RACHEL
Paris didn’t wait for me to feel settled.
By Monday morning, the city had decided I existed and expected me to keep up.
I spent my first week walking. Not the romantic strolling people talk about, but the kind where your feet hurt and your brain won’t shut up and you keep checking your phone even though there’s no one left to text. I walked to learn the shape of my neighborhood. To memorize corners. To pretend I wasn’t counting the hours since Frankie left.
I took my camera everywhere.
It felt safer that way. Like if I had it around my neck, I wasn’t just a girl alone in a foreign city—I was working. Observing. Collecting evidence.
Paris had faces for days. Old men with eyebrows like punctuation marks. Women with mouths that looked like they’d said no their entire lives and meant it. Kids who stared right back at you without blinking, like they already knew something you didn’t.
I loved them all.
I started most mornings at the market two blocks from my apartment. It wasn’t fancy. No Instagram-perfect flower stalls or cinematic baguette displays. Just crates of produce, stacks of cheese sweating in the heat, fish laid out like they were daring you to flinch.
The vendors learned my face before they learned my name.
“Bonjour,” I’d say, confident. Clear. American vowels tucked neatly behind Parisian consonants. I definitely wasn’t channeling any songs fromBeauty and the Beast. Well, mostly not.
Sometimes they’d respond fast. Too fast.
And then I’d smile, nod, and say, “Pardon—plus lentement, s’il vous plaît,” which immediately gave me away by asking them to repeat it more slowly.
My French was good. Technically. Grammatically. Years of classes and pronunciation drills and teachers who spoke in neat, neutral accents. But Parisian French had swagger. Shortcuts. Attitude. Regional slant. It moved like it didn’t care if you followed.
Sometimes they’d switch to English out of mercy. Sometimes they wouldn’t. Both options were humbling.
There was one woman—late fifties, maybe—who sold herbs and looked like she’d never trusted anyone a day in her life. She corrected my pronunciation ofthymthree times before finally nodding like I’d passed a test I didn’t know I was taking.
“Vous apprenez vite,” she said.
I preened. Internally. Always internally. Because yes, there was no better way to make you learn fast than to throw you in the deep end. I was definitely swimming to keep from drowning.
Furniture shopping was its own emotional rollercoaster.
I learned quickly that “vintage” in Paris could mean either charmingly distressed or structurally offensive. I walked into at least five shops that smelled like dust and regret. I sat on chairsthat wobbled under my weight and pretended not to imagine Frankie’s voice in my head pointing it out even as she laughed.
I bought a small kitchen table from a man who called mema photographebefore I told him what I did. He said my hands gave me away. Something about how I kept framing things in the air when I talked.
Did I do that? Really?
Yes, it made me really self-conscious the rest of the day because yes, I did do that.
That night, I ate takeout on my “new” table like it was a victory.
Every afternoon, I wandered.
I crossed bridges for no reason. I sat on benches and watched couples fight quietly. I photographed reflections in windows and the backs of people’s heads and the exact moment someone realized they were being watched.
Faces told stories even when mouths stayed shut. Especially then.
There was a woman on the métro who kept checking her lipstick like it might betray her. A man with a scar across his cheek who smiled at nothing and no one. A boy who couldn’t have been older than six, gripping his mother’s coat like the world was a slippery place.
I took pictures when I could. When it felt right. When it felt honest.
Sometimes, I didn’t. Sometimes, I just looked.
