Author’s note: I visited Edinburgh for the second time from May 1st to May 4th, 2025. Both times I was there, I couldn’t help but think of a previous relationship of mine back in Arizona and how, after it ended, she went to this sleepy uni town to study for a year. In this way, visiting Edinburgh for me is a bit like meeting the person who replaced you. You can’t help but compare yourself to them and see all the ways you fall short. I plan to return at least once more, but not to keep the comparisons going. I hope on that future trip I can use Edinburgh as a starting point before heading out to the Highlands or some such place where I can get a bit lost, discover something new, and not spend so much of my time looking back.
On arriving
From the top floor of an apartment building in the 10th arrondissement of Paris, a street away from Canal Saint Martin where often there’s music playing late into the night and if not that then always two parallel rows of people drinking wine and smoking cigarettes as the sky’s palette deepens into a dark blue with fading orange embellishes before dissolving into night, you start your journey.
Spiral down the steps and out the double doors onto Rue Bichat, where men in beanies and Carhartt jackets and women with fringe bangs and loose-hanging overalls sit and talk and smoke and sometimes work on their computers on the terraces of cafes. Head to République, where you take line 5 to Gare du Nord, where you then take the RER B to Charles de Gaulle. Get through security in a blink, always faster than you expect, so now you wait, sitting at one gate before moving to another, doing laps around the terminal. You end up at a gate heading to Israel. Could you have guessed as much if you had not seen the destination? The first Israelis you had met were in Belgrade, at the beginning of your travels, and you were struck by the stark differences between them and the jewish people you had met in America, namely Burt and Larry, two old jews from Brooklyn who taught you how to sell mattresses or the ones you saw on TV and in movies — the Woody Allen’s, the Jerry Seinfeld’s, the Larry David’s. The sort of men who have never thrown a punch. In Belgrade, the Israelis stood tall, fully erect, with broad, muscular chests and hard faces that never once cracked at your jokes, and you know that you’re funny, plenty of women have told you as much before turning down your advances. Finally, it’s boarding time. Queue up, move along at a snail’s pace. Priority boarding doesn’t make sense in Europe. Everyone is shoved into a long corridor anyway. Take your seat, take out your book, and then fall asleep before takeoff. In Edinburgh, shuffle awkwardly out of your seat and down the aisle. Everyone moves slowly and then quickly, just to get down the steps and funnel into a bus waiting on the tarmac. All priority and non-priority passengers again mixed, corralled into one classless stock. At the airport, there’s a queue for passport control. Then one more small queue for the double-decker airport shuttle. But wait, the bus stops themselves are a sort of queue: Maybury, Murrayfield, Wester Coates, Haymarket Station, and on and on. Get off at Princess Street. From there, you walk up the Mound. It’s nearly midnight now. In the dark you can see, half lit by street lights and passing cars, the National Gallery and The Royal Scottish Academy, dark academia-esque pillars that create deep shadows. Edinburgh Castle lurks in the distance like a cat on the other side of the room in the middle of the night, noticeable by how it creates a denser shade of black than the darkness that surrounds it. Take Market Street to Cockburn Street, and head up slightly until you come to the Edinburgh Backpackers Hostel. Check in with the barely-adult receptionist from some South American country, head up the stairs to your dorm and inside where most are already asleep you make that annoying noise of someone trying to be quiet, singular bursts of apologetic sound amidst an otherwise placid stillness, the unzip and rezip of your bag, the uncap and recap of your deodorant, the sound of your loose arm fishing for its corresponding jacket sleeve, your locker lock clanging against metal. Then back out the door, down the steps, out of the hostel, up the street to one of the few remaining open bars. Edinburgh is a beautiful, sleepy woman of a town. The type to never make it to the end of the movie, and who wouldn’t even bother the following morning to inquire about what had happened. You head down to the basement of The Jazz Bar. Order a blackberry gin and tonic. Small talk with the bartender. Truth be told, you also small-talked with the bouncer, the hostel employee, and the bus driver. You wanted to small talk with passport control, but it was all done by machines. You don’t know it yet, but over the course of this long weekend, you’ll small talk with multiple baristas, tour guides, strangers on a train (failed attempt), and several others. You’re like a toddler who just got a command of language and now won’t shut the fuck up. You can’t help it. Your home is a lovely one, but no one place can give you everything, and Paris is lacking in the art of small talk. It’s meaningless to the Parisians, as if all conversations have to be big to warrant the effort, as if life isn’t held together by little moments, as if we all don’t need a reminder every now and then to notice the weather, to have small words knock us out of our self-absorbed reveries.
Take a seat at a table made for two. Relax now. You don’t necessarily know what you’re doing in Edinburgh — the germs of the trip started months ago when you wanted to head to Glasgow for a concert, then they modified and grew into a reunion trip in Edinburgh to see Clodagh and Alan again but that fell apart when Alan couldn’t make it. Now you’ll see Clo for a bit and do God knows what. Figuring out the God knows what doesn’t matter that much anymore. You have a place to sleep, a place to sit, and you’re drinking a blackberry gin and tonic and listening to jazz, and it’s not even half bad. There are uni students all around you— you can tell by their baggy clothes, their soft, chubby skin, their white socks puffing up over their black loafers. Some of them are dancing, but not to the music. Or rather, they’d be doing the same moves whether the band was playing funk, rock, rap, or if there were no music at all. You’d be doing the same thing, too, wouldn’t you, if you were not in Edinburgh but in Seoul or Paris or Krakow. The same movements and patterns of life, just with a different backdrop. The muscles soften, the back loosens. You’ve arrived.
On Clodagh and The Penny Black
Clodagh
I don’t know if I’ve ever told you about Clo, but you’ve seen her for sure on my Instagram stories.
She and I had met years ago in Sofia. I was walking towards a trash can in Crystal Garden to throw away the wrapper from a sandwich I had bought from a food truck near the National Theatre, and she was walking towards me, out of Bar Bar, asking if I knew where The New Sofia Pub Crawl meets. It was her first solo trip. I recall her as mostly tense, eyes alert, the kind of person who checks for exits at every new venue or gets to the airport with always two hours to spare. Imagine her luck in meeting me at that very moment. Not only did I know where the pub crawl meets but I could have given her the entire tour myself, including the little bits of history you learn throughout, starting with the Stefan Stambolov statue, where the pub crawl hosts take your money in exchange for yellow wrist bands, and why poor Stefan has a gash across his face. But of course, you know all about the pub crawl and how often I attended and the friends I had made there. So Clo is one of the Sofia friend group, along with Alan. We had all met together that night. I can’t remember how we got along or why we did, but we did, and we met for drinks and lunch after that night out and had a proper reunion in Edinburgh two or so years ago. My life, in case you’ve forgotten, is long stretches of isolation and writing broken up by occasional, though increasingly rare, reunions in different countries.
Clo’s at least a head taller than me. This sometimes makes taking photos of her difficult. In the Glasgow Botanic Gardens, I try to take photos of her looking into a koi pond. I stand on a ledge on my tip toes and stretch my hand high up above us both, and the shot still didn’t come out right.
We spent Friday together. I met her at her apartment, which, even though she shares it with two other flatmates, still affords her 10x the space I have in my small Parisian studio.
She wore biker shorts, Doc Martens, a periwinkle t-shirt, and a thick, fluffy flannel jacket made of the kind of material that itches. She looked like a child who had snuck into her mother’s closet and chose each item of clothing based on some internal criteria, immune to the scrutiny of others. If she were an animal, she’d be an owl. Have you ever seen an owl walk? Long, skinny legs under a thick body. That was her in that jacket. Plus, she has a bird-like face that will inevitably droop outward and then downward as she ages (like wax from a burning candle answering to a soft wind). She’s quiet like an owl, too. Very still. Sometimes you wonder if she’s sleeping, but then she gives you a look, a real controlled spin of the head, and locks in.
That day was the longest we had spent together — usually, we’re accompanied by Alan, who can take a lot of the pressure off of a person. He’s the type to sing to fill the silence, while Clo and I opt to sit in it. We talked of several things, which I won’t repeat here, not because they’re scandalous (as they’re not), but because you already know most of it; the Riga story, the bus in Amsterdam, plans I once had for a life in New Zealand, our soft plans for the future (she has a great agenda for Europe, maybe Italy, and a life centered around art), whether or not we want someone to come along and disrupt those plans, etc.
The day started at her apartment, then we got a coffee (she ordered an iced hot chocolate, simply making things up to fit her fancy), then we went to a horrible little modern art museum in Glasgow (even with free entrance it wasn’t worth it), then the botanic gardens which were the highlight of the trip. It was a bit of Arizona in the middle of Glasgow, with succulents, cacti, and other plants that reminded me of the dry, dead desert of my youth. I saw two dogs that reminded me of Ashton. We always lock eyes, these Ashton-looking dogs and I. Recently, I had a dream that I learned he had died of cancer, but he was loved until the very end. Then I spotted a Dalmatian, which I think is the best type of dog to have in Paris, as those who belong in Paris don’t belong anywhere else, we’re covered in spots, if you will. I don’t think I’ll ever have a dog again —they’re just ticking time bombs of grief — but if I did, I think it’d be a Dalmatian or a spaniel if I lived in the country.
Between the two of us, we had four cameras (six if you count phones). We walked around like members of National Geographic, documenting the Glaswegians, the best of the bad art on the museum walls, and every single unique and beautiful plant we stumbled upon in the gardens. I have a photo of one named Begonia Cowardly Lion. We switched between different cameras for different shots, taking fast photos with our phones when the light was too low for film.
I snapped several photos of her on our outing that turned out quite nicely, including one of her right thigh, which contains a freshly inked tattoo of a crow, still looking quite wet in certain light. Look closely, and in the crow’s feathers, you can see Clo’s leg hairs growing in, giving the bird texture.
The Penny Black
That night, after we returned to Edinburgh, I met most, if not all, of her friends at a birthday party at The Penny Black. It was as if I had walked into a Sally Rooney novel. Like Clo, nearly everyone was from Ireland, though never two people from the same town, and no one was from Dublin, where I’m heading next if you want to join.
The men had haircuts that were three weeks away from growing into a mullet, broad chests, baggy shirts, thick calves hidden by dad jeans, and the face of someone who can take a punch and keep on swinging. The women had toothpick arms and legs and dressed like Herr Cole, my high school German teacher, who, before taking our class on a two-week trip through Germany, bought all of his clothes from second-hand stores (“sometimes you can get a shirt for as cheap as a quarter”) and believed the best way to match was never match at all. Clo seemed different here. She was a little lighter, a little more relaxed than how I had seen her before. She could have stretched out her legs and taken a short nap in the middle of all the chaos and drinking.
I was a talkative motherfucker that night, truth be told. Even by David standards. I had just finished a long stretch of talking to no one in Rouen, and all the energy I had stored was coming out in troves. It’s a rare gift to out-yap the Irish, but there was no stopping me. I existed outside myself, watching as I moved through the night, talking to anyone and everyone, whether they wanted it or not. In my younger years, I’d have felt some post-yap shame, would have thought of all the things I said poorly, would have stressed over how I presented myself. Lately, however, I’ve been less attached to my words, whether they are her expressed verbally or written down. Once it’s out in the world, it no longer belongs to me, is no longer attached to me, and I’m convinced — though I don’t yet fully know the implications of this conviction — that if someone wants to understand me then the last thing they should pay attention to are my words.
The Penny Black closed at 1 am (horrible). The Rooney Gang were ready to go home anyway. I wanted to keep going, of course. I felt as if the night had just started, but they were a sleepy bunch. They had warm milk and lemon waiting for them, cozy bedroom slippers, a late-night doom scroll through Instagram, reels of funny cats to be shared.
I took Waverly Bridge up into Cockburn Street, with the aim to head towards a few bars and find a group I could integrate myself with, but then I saw a drunk lad drop all of his chips on the street. He wobbled a bit and then bent down. Hunched over, he ate the chips off the ground, one by one. I took this as a sign to head back to my hostel, and thank God I did, for I was more far gone than I realized. I woke up several hours later, fully dressed, AirPods still in my ears. I had been playing As It Was by Harry Styles on repeat, as one does.
On rediscovering Edinburgh
Edinburgh is a small town, at least the Edinburgh one sees as a tourist. Even after this trip, I still feel as if I hadn’t seen it, not really. Or, if I did in fact see what it has to offer, then it has very little to offer, to be quite honest. She’s a small, sleepy town — somehow both late to rise and early to bed. I feel like if one stays here long enough, one will start saying absurd things like “it’s really coming down” when looking out the window at the rain or other such nonsense with a straight face.
As far as I can tell, there are two main streets: Princess Street and High Street, which is part of the Royal Mile, where everyone (myself included) spends a lot of time taking photos. If one were being discourteous, one could say walking down these two streets is like walking down an extended gift shop at the end of a museum or a post security terminal in a large airport: a long crowded corridor with tourist shops on both sides of you (Tartan! Tweed! Cashmere! Kilts!) and handwritten signs outside of overpriced restaurants promising a real Scottish breakfast. But that doesn’t paint the whole picture.
On my first day of this trip, before meeting Clo, I walked to Edinburgh University and then to the Meadows and then made my way back to Old Town, which I guess is where I stayed most of the weekend. There’s far more names for neighborhoods in Edinburgh than necessary and it all seems significant to the locals but nearly damn invisible to an outsider. When I met Clo to see her apartment, she told me that she hasn’t been to Old Town in ages, as if it were across a river and through the woods and not, as far as I can gather, a 5-minute walk away.
I wanted to — but did not — take a bus to the Pentlands. I wanted to — but did not — go towards the North Sea. In coastal cities I often find myself walking towards the water, even if the view isn’t particularly spectacular, the way the rocky coast of Le Corsic is spectacular, the way Etretat is of course spectacular, the way the black beaches of Vic were of course spectacular, no even if the coast is the maritime equivalent of a bus stop, I still feel its magnetic pull. I think we all do. Families from Arizona will drive six hours to California to see the ocean. We’ll say the trip is also about Disneyland or Six Flags, but we’ll spend most of the time on the beach looking at the Pacific. It’s those memories that alter. For me, getting in the water is secondary. It’s enough to know something significant is nearby, within reach.
I’m trying to remember my first time in Edinburgh — you and I were not talking then — when I had the reunion with both Alan and Clo. To be honest, I was quite drunk most of that trip, either drunk or hungover and biding time until a drink would be acceptable (Alan and I concluded a cider at 10 am is reasonable on such special occasions).
Alan had dragged me on a free walking tour where I learned about a dog who either died or never died or died and then came back for his owner or died with his owner and there’s a statue for him where his nose is rubbed down like the breasts of Dalida in Montmartre or the groin of Victor Noir in Père-Lachaise. One tour guide said Edinburgh inspired Rowling to make Harry Potter, and another one said it didn’t, and that’s just the tourist industry making a buck. I remember tourists walking around with wands and the sweet little American—rich valley girl type, every sentence ending with a question mark, paying for drinks with her daddy’s Chase Sapphire Card, her name embossed under his, telling me that she can easily see how these streets inspired Hogwarts.
I remember sharing a short poem, short enough anyone can remember it, with a few strangers. It was Raymond Carver’s Late Fragment:
And did you get what
you wanted from this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
beloved on the earth.
Do you see, I asked them, how much nuance Carver gets across with just those two words, “even so”?
But I can’t remember if I saw the sun at all on that first trip. I can’t remember what I ate or how I slept or what I did first thing in the morning when I woke up. I don’t remember who I met in the hostel — that time I stayed in one of those pod hostels, like an astronaut floating in space, or maybe more like dog crates stacked in a kennel. I recall the insides of bars, cocktail lounges, there was a bar with a Frankenstein show (I have no idea why), a strange little underground venue with a single pool table where Clo was having a night. I remember her face, at first a little nervous, taken aback by her own skill, slowly breaking into a small, confident smile as she realized that yes, she was going to win yet another game. I remember a young, meek, nervous American from Boston who wore a baseball cap. Once I saw him take it off, and he had beautiful, thick, shiny hair under that worn-down Red Sox cap. I said to him, my brother in Christ, what are you doing, what are you doing, where do you think you are.
On hostels
I rented a bed in an eight-person mixed dorm at Edinburgh Backpackers Hostel on Cockburn Street, just up where the street starts to curve into the Royal Mile. (Cockburn is another famous street of Edinburgh, but it serves to connect really Princess Street with High Street, and its fame comes from the way the street curves and how the buildings look like they are folding into each other. I was assigned the bottom bunk, which meant I didn’t have to climb up to bed at night but also meant I couldn’t sit upright in bed. The beds were put in at an angle, two on each side of the room, forming a bit of a diamond shape, to fit them into such a small space.
A pungent and thick smell, the smell of wet socks dried on foot during a long hike, occupied the room. I could not tell if it was coming from one person or if the scent was the collective smell of the eight of us. On the second day, I couldn’t bear it anymore and went to open the window, only to find that the window had been open the entire time. This was as fresh as it was going to get.
My first night at the hostel, after getting home from the Jazz Bar, I fell asleep with no one in the bunk directly to my right, but in the morning I woke up to see, not four feet in front of me, a shirt-less, scrawny pale traveler, his clavicles protruding like God had equipped him with skin that was a size too small for his skeleton, a face mask on his eyes, and a set of free ear plugs (taken from the jar at reception) stuffed in his ears. A real pro.
On my last day at the hostel, I lingered in the common room after checkout, as I had a full day to kill before my flight back to Paris. As I sat there, writing some rougher version of these very words, a small group of friends came in, wearing pyjama bottoms, thick sweaters, backless slippers, and carrying between them a half-eaten loaf of bread and a plastic container of something that looked like a mix between hummus and spinach artichoke dip. It startles me how comfortable other travellers are in common rooms such as this. How little anyone else seems to care about the sound of their voice and how it carries. The small group of three sat together and spoke loudly. They spread their spread across slices of bread and munched loudly. They laughed loudly. I felt like an intruder. Misery loves company, and happiness sneers at it.
I know you’ve never stayed in a hostel, so I’m doing my best to set the picture. Some of them are quite different from one another, like the dorms I stayed in Vic when I visited Iceland the year before.
But for Edinburgh, I’ll leave you with this image:
On the third floor communal men’s shower and toilets, a tall, lanky, bald man in his mid-thirties is peeing into a urinal. He’s wearing only a pair of boxers, no shirt, pants, socks, or shoes. He’s stretched himself so he can lean over the urinal instead of standing right next to it. Directly beneath the urinal here are puddles of urine and god knows what else that he’s trying to avoid.
On walking through Edinburgh, or nostalgia for an un-lived past, or the gap between the person you are and the person you’ll one day be
I’ve told you all about my relationship with Riley and how it ended and the impact it had on my life, how you can draw a line, albeit a squiggly one with a few curves that loop back on themselves, from that break-up to me 4 years later leaving the US. I won’t repeat myself, or I’ll try not to. But what I haven’t shared is that a year or so after she ended things, she enrolled in a master’s program at the University of Edinburgh. This would have been around 2019 or so in the autumn, back when I was still Arizona David, with my dog, my two bedroom apartment, my job at the mattress company, with a belly that spilled over the waistband, with a closet full of things I never used, with weekly sessions with a holistic therapist and an EMDR specialist.
On my first day in Edinburgh, I walked to the campus under auspiciously clear and beautiful weather that would accompany me the entire weekend (rain would begin to fall, just slightly, as I boarded the airport shuttle for my return flight home Sunday evening). I have no idea how her degree went or how her time in Edinburgh was — we haven’t talked since the break up and won’t ever again — but it’s easy to see that she would have belonged perfectly in this world. I can see her here. Her gummy smile and soft eyes. Her habit of picking at the skin around her fingernails. I can hear her laugh, the kind of laugh that often turns into a snort. I can see her amused face as she watches the world unfold. She liked to observe people, to make predictions on what would happen, to sit back and see if she was right or not.
There was a time when hundreds (thousands?) of the photos on my phone were of her and our shared memories. Most of the photos have been deleted, though luckily some remain, like the one of her sitting on a stool in the Barnes and Noble backroom, doing her homework, solving differential equations for a chemical reactor design problem. She’s wearing a loose blue and green flannel, light blue jeans, her usual worn-in sneakers where her left pinky toe is about to break out. Her face isn’t in the photo, just the back of her head with her long blonde hair, but you can tell she’s smiling from the attention. Or another, one of my favorites, of her in a summer dress, her bare feet up on the dashboard of my dad’s 4Runner, which back then I drove, before I let it overheat beyond repair one summer, light grey smoke billowing from the engine as I sped down the freeway. In the photo, she looks straight at me. Her face is flat, but intentionally so. She knows how to make a moment land, knows how to make a photo, to capture a vibe, and this one is akin to the kind of photo that would grace the cover of a folk band album — a duo traveling across the country, their relationship mercurial and undefined but revived with every performance they put on.
Edinburgh is small enough to know that the bars, cafes, and restaurants I frequented are ones she likely did as well. As I stumbled drunk home down South Bridge, she likely did as well. As I sat on a park bench in the Meadows, reading, she likely did as well. Maybe the same jazz band that welcomed me on my first night back also played for her, if they have been around long enough. I didn’t have to seek out the associations. They were waiting for me on every street corner.
A good breakup can teach you things — more fundamentally than any other experience, save for of course death, the final exit that all breakups and separations are preparing us for — and this one had taught me that when thinking of the love in you life, think of whether it’s useful in helping you become the person you want to be. Often, we treat love as palliative. We encourage the idea that one should be loved for who they are, but look at who you are and think if that’s really what you want. Anyone who loves me now as I am is not someone whose opinion I can trust. Their love would be stifling and limiting. It’s like when friends tell me a short story I finished is good when I can see all ways its shit. Whose opinion can you trust as you try to change and improve and grow? I can trust only those — the Riley’s of the world — who had the most unfortunate and difficult role: they had to first see something in me, truly and genuinely, worth admiring, something that attracted them to me and then they had to see past that into the gaps that existed between the person I wanted to be and the person I was. For now, anyone who would opt to stay, after seeing deeply into me, has clearly not looked deep enough, or they see in me comfort for the life they’re happy leading, comfort I do not wish to provide, not for very long, at least. Maybe this is why my relationships now have built-in expiration dates, like two travellers sharing a flight or a train ride; any long-term potential handicapped by the fact that we’re only temporarily heading in the same direction.
After walking through the university, I had a flat white and a piece of carrot cake at Kilimanjaro Coffee. A real university cafe where students sat across from each other discussing politics and philosophy and complaining about the unclear directions from their professors. From there, I walked all the way over to Topping & Company, a bookstore Clo recommended near Calton Hill. It was a good recommendation. It’s a lovely two-story bookstore where you can get lost in the rooms. Where you can easily sit and read and be undisturbed. I used to have boxes of books back home, easily close to a thousand. I sold nearly all of them, as part of my plan to get rid of everything I owned and restart. Now, as I’m more permanently situated in Paris, I’ve begun the slow process of buying books again. Though I’m trying to buy only a few, read them, and then buy a few more. I intend to build this new life brick by brick.
At Topping, I buy four thin novels and story collections. They are white paperbacks, part of a Penguin series. They fit perfectly in the back pocket, ideal for reading on the metro: The Stalls of Barchester Cathedral by M.R. James, A Short Guide to Towns Without a Past by Albert Camus, Paris France by Gertrude Stein, and Revenge by Vladimir Nabokov
Riley and I had met in a bookstore and first bonded over our love of reading. She’d recommend a book, and we’d read it together. Then I’d recommend the next, and we’d read it together. I was more timid back then when it came to asking someone out, and I recommended a book that I knew was being made into a movie, as that was a way to easily ask her out on a date. After we finished the book, we could see the movie, I said.
For one of our Christmases together, I asked her to buy me books. As you know, this is a real mean thing to do to such a sweet lady. I’m as snobby as it gets when it comes to books. I pick up books and drop them if a sentence rubs me the wrong way. I have annotations in copies of classics where I think the writer could have improved their writing. Truth be told, I don’t really like even talking about books with other people; it only sets me off. It’s such a personal thing, reading and writing, and a significant blow in life when I meet someone with just the most godawful taste in literature.
But Riley was up to the challenge. She got me several books, all but one I had never even heard of, and all of them keepers. I didn’t sell those ones when I got rid of my books. Instead, I kept them in the one storage box I have allotted myself. It’s a black box, about 45 liters worth of storage, in the back of my dad’s closet, nestled under boxes of ammo. In the box, there are the practical things: my birth certificate, tax records, diplomas, etc. Then there are things like Riley’s books, polaroids, birthday cards, a map of Dublin fom my second trip out of the US back when I was just 18, a gold chain I used to wear when I was just a kid, an old wooden crankbait with rusted fishing hooks that my dad bought me, and other miscellaneous items that I could not bring myself to toss.
On returning to Paris
I returned to Paris late Sunday night. Another series of queues to arrive at one’s final destination, this time not a jazz bar in Edinburgh but a small studio with a mezzanine.
In writing this note to you I’ve realized that I’ve returned to Paris more than I’ve returned to any other city, even my hometown. From Strasbourg, back to Paris. From Nantes, back to Paris. I’ve returned to Paris from Reykjavik, from Cologne, from Florence where I saw Devin get married, from Riga where I got entangled in a few marriages myself, from Porto where I met Sasha again and unfortunately drank too much to appreciate the company, from Amsterdam, from Rouen where I spent 3 months in a digital nomadic sort of hermeticism, my only forms of communication were memes sent to friends and once a month check ins at work, and now back to Paris from Edinburgh.
From La Villete I take the 7 to Gare de l’Est. On the metro, a homeless man gets on. I’m too tired to engage. I keep my head down. I can see that his ankles are bloodied. There’s enough dirt on him that one could scrape it off his body like an archaeologist picking at bones. He picks up a receipt that someone else had dropped. He goes up to each of us and says something in French. Désolé, I say. Sometimes I say désolé, sometimes I say c’est bien. Sometimes I speak English, though if you speak English they pester a little longer. If you really want them to leave you alone, speak some Bulgarian. Sometimes I give them money, sometimes it’s a little (a few coins), sometimes it’s a lot. When it’s a little, they say thank you graciously. But when it’s a lot, they take it quickly and hide it, in case you made a mistake and will ask for it back.
When I was a kid, I remember being in the car as my mom was driving. We passed a homeless man on the corner of a four-way stop with a sign asking for money. My mom turned the car around and drove up to the guy, rolling down her window to say she didn’t have any money to give, but if he was hungry she’d buy him lunch. I think he thought — as I did — that we’d get him food and bring it to him. But instead, she parked the car, and the three of us walked together into a Taco Bell. The man sat across from us and as he ate his burritos and tacos. His face, as dirty as the ankles of the man on line 7, softened. It wasn’t happiness or relief but something heavier. He said what she did was a very kind thing, a very kind thing. I can see his soft face, pained as he unwrapped his third burrito (he had got quite a few, at my mom’s urging). Chances are that nothing much changed in that man’s life. The life you live doesn’t prepare you for any other. It’s a moment that stuck with me, even so.