“And to those of you who mourn your lives through one day to the next,
Well, let them take you next!
Can’t you live and be thankful you’re here?
See, it could be you, tomorrow, next year.”
- © Guillemots – “Trains to Brazil”


Wednesday, and I wake up wanting to weep.

My previous elation at living in Paris has cratered somewhere far, far away and I am at a low. I leave the house, dishevelled, no make up on at all, to walk the 50 or so yards up to the boulangerie , 0.85€ counted out exactly, to make the transaction as swift as possible, in order to fill my belly with breakfast as soon as I can manage.

It is shut.

I manage to stumble into another on the Rue de Rennes, baguette a whole euro and crash back to the apartment. Bread in hand, Nutella jar in the other, I contemplate letting go of what is in one hand and binging on the other. Needless to say, I couldn’t care less about the bread anymore.

The guidebook is pored over and nothing jumps out. The Balenciaga exhibition is thought about and pushed aside for the (hopefully) occasional afternoon off uni. Horribly out of date, the book gets me nowhere. I think of all that needs to be done in the flat, at uni,; the battles with French administration have only just begun. I want to crawl back into what is masquerading itself as my bed and go to sleep.

Eventually, a move as wrong as I’ll ever make, I decide to go to Sephora, ‘beauty emporium’ on the Champs-Élysées and get myself one or two nice things for the bath that (hurrah!) we have in the apartment. One change on the Métro, and twenty minutes (and a slightly wrong turn later between the Grand and Petit Palais), I’m wandering through a much busier shop than I remembered. Eyes on the carpet to avoid the all-too toothy smiles of the girls holding perfume bottles/eyeshadows/lipglosses in hand and I pick up cheap stuff in fluorescent packaging which albeit briefly, cheers me up.

I queue patiently, second in line. A too-tanned-to-be-real girl and her (likewise) boyfriend hover into sight, clutching as much rubbish in expensive packaging as they can possibly grab. They slip in front of me.

I am of course outraged. But I am also resigned. And I supposed, embarrassed. This is France, where queuing is not so much as an art but anarchy and I know this. This has happened before. Although I am not Anglo-Saxon, my queuing habits definitely are. As a Celt, I am furious and want to a. tell them off b. point out where they should be in the queue and c. kick them, leaving a nice imprint of my muddy shoe against their Evisu jeans.

As a foreigner in France, it being my second full day of living here, I cannot muster up the courage to say this in French. My heart crumbles at my lack of ability in this.

At home later, I am fed up with myself for replaying this situation over and over in my head. I leap into a proactive state. Cinema, cinema, cinema. Let me lose myself in another world for two hours, come home, clean slate. “Quand j’étais chanteur” with Cécile de France and Gérard Dépardieu has been revealed in the magazines but the times tonight don’t quite suit. And then searching for cinemas in my quartier, I see, but 90 minutes later at the Lucernaire (which incidentally, is a fantastic venue, better than I could have possibly expected and ten minutes on foot from the flat) is “Paris, je t’aime”.

Far from losing myself in someone else’s world for two hours, I lose myself in what is becoming my own. My eyes sparkle during the beginning of a romance in the 5ème and glisten as Juliette Binoche falls into the depths of desparation. I laugh heartily with Nick Nolte’s character and feel the start of my weeping during Natalie Portman’s romance. I concur with the 14ème. And just at the very end, just for a split second is a sight so familiar just now, but will become even more familiar as I walk that route every day for the next year on my way to uni. I want to scream with joy.

My hands rush up to my chest, against my heart, as if to stop it bursting out of my body with such sheer delight.