BEAUTIFUL DISASTER—
The glow of the Eiffel Tower bleeds into the puddles on the ground. It’s midnight. The tower sparkles with brilliant flashes of light until it goes dark for the night.
A couple kisses to the left of us, and straggling vendors jangle Eiffel Tower keychains in our faces. The hail plummets down on us, and we run to escape the cold. We yell out the names of people we love (earlier, we locked their names to the love lock bridge near Notre Dame).
When we make it back to our hostel, we’re cold – it’s been sleeting the entire weekend, and the sky is always gray. We fall into a sound sleep. Our hostel is stationed next to La Seine, with green-gray waters churning a steady current, and swans skating across the surface in the daytime. Here, I’ve eaten the most sacrilegiously delicious cheeseburger of my life and shared conversation with other travelers.
“You’re in Europe! Come on, experience it,” says Daniel, a Brazilian exchange student. “For me, the drinks are ten times more expensive than in Brazil. For Americans, only five!”
Before we can continue our conversation, his friends call him over to dance to early 2000’s American music. A group of people at a table argue about politics and the merits of feminism. Solo travelers mingle.
“I’ll be living in India soon,” says Lena, an American. “I’m ready for the spicy food.” She leans in— “Never walk around here alone,” she says.
It’s 2 a.m., and I’m asleep. A hand grabs my shoulder. I wake up and turn to see a figure standing over my bed. He’s drunk; I string together more profanities than I ever have in my entire life. I can’t sleep for the rest of the night.
I replay the weekend over and over again in my head: the vivid stained glass windows at Notre Dame, the use of light in the Renaissance paintings at the Louvre, the waitress who scoffed at us because we couldn’t afford expensive desserts, the pipes hanging out of the ceiling in the metro stations, the street performer who forced a friend into an uncomfortable duet, the woman who tried to pickpocket us, the stunning weave of the metal in the Eiffel Tower, sitting knotted in traffic while the cab fare ticked up, the cracks in the streets that just felt Parisian.
At 4:30 a.m. we’re up and getting ready to catch our plane back to Barcelona. On the flight to Paris, the plane dropped for an agonizing five seconds, along with our stomachs.
At the hostel, we met people who had been on our flight. The first thing they mentioned was the drop, that nauseating fear of falling, the immediate sense that everything was going to go wrong. It’s rare to experience a weekend that’s as much of a beautiful train wreck as the one I spent in Paris.
One moment, standing outside of the Louvre with my hands going numb, the clouds in the sky broke and immersed the city in warm, golden light. We could see the Eiffel Tower stark against the sky in the distance. In a day’s time, we’d be underneath it, watching the lights and letting the hail scrape against our coats.
