Dear Long Lost (Imaginary?) Love (Part 1, Prologue)

Hello everyone, as a bit of an introduction I'd like to first say that I'm very glad to become a part of this community. The piece that I've posted here is kind of a prologue to something longer that I'm planning to write (yet unspecified - a novel? a collection of letters?). I want to tell a story of a girl who returns to Paris in 1978, ten years after she fled the city, afraid both of the student strikes and the strong love for her childhood friend. After 10 years, and no good-bye, she arrives at her long lost love's door, with a vague memory of him, wandering if she'll ever find him. This is my first work of fiction, so far I've only been writing for magazines. I'll be very thankful to hear your thoughts, thank you!

Paris, 27.02.1978

Dear Long Lost (Imaginary?) Love,

I have returned to Paris at last. Ten years have passed since I wandered these streets. Ten years since I fled them in the spring of 1968, confused and afraid. I feared the flames bursting and the barricades rising, uncertain whether they were the creation of our classmates protesting around the corner from my apartment in the Latin Quarter, or of my own heart and mind trying to comprehend my rapidly growing love for you. I should have participated in these riots. I should have taken my emotions outside, grabbed a brick in one hand, and your arm in the other, shouting “L'imagination prend le pouvoir!“ - “Imagination takes power!”. I didn’t. Instead, I ran away.

At the age of sixteen I wasn’t ready to either participate in the protests, or face my feelings and so I chose comfort over rebellion, far away over home, New York over Paris. My father had just been offered the position of an art conservator at the Museum of Modern Art and although we all knew it was a great opportunity for him, he didn’t put either me or my mother under pressure to leave France. In his usual gentle tone, he proposed that we experience a new environment for a while, which caused nothing but an unsettled look in my mother’s eyes. If I had shaken my head for a second, she would have whispered two words into my father’s ear. Let’s stay. Yet my stillness and her silence approved his plan to move away. I even memorized a speech that I had prepared in case someone, assumably you, wanted to change my mind and stop me from going. Papa made the decision - I chose to blame it on unsuspecting Papa. They need me there in New York, a family has to stick together - for the first time in my life family values provided me not only with some kind of inner stability, but also with a plausible excuse for living my life faintheartedly.

I never used this speech, because as I made a quiet, uneventful exit, which I thought I deserved, no one ever asked me why I was leaving. The excuse for my sudden departure rang only in my head, comforting, too often poorly, my troubled consciousness. I made sure no one would be there at the airport to bid farewell to me, especially not you. I didn’t want our tears to overshadow the blissful memories we’d created, the last words we say to mean more than what we’d uttered before. I didn’t want us to make any promises impossible to fulfill over the Atlantic Ocean - whether these were to be weekly calls or monthly letters. I thought that by escaping unexpectedly I would end our relationship on a positive, or at least a neutral note, evading any negativity and tension that could arise between us. But after I had left Paris in May and settled down in New York during the summer, I woke up from the moving frenzy in early September, discovering in terror that I hadn’t ended our relationship on any note. The lack of an adieu left it unpronounced, ephemeral. As if it had never happened.

Our plane took off into the darkness on a chilly May evening and I didn’t even manage to catch the last glimpse of the city. I left thinking that I would be back soon enough for the passion on the streets and in our hearts to have cooled off slightly, but not completely; that from the distance I would gain some perspective... or what I needed even more - courage. What I didn’t realize at that time, was how easily a year can turn into a decade, how life likes to take its own course over our plans. New York captivated me from the very moment we arrived there and I lavished all my attention on its myriad little phenomena. You were always there in the back of my head and I even kept track of everything new I encountered in a little black diary - to one day share the entries with you. But over the years those memories of you that I wanted to keep pure and unadulterated when I was leaving Paris have become so vague that today they are a mere sequence of flashing moments. Sometimes you return to me as a dream at night, occasionally as a warm feeling triggered by a situation or an object which reminds me of you.

One windy day during my senior year at college, I was taking a stroll somewhere in Little Italy and I saw a group of young boys playing football on the street. One of them had a small, silver cross hanging from his neck, and along with the slightly olive tone of his skin and his deep brown eyes, it instantly brought me back to the time soon after our First Communion, when we were only small children and neighbors who barely knew each other. I was looking down at the yard behind our building from the window in my room and you were playing tag with some other kids, when suddenly one of them accidentally pulled you by your own small, silver cross that you kept around your neck, and the pendant snapped. Out of a few dozen kids who got it from our church to commemorate the ceremony, I remember you to be the only one who actually wore it. Your eyes filled with floods of tears, as if that broken pendant had breached your loyalty to Lord. I didn’t know much about life, let alone God back then, and sometimes I think I’m even more clueless right now, but your reaction to the incident impressed me. To me your crying symbolized complete dedication and immense inner strength, an ability to trust and to believe in what is an abstract idea for most people.

Until I saw that boy in Little Italy who reminded me of the event, I wasn’t even aware that my mind was still storing that memory. For the years that have passed it had been covered in a thick layer of dust, quietly waiting to unleash on me in vibrant colors in the most surprising moment. That day I started wondering what other memories my mind was keeping from me.

~~~

I have to confess to you that I haven’t shared the real reason why I came back to Paris with anyone yet. You’ll be the first one to know. Two years after we’d left the city, in the August of 1970, my grandfather, who stayed here, died. He played a significant role in my life when I was growing up, and I shared with him a very unique relationship, as if we were some kinds of each other’s reflections in the universe. I would say that, as opposed to the love I had for my parents, the love I had for him was not innate, but rather unconditional. He used to say that because I’m the child of my mother, the person whom he loves the most in the world, he loves me twice as much. And in return, whenever I spoke with him on the phone, I would lock myself in my room and confide quietly that I loved Maman and Papa as much as there were stars in the sky, but I loved him as much as there were stars in the sky and one star more. I know that his relationship with my mother hadn’t been the easiest one when she was an adolescent, especially that my grandmother left the two of them when my mother was only a toddler and they could only count on each other. Even though I never investigated into the meaning of this sentence, I heard once or twice, when they were arguing, about the flowers he used to bring her in apology for the things he’d done or missed. Maybe this was the reason why he cosseted me to extremes, compensating for the time he hadn’t been there for her. Regardlessly, I felt a very natural connection to him and viewed him as an authoritative figure, who I oddly didn’t fear, but respected with warmth.

Although I was this close to my grandfather, and my father adored him too for his open-mindedness and composure, Maman was the only one who flew to Paris to attend his funeral. Perhaps she needed her closure with him by getting her final sorrows or regrets off her chest. Perhaps she feared that if the three of us broke the daily routine of our New York life, the commute, the rush, the dropping off and picking up, and exchanged it for a weekend of reminiscing in France, we would never come back to the new home she managed to create in Manhattan’s Lower East Side. I couldn’t cope with him being gone, but I knew I had to respect her wish.

That summer I lost my biggest supporter, a mindful guardian, and a reassurance that whatever I do or whoever I become, there will always be a person who would not condemn me for it. After we had moved to America, I called him every week and described in detail all the New York’s curiosities I encountered that day. At the end of our conversations, over and over again, in the spring, summer, autumn and winter, he would tell me the same story of how he’d spent his morning. He first went downstairs to buy a freshly baked baguette and to catch a glimpse of the Eiffel Tower in the narrow space between the buildings on his street in Montmartre, then talked to Pierre, a street painter with whom he’d bonded a few years earlier over the beauty of Pierre’s art, just to finally leave some breadcrumbs for the Parisian pigeons that would fly over to the stairs that led to his building. I heard this story more nearly a hundred times and it never made me tired. I just closed my eyes, pictured my grandfather in his natural setting, and for a second I would forget about anything else in the world.

My grandfather knew that the description of his daily routine comforted me, even though he pretended to have forgotten that he’d told me the story a few days before. He was truly the one person who had acquainted me with the beauty of Paris during the long walks he used to take me on when I was a child. He picked me up from school, and although our apartment was just a few streets away, we walked around our arrondissement for hours. He often stopped in the middle of the pavement, told me to look up and pointed to some architectural element which he found enchanting. I didn’t catch many of the things that he described, too young to appreciate their aesthetic value, but if I learned something from those walks, it was how easy it was to become infatuated in Paris. This story that he used to retell me over the phone was his unspoken promise that just like him, the city would always be waiting for me, whenever I would decide to come back, and it would be just as dear to me as it was when I was leaving. His death bereaved me of this comfort. In my grief, Paris seemed further and further away every day, until it completely dissolved to become my past, together with you.

When I was preparing to leave New York a week ago, Maman was concerned, Papa was perplexed, and I shared their uneasy states of mind. My decision to come here was in fact sudden and unforeseen even for myself. Not longer than a month ago, I came upon the keys to my Grandfather’s Parisian apartment that my mother hid deep in our storage unit along with some other remains of the memory of our past life. The keys were so riddled in rust that they soon were to turn into reddish dust. And I realized a simple truth that day. If I don’t open those doors now, they will forever remain locked. My parents knew that the fact that I hadn’t attend my grandfather’s funeral haunted me for a long time. I could easily justify escaping the riots and freeing a confused heart in 1968, but when I didn’t return to Paris later for this somber occasion, the only word that came to my mind was oblivion. Yet, to tell you the truth, my grandfather isn’t the one I came to say my final good-bye to. My relationship with him in the metaphysical sense will always be everlasting, it needs no good-bye. In a down-to-earth sense I didn’t follow a custom, but I did pay my final respects to him. On the day of his funeral I went to the St. Patrick’s Cathedral, because I thought that if a prayer were ever to be heard, this would be the place. And it put my mind at ease.

You are the one who didn’t get the final good-bye. And this is why I’m standing here in front of your apartment right now, in the exact same place where you told me that my lips tasted like lemonade when we kissed for the first time. I have already tried to knock on your doors six times now, and every time I run away like a little child playing a prank on her neighbors. Will you open them to condemn me? Comfort me? Are you even there, on the other side?

I have returned to Paris at last. I have returned to Paris at last, because I’ve been missing you.

Yours, Anna