#placestohide

Paris. Nights alone in the big room in my grandparent’s house, in the Premier Arrondissement. I can hear the metro when it rumbles under the expensive apartment. There’s jet lag and insomnia so I get up. Sit at the window and watch the city. I’m right in front of the Seine, I can see the boats full of tourists, sliding under the bridges. Somewhere, someone is crying. There are lights and people passing under the window, couples walking hand in hand. Across the city, my grandfather lays dying in a hospital room that reeks of morphine. In here, my grandmother sleeps in the nest of Alzheimer's, perhaps forgetting her husband is dying. Perhaps her mind tricks her into thinking that he is lying in the bed next to her. Perhaps she can hear his breath. The cars moan back and forth. The people speedwalk across the street. The moon glows. Paris. I can see the Eiffel Tower. It’s a hot summer night and the sky feels like a giant bruise. The city keeps bustling all around me and I feel like the eye of a big, urban storm. Around the apartment people live and move and feel, but in here, all is still. I’ve been sleepless in many places-San Francisco, New Orleans, New York...- and all have been different. The different cities all have their own peculiar ways of breathing into the night. I like Paris best, maybe because I see more lovers and street musicians here than anywhere else. There are always interesting snippets of conversation to pick up when I open my window; “Chérie, un jour je t'amènerais en Italie, a un endroit ou la musique est si belle qu’on danse dans la rue.” My grandparent’s bourgeois apartment is filled to the brim with books, and when the city noises become too much of an impassive white noise, I can read Baudelaire, Rimbaud or André Breton or Eluard. And every couple poems I can look up and remember that all French authors loved Paris. Chances are they too sought the Eiffel Tower’s solace during sleepless nights. I write.