Paris

You told us not be tourists.

So I moved to Paris.

There's something in Paris that everybody needs to look for.  Like a treasure map seeped into our skulls, planted into our skin. They say Paris is the cure. But I think it's a drug.

I found it once.  The euphoria. I found it under the rain of a late sun, where the sky is plaited gold and the water reflects every karat on the street. Alone, really.  

(This. This was it. Gold.)

I was against a heavy wrought-iron door that divided me from the glass triangles of the Louvre with water dripping from my scalp into my eyes.  Crowds flocked across the marble bridge that stepped over the Siene, gold bounding off their lapels and wristwatches and handlebars.  They probably smelled like bread, too.  Even in the rain.  Everything smells like warm bread.

Music. A man with his meaty fingers strolling his accordion, singing about the rain from under his mustache. Wet newspapers with pretty words telling ugly stories.  Cigarettes littering the off-white walkways.  Teenagers littering them, teenagers with screwy teeth and unclean hair.  

But they were still beautiful. The way they dropped their cigarettes as if it wasn't killing them.  The way they talked, it was poetry and music stirred together in syllables.

Checkered taxis and thin bicycles ridden by young businessmen. Pigeons lining the wrought-iron fence that strung along the river.  Ivy twining up the chalky buildings with their intricate detail, and the Napoleonic statues carved from the hard, white stone.  Crepes, too, platter-sized, drenched in the same white sugar the city is made of.

(I took this picture in the name of love)

And I was under a marble arch of the palace where thousands of canvases slept. Their creators were dead; the artists that gave them life were hundreds of years gone.  But they could never die. Under this arcing, pale palace with its long windows and soft, aging walls, they could never die.

And there was I, hearing beautiful words that meant nothing, being seduced into the captivating drug of adrenaline that God called Paris.