Il y a longtemps que je t'aime

Whenever I go on a trip I can't help but get nostalgic.

It's almost as if the waiting in the terminal to depart, the hours seated next to a smelly teenage boy 40,000 feet above the earth, and the inevitable exhaustion that is soon to set in, brings out my most sentimental side. Just as much as the tangible rituals play out, the sentiment for my former travels seem to have their way with me as well. For example, in the couple of times I've flown through the big ATL this year, I get this inexplicable teary sentiment that I just can't help from welling up in my eyes, and in my heart. I find myself playing over and over the dozens of trips that passed me through its gates during my 14-year tenure in Lexington. I never loved that airport or Delta so much as when I no longer knew their familiarity. Maybe it's something about the journey I have been on the last 31-years, or maybe it's the solitude in the eyes of all those strangers. Whatever it is, the bittersweet nostalgia never fails to grip my heart.

Leaving for Paris was no different. It came upon me in the remembrance of the times before that had come and gone, the sadness and the hope I had felt at different times when I returned to her open arms.

I always remember the way it felt the first time, like being a fish out of water, tongue tied and girlishly shy, the time in which it should have most been a ride on a cloud. Instead, it was the time that felt the most heavy, the most laborious, just days after marrying the husband formerly known as mine. Just as we walked around her streets, and navigated through the unfamiliar, it was those days spent in the city I'd always wanted to be in when I think I first realized I had made a terrible mistake. That's what Paris felt like the first time.


When I returned to her four years later, almost to the day, I went towards her with the eyes of a broken spirited woman, glad for the solitude, scared of the inevitable reminder. I remember that the moment I touched down I felt the relief that comes from independence and of reinvention. I know that I re-entered that magnificent city with eyes ready to be opened, sadness ready to be lifted, I was ready for something great to happen. What it gave me was an opportunity to make a friend, and to be apart of an international business community for the first time. The remnants of that journey left me with people I call my friends, one in particular who four years later I can still laugh with delicious ease, and smoke cigarettes and drink champagne with on the Champs Elysee.

The third time is the time when I returned and was healed from all the scars and all the pain of the past. Somewhere in those beautiful days of March I finally learned that I still had a heart. It was that time that I looked forward to Paris the most, because it meant spending a few days with one of the most important and influential person I have ever come to know. It was our shared sadness and the secrets behind our eyes that in the months before our last meeting had formed a bond so tight I'm quite sure it can never be broken. It was he, who held the keys to a journey of the most amazing sort, who taught me how to follow my dreams, and how to see the world through eyes wide open. It was he who I fell in love with at the base of the Eiffel Tower, and who to this day doesn't understand that it's because of him that I had the courage to be here.

When you have taken certain journeys, no matter the sort, there is always one that you know leads you home. It was this time when I stepped off that plane and into the arms of the man I call my best friend, my souls perfect mate, my love, I knew that I had finally come home. It was there in my favorite city that she lured me ever closer to her with a sublime and perfect ease, a blatant familiarity, a contentment like I had never known--welcoming me in a way unlike any of the times before. It was this time that magnificence of the Eiffel Tower sealed a bond, where I looked in his eyes and knew there was no other place I would rather be than right there in his arms, in his city, or in any city as long as he was there. It was there in Paris where we made memories walking along the Seine, took a nap on the grass, ate at his favorite (the most unlikely and amazing) restaurant, binged on croissants, and dreamt of days still to come. It was the fourth time that I went to Paris when I learned the journey is really only beginning and where I left the ghosts of the past only to whisper in the shadows.

For it was this time that this dreamer of a girl awoke into a perfect reality of what Paris is, what it should be, and all that it has yet to become.