P...

There is something about Paris…That I love, that I hate.

This isolation in beauty, the silent noise, the organized crowds…a choreography as foreign as it is familiar, one feels always like a dancer, or some personage in a play that’s being replayed over and over again.

It is hard not to fall for Paris at the first sight; it is hard not to hate it with virulence when you get to know it better, or worse. I hear this is how old married couples feel. I hear, yet rarely if ever give credit to what I hear.

Paris sings nostalgia, but slaps your face with a cold present.  It hides the hard traces of time, and poverty behind resistant grey clouds and dizzying scents of warm croissants and pains au chocolat.

It is par excellence, The femme fatale, who would never give up her age or her flawless lipstick. who dips her lips in champagne, because water is not expensive enough. who collects lovers but never falls in love, because she only loves herself. who nearly never laughs , and when she does, never fully, so that one can’t help but try harder to make her smile. If one was among the majority of ones who need to be liked, and one almost always is.

Opulence in this city smells like perfume, but tastes like ashes. Poverty in this city is desperately silent. And people who run along their tiny circles drink to forget how tiny these circles are.

it is very amusing to watch the Paris show, where entertainment is not a promise but an obligation.

But sometimes, sometimes when the clock strikes midnight, or midnight strokes the moon, you see the drunkard homeless leaving his bottle half full and heading to his own palace to sleep on a warm mattress with crispy warm bed sheets,  the “boulangère” going back to her passion for  philosophical books and the arms of her Algerian lover, and the banker, featherless, spending the night in prayers and chants  while his heart bursts with love tears… They all leave the city to phantoms and shadows…until

Until the white thread shines among the black ones. Then, they all come back, on time, dressed up, to take back on their roles in the eternal play that is the city.

The midnight train that took them away, brought them back, and all is well that never starts to end…

DS