I first went to Paris 6 years ago. I had been paid $4,500 for a screenplay option and I felt incredibly rich. Before then I had always told myself I'd be a cliche and go write in Paris with my first writing check, and I lived up to this very pleasurable promise. It was a magic time where I met magic French kids who danced with me and took me to parties in empty apartments and festive bars as music played on every street corner during the Festival of Music. I remember reading an email from my dad that he had gone to a Dodgers game and witnessed a brawl, he was checking in on me and laughing about some youtube videos I had made about a disgruntled German boy who only notices the industrial elements beneath the Eiffel Tower. This was months before my dad told us he had the pancreatic cancer which two long years later would claim his life. It was a few years before my mom was diagnosed with the breast cancer that she would kick at a heavy cost on an island away from home. My girlfriend and I have been here in Paris for six days now and it is a gorgeous time. One of love and interest, conversation and taste. We used our tax returns in February to buy the tickets. We made that money the long slow hard way. This city now, it's a magic but a different one. Gray has entered my beard and some regions of my heart. Her and I met in the later throes of our own separate tragedies and have done so well to thrive through em during and since. But Paris now has morbid edges I didn't see six years ago, and yet it is still magic, a passionately intimate one with my lover and also a slow and thoughtful one that requires me to look my self in the face and recognize change. We have no wifi where we are staying, so now I sit at a nearby bistrot scrolling through my instagram feed,noticing how all my old friends are now pregnant and raising kids, where six years ago I used to be one.
oct 20, 2019
