First posted March 2023.

My dear,

For the second time in my life, I sailed away from shores drenched with red, white, and blue, and for the third time arrived at the same. How funny it is that so many people look at those same colours and think, “Ah, my home,” each of them thinking of different places. But I suppose they are all the same place, really. The divisions between them are just lines drawn in the grey imaginations of men who do not dream.

That is to say, I am gone. I am here as much as I was there, and have left as much as I have stayed. The words others use to describe me ring hollow. To say one is an expatriate implies that one was ever a patriot. I have loved uselessly many times, but unfed, love dies, eventually. Countries cannot love you back.

How long ago I left is a secret held only by you. I envy the lies of linear systems, wishing things were really as neatly ordered as people pretend they are. I walk down the Champ de Mars in cold sunlight and try to marvel at the work of human hands. There is a strange, floating limit to what we believe is possible. A 300-metre tower, a mermaid in the black depths of the ocean, a revolution, a new dawn. Calm, wordless serenity fills my head as the wind howls in the voices of a thousand screams through the wrought iron lattices rising into the sky.

I find no company in the catacombs, though perhaps that should not come as a surprise. What use have ghosts for bones? Dim electric light, meant to evoke candles, burns in uninhabited corridors. Each skull once belonged to a person as whole as the hundreds who march past them each day, and so rarely does someone stop and marvel at that fact. I do not think so much of the skulls; their faces do not come to me in holy visions, nor their names in mystic prayers. The walls of legs and arms are far more arresting and unnatural, arranged in piles to frame the skulls. They remind me of the sea of dots forming the background of a pointillist painting. Part of something you must step away from to truly see.

No one has ever called me beautiful — at least, no one has ever meant it in the sense of longing. I am beautiful in the way that la Statue de la République is beautiful. People gaze up at her in awe and think of other things: of sacrifice, of freedom, of courage. They do not think of her. The beauty of monuments is in representation. To some, I represent all the sadness of history, all the fervent desires unfulfilled, all the causes that doomed heroes could never give up. My skin is cold and flawless as smooth bronze.

Even so, I cannot rest in the cobbled rows of Père Lachaise. I am not vain enough to think myself worthy of remembering. Maps with points marked with names flutter away on the wind, dropped by tourists once their respects have been paid. I left my name on your shore; no tomb will remember it here.

In the cemetery of Montmartre, cats roam through the rows of graves, keeping watch over their residents and visitors alike. Ivy climbs up creaking trees and the wind is laced with the sweet smell of decaying flowers. On a bench in the full morning sunlight, one of the cats sits next to me, closing her eyes and poking her nose in the air, trying to find my hand to rub her head against.

I feel I have now told you everything, and yet I fear you will not have understood. If words had been enough to explain, I’d have given them to you before I left. What I want to say is the sound of the bells of Sacré-Coeur. What I want to say is the smell of the boulangeries in the morning, when the first bread of the day goes into the oven. What I want to say is the soft tulle that floats around the dancers on the opera stage. What I want to say is that you must not think of me alone here. Red and white and blue flowers bend beneath the breeze in window boxes lining the streets, and you can think of me in them, if that comforts you. I stretch my body on the cold gravestones, and feel the moss grow over me and the stone together. I have never felt more at home.

What I want to say is, there is a city, now, who loves you back.

Yours always,

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