never fail to deliver. Walking ten miles with you feels like gliding.
But you are a writer's city, deep down, famous for gin-fueled 1920s writers whose eyes glazed over during the mornings and hands shook while they wrote books I will never be able to forget. You brought Voltaire and Victor Hugo. You throw your arms wide open for poets and observers, you kiss us on both cheeks and tell us that we are welcome here, welcome to live and write and become something better than who we were, arriving by shaky airplane in Charles DeGaulle airport or trembling from steamboats.
The Seine runs through you like a vital artery, and I feel closest to you here. You are oldest, here. You have seen blood and pain, love and bliss. You have held Romans and Parisians. You have seen blitzkreigs and military hospitals. You have seen revolution after revolution. You have scars, and you wear them without apology. You are not afraid. I am not afraid, when I am with you.
Perhaps most impactfully, I love you because loving you is temporary. Loving you has an expiration date from its beginning, an inevitability when an unstoppable force meets an immovable object. I am temporary, but you will continue. You will be a great love for me, but I may be easily forgotten by you. Other writers will come to take my place. They will lean their elbows over your bridges, look out into the golden city of lights and breathe you in. They will walk through the Louvre gardens past dark, an intoxicating sense of danger meeting an insatiable urge to know you better. They will think themselves princesses walking through the Jardin du Luxembourg. We will come and go.
But you?
You will stay, perseverant, scarred, relentless. You will be an unstoppable force. The Metro will rock underneath you, a rattling heartbeat. Old statues will oxidize. The Eiffel Tower will poke holes in the sky. And you will carry on.
