For as long as I can remember I have wanted to live in Paris. It seems so exotic to me, someone who has been on Staten Island for her whole entire life with the occasional trips to Disney World. I long for an apartment with a view of the Eiffel Tower, a symbol of my independence and freedom from my not so extraordinary life. I can smell the butter on the croissants and taste their flakiness as I imagine walking next to the Seine. In my head the city is less crowded then Manhattan and no one is pushing you out of their way in a rush to go someplace unimportant. I can be an anonymous person in a street café just reading until dusk without all of the honking taxis. This is the Paris of my imagination.
One of the first things most people get to know about me is this desire I have to be in Paris and away from New York. A lot of them think I am crazy considering that the French have a reputation for not being so fond of Americans and that New York is a wonderful place to live. I feel like Paris is the place that I belong, a place that is not quite so loud and obnoxious as New York, a place where I can be content in. It seems beautiful, with cobblestone streets and old world architecture combined with so much history that America doesn’t have. I know that we are a relatively young country with history of our own but France seems like a place where I can truly be myself.
In the last few months I have begun to realize that my yearning to live in Paris is just a means to escape any problems that occur in my life. It could have been any other city that I attached myself to, but Paris is a fashion capital of the world which is probably what made it the subject of my fixation. This realization really hit home once I found myself reading this passage from Sarah Vowell’s novel The Partly Cloudy Patriot; "An astrologer once told me, 'You suffer from what's called a geographic.' A geographic is when a person walks around thinking that where he lives will make his life better. The astrologer said, 'Let me tell you, life is about an emotional connection to people and things and it doesn't matter where you are on the globe.'" That paragraph really struck a chord with me. I realized that I kept thinking that I would be happier if I lived somewhere else and that what I really needed to do was change the things that were bothering me here where I actually live. I would most likely be the same in Paris as I am everywhere else.
My bedroom is a dedication to my dream. There are Moulin Rouge posters along with at least three sculptures of the Eiffel Tower and numerous other French artifacts cluttering up space that could be put to a better use. I am not going to take them down because I still dream of going to France and wondering if my instincts were right, but now when I look at all of the Parisian memorabilia they are more of a bittersweet reminder that nothing will change by relocation. I have to take charge and change things on my own before I can truly be happy anywhere.