one night in paris

Thoughts from 12 hours in Paris aged 30. Pictures from 4 months in Paris aged 19.

It’s been a while since I’d been on the Paris metro, and certainly this stretch of line northwards to Porte de Clignancourt. When I lived in the city, over a decade ago now, I used to play in an orchestra at the end of line 4. The walk with my violin through the patchily street-lit neighbourhood felt risky, and I often broke into a jog before hitting the glow of the metro station.

Paris has changed a lot in the last decade, and this neighbourhood is now full of trendy bars and small plates restaurants and the buzz of Friday night, and dragging my suitcase through it I feel the onset of a familiar ache. I am missing out. I am not taking advantage of my time in a city teenagers all over the world stick on their bedroom walls. I am missing precious opportunities and new experiences, potential for memories melting into the twilight around me. This feeling is older now, rarer, but when I lived in Paris it was omnipresent. When I’d sleep in late and miss my university classes, stay in my bedroom until dusk, turn down evening activities to sit in the dark with my laptop screen.

My airbnb building is a labyrinth of liminal spaces, a Back Rooms fever dream. I take 3 different lifts, get stuck in the basement for close to half an hour, embarrassed to ask the advice of a suited man and his small dog as I feel dishevelled and my French is too rusty. I have no signal to message my Airbnb host, which is entirely my own fault. I am unable to navigate this city, I’m terrible at this language. I cannot undertake any social interaction without embarassing myself. I feel a lump in my throat, that tidal wave of hopelessness lapping at the edges of my consciousness, that grey veil between my beige life and the life I could be living were I not so hugely ineffectual as a person.

Of course, these feelings are not relevant. I am spending a night between trains in Paris on the way to a nice holiday. Many furious reviews say this Airbnb is impossibly complicated to access. My French has already allowed me to acquire the keys in a complicated multi-stage exchange with a bartender round the corner. I rarely feel lonely. I enjoy my life.

I do get into the flat, and I do not go out again. I listen to Friday night through the window with the rest of my M&S train dinner, and call my partner from the sofa bed. I have much less to prove to myself these days. Today I’m able to feel sadness for a teenager who lost her father in freshers’ week and felt ashamed of taking time out of university to recover, who moved away from all her friends and was shocked that she was miserable. The view from 2023 is very different to 2012. And I have made my peace with the fact that Paris will always hold inadadequacy and self-doubt just below its surface, because the rest of the world does not.