‘do you know where i can get a glass of champagne?’, a random girl asked me a tuesday at 7 am.
‘no idea’, i answered with a smile. we are all going through a lot, i thought.
‘you can’t imagine how much i need a glass of champagne’.
‘i can imagine, it’s just 7 am, gurl’ i wanted to say. ‘no worries, brasseries and supermarkets should start opening in an hour, you are almost there’, i said trying to support her.
‘my name is K. and i am from the US’. ‘nice to meet you K. my name is S. and i am from spain’.
‘i am in a girls trip trying to forget my ex’, she said. ‘but i had a bad night. he reached out some hours ago and he made me feel like i was not deserving anything in this life’.
we kept walking on silence. i wanted to cheer her up but after all we just met a minute ago.
‘do you think here they will have some champagne?’, she asked when we were in front of the church of notre dame des blanc manteaux.
‘i think they are more into wine… but if they turned water into wine… maybe you can ask them to make it champagne this time’, i answered.
she smiled and she went in. worst case scenario, she might find god instead, i thought.
it made me think when was the last time i was in church. i was raised catholic, but it has been a while i haven’t gone to a sunday service to pray or to connect with god.
i thought about coming back.
the core values are the good ones. community, helping each other, honesty… among others. there’s bad things as well – as everywhere.
i started to get distant when i felt the energy was a little bit off.
somehow, i was always sad after praying ‘through my fault, through my fault, through my own grievous fault’ and striking our breast in a dramatic way.
but has been a while i feel i need to feed my soul. might be related to the craziness we have around the globe.
when life is what happens in between 3 scrolls of not differentiating Kylie from Kendall since ozempic, a Palestinian kid with bullets in his head and his chest by the Israel state, Jeff Bezos getting married in the most pretentious way, and my homeland burning because politicians still deny climate change…. i need to find some sense. i need to believe.
there’s a superman movie i haven’t seen yet that shows a bit of this.
and here we are. real life villains are even worst than the ones we read in fiction books when we were still naif and full of hope.
‘i wake up every morning with anxiety since the last 6 moths’, A. told me. ‘i feel guilty for everything. what’s my role? what am i doing with my life beyond going for apero and complaining about AI removing my job in 24 months?’, she asked.
we might all be close to need champagne at 7 am, i thought.
instead, i went on a date.
i could have threw my phone away. but i read that this would be white privilege. you can’t escape reality when your morning alarm is a bomb killing your mum.
i am pretty bad at texting and reading the bios. i match according to the pics and haven’t paid enough attention to the fact that they are all 27 years old.
might be the baby girl effect.
‘let’s meet at 20.30’, he said. shit, i am still in aussie schedule, i thought. this is sleep time for me. i like to get ready for bed around 21.15.
magnesium glycinat. cuddle my dog. write to my gym coach: “let’s focus in the arms tomorrow”. wordle of NYT thinking i should stop my subscription because they suck. but the games section is the best and not ready to change yet. learning some new words or expressions in english and french. like ‘deshabiller Paul pour habiller Pierre’, search in google why they both start with a P. or raincheck.
i wanted to raincheck. but when you start a new life, you gain weight and you do things in a different way.
we havent text that much, so when he proposed to meet after 3 text lines, i was keen.
it was a random tuesday at le Marais ‘i work at xyz as data analyst’, he said.
fuck my life, i thought.
is not bad enough he is 11 years young… he works in the same company as me. i think it took me 30 minutes to recompose myself.
he kept talking i guess because i was pale.
the third wine helped me to get back to the moment. i always thought my personality gets better with some Sancerre.
‘i am from Beirut. arrived 4 years ago to Paris. worked in EY. hated it. now in xyz. and excited to get back home in October’.
‘oh, from Beirut’, i said meanwhile i felt my instagram feed was becoming a reality.
‘is it your first time going home in 4 years?’. ‘yes’.
i am pretty bad in geography but it’s not that far away. maybe expensive.
‘can i ask why?’. ‘yes, because there was always something going on. when you live in a post conflict moment in your country and the ones around you are fucking around, you think twice if you will be able to make it back to France’, he said.
‘Iran answered to Israel with missiles faster than you do to my messages’, he smiled.
i thought there was not enough Sancerre in this world to bring me back to my comfort zone.
‘but you should visit, we just enjoy life to the max. we love life. we drink life. we appreciate life because it’s not expected for us to live. there is people who was born to live and people who was born to die, so we just make the most of the time we have’, he concluded.
for some reason what he said made me cry.
i never cried on a date but as everything in life there’s always a first time.
and i cheer up myself thinking it’s best than crying during sex.
we also discussed about techno parties, effect of drugs, cultural clash. ‘i like to detox and go for runs, i feel really good after a run. and after some time, i feel i am ready to go. like fuck it. fuck everything’, he said.
seemed to turn out well for him, physically, i thought meanwhile i was checking his arms wondering about how extasis interacts with protein shakes.
in all the drama and superficiality, we liked each other.
the week after, i reinterprated his advice. ‘fuck it’, i told myself. but instead doing a rave, i decided to walk 300km.
‘i am doing el camino on my own, just with my dog’, i told E. during our dinner at le Progress.
‘are you ok?’ she asked me after telling her my plan. ‘i don’t know, this is what i need to figure out’, i answered.
i started walking. walking for 15 days. walking 25 km per day.
there’s something magical about walking. you keep moving to somewhere, even if sometimes you don’t know anything about where are your heading.
all the mess in the head starts to detangle.
it’s like my brain could breath again.
‘how was today’s stage?’, N. texted me. ‘nothing special today. not a single beautiful landscape. lots of concrete. no views. no nature. i could have skipped this day, it was just 30km of pain’, i told him.
‘like in life, there’s a lot of unnecessary days or episodes we would have wished they didn’t exist’, he texted back.
that’s true. and somehow they always serve to something.
another day, another stick for my dog walking free in nature parading about every single thing.
in the random thoughts that crossed my mind, i thought about my legs for being able to bring me to places i never been.
it’s funny how i was never conscious that my body was made for something else than sending emails and sitting in meetings for 8 hours per day.
after the 6th day i called T. to catch-up.
‘we broke up, i am selling the brand i founded and i left portugal’, she told me.
‘everything changed and i am not doing well’, she said between tears. ‘but i read something the other day about how to frame emotions. it’s not just about feeling sad. it’s more about i have sadness moving through me and this feeling is temporary. we are not our feelings. you can feel it passing through you but i am not becoming sadness’, she said.
i walked the next day thinking in what she said and in all the moments i felt sad in my life. or anxious. or not loved.
when a friend is not there for you. when i missed not having a family. when i thought i knew someone but turned out to be a sociopath.
and she is right. it’s always temporary.
like everything we are going through. we have power to change things.
we just need to take back control of our lifes. of our choices. of our algorithm. of our thumb.
after 12 days and 200km, i decided to stop. something changed. like got rebalanced.
we face some many times the same shit and we always make it through it.
or most of the times.
i guess the 200km gave courage to my heart and peace to my mind.
i came back to Paris not necessarily rested. but definitely changed.