pretending is what I do best.
5
Scarlett
That evening, freshly showered and dressed after the train ride, hand and arm thankfully unbruised after the faucet incident, I crank open the tall windows of my seventh-floor flat overlooking Champ de Mars and the Eiffel Tower.
The evening light filters in, and I inhale Paris.
It smells like home.
It smells like memories—the good ones, that is.
Maybe even memories that extend so far back they come from other lifetimes.
If that’s even possible.
I turn around, stride through my kitchen, and tap the cover of a paperback I recently finished—the story of a man who meets a woman he loved forty years ago, a woman who died in a boating accident one summer. It’s a heartrending tale of the possibility of living again and again, meeting the same lover over and over, but at the wrong times for both of you.
In this story, it takes the man and woman eighteen generations till they reconnect. My heart squeezes, like it did while I was devouring this tale of out-of-sync love.
I don’t believe in reincarnation.
Not of people, and not of souls.
Yet I do believe we can have connections to people, and especially to places that almost feel as if we could have lived there in another lifetime.
Paris is that for me.
Paris is my soul mate. It speaks to some deeper, ancient part of myself, of my soul.
It’s the lover I’m destined to meet again and again.
This city centers me, as if I have lived here before, as if I was destined to return to it.
I can still recall with crystal clarity the first time I set foot here.
When I was eight, my scientist parents brought me here for a research conference, and after they presented on gene mapping, we wandered.
I skipped down the Rue de Rivoli, traipsed through the Jardin des Tuileries, and climbed up onto a mint-green stool at Ladurée to order a chocolat chaud. I ordered it in French.
The server was most impressed. “C’est bien,” she told me.
My father snapped a photo of me, gap-toothed and grinning at the server. He captured another shot minutes later of me wearing a chocolate mustache and licking my lips. My parents still have those pictures framed in their Manhattan home.
That trip, more than twenty-five years ago, turned the key in the door of my heart, opening a latent part of me.
A part that had perhaps always been present inside of me.
Present as a hum, as a wish, as a hazy dream. To be here. Because I felt like I knew this place, and had for all time.
That day at Ladurée, I was certain that this city would be my home one day.
The sights, the sounds, the smells—they belonged to a part of me that perhaps already knew the city. The museums, the shops, the language . . . The way beauty exists on corners in the lines of streetlamps, in the glass of boutique window displays, and on sidewalks in the shape of cobblestones, especially as they glisten after a rainstorm, like they’re made of diamonds.
This city embraces beauty, and perhaps that’s why it calls to me—the beauty is the yin to my yang. It balances out all the numbers that march through my head.
Beauty has always been my other passion, whether it’s found in literature, in fashion, in architecture, or in the everyday as I walk through my adopted hometown.
Paris is mine. It gives me strength. It’s the place I returned to three years ago when my marriage died, burying itself in a coffin of lies. When I discovered what happened with my one-time husband, I could no longer stay in London, where I’d been at the time.
Paris called to me with comfort. Like a soft hand across your hair when you’re a child and you wake from a bad dream.
The city was my lullaby, whispering me home after love and life as I knew it had been demolished.
Perhaps I need that connection to Paris now to erase all these risqué thoughts of my business partner.
I need my soul mate to ground me.
With the windows left open, the evening light streaming in, I leave my flat, take the lift down to the first floor, and exit on Avenue de Suffren.
I head past the Eiffel Tower, then over the bridge that arches across the Seine, slowing to admire the view of the river that cuts through the city.
The river has secrets. Listen to it.
That’s what my father used to say when he brought me here after his meetings.
The river always knows.
Like the