The Last Flight Home

View from the Hotel Room _{(Credit: jagerm)}

Paris had always occupied a prominent slot on my bucket list. I think every romantic dreams of making the pilgrimage to the city of light at least once in their life. The saccharine picture painted in bright colors and glamorized experience so common to the city’s portrayals in film and song never quite captured its authentic truth. However, I have found in my travels that there is a spark in Paris which cannot be matched by any other place on earth. I felt the history of revolution and resistance beneath cobbled streets, captured my own snapshots of iconic views, and tasted tradition and love in every café and restaurant I sat beside in the air of summer turning to autumn.

I had been here for almost a month before fortune found me. My first week was spent alone, permitting myself to be a tourist and see the famous sights which everyone of similar mind had always dreamed of: the Eiffel Tower, the Musée d’Orsay, the Moulin Rouge, and so on. Afterwards, I settled down and decided to learn the area in which I had been staying. I developed a warming rapport with the grocers and butchers and charcuteries near where I was lodging. But I truly felt welcomed one day in the park when I met my anchor to the city by pure serendipity.

Élise was the first person to make me feel like my stay in Paris was more than transient. I told her I was relatively new and wouldn’t be staying too long, but my situation was relatively open-ended. We conversed for a while and she welcomed me to Paris with grace and warmth, disabusing me of my preconceptions of Parisians. She commented that I was oddly charming for someone with my origin and invited me to dinner with her and her friends. I would discover later that was her way of being playful.

Every night, this group of young dreamers which I soon found myself part of would sit at a café by the banks of the Seine, like so many other Parisians do, and have those discussions that only seem to happen in overly sensationalized depictions of this city which had so quickly captured my heart. Their English was impeccable, while my French was only so-so. It was almost effortless the way they could hold their nightly salon discussions in my native tongue so I did not feel left out.

We would volley back and forth on politics and religion and the wonderful pieces of life, and I learned the details of my newfound fellowship in a city so far from home. One of the boys, a handsome heartbreaker named Jean-Phillippe lived a fairly hedonistic existence. He had a name so common, but the way he made it his own by the virtue of the way he approached life. When you merely said his name, you knew he was the one of which you spoke, even in a room where seven other boys had Jean-Phillippe on their birth certificates.

Naturally, Jean-Phillippe and I spent most of the evenings going back and forth. He had lived as an artist and a writer, doing odd jobs and enjoying his freedom. I had spent the end of my teenage years into my twenties in service of my country before earning my degree and transitioning into more mundane fields. I had a much more restrained outlook on the world than he did. Slightly more pensive, more reflective. I was introspective, and he was active.

He became my best friend in town.

Meanwhile, Élise was so much more to me. She was not a native Parisian like many of her friends, having grown up out in the country. Our backstories from our respective homelands mirrored each other closely. She felt like she was paying the goodwill of our social circle forward by inviting another outsider into this tight-knit circle of truly wonderful people. They accepted me as one of their own. And while I only ever saw Jean-Phillippe and some of the others when there was something to do, Élise became a much more constant companion. We’d accompany each other for some time almost every day, especially in the mundane moments such as running errands or a walk in the last remnants of summer air when the leaves began to turn. I hesitated to call her just a friend at first because she became a natural and much more significant extension of my life.

For the first several weeks of my time with the group, we said little about the events in my homeland. Our conversations skewed towards our histories, our philosophies, who we had read, what we had watched. It almost felt unreal to me; to live out a fantasy most people knew on a subconscious level was a stereotype projected through a warm color filter. Yet this became my life and I adored it.

One of our nightly meetings was interrupted by student protests deeper into autumn, so we moved the evening to the apartment in which I had been staying during my time in the city. I had been eating most of my dinners at the café, or occasionally at another restaurant on recommendation from my friends, plus the increasingly common nights when Élise and I would eat dinner just the two of us. If anyone knew about us, they kept it to themselves. The thrill of keeping ourselves a secret from her, or rather our, friends was a tad intoxicating in the best way.

It was a splash of home to be entertaining again. My mother always insisted on hosting the major holidays at our house, and to give my Parisian friends a taste of my life after living as they did for so long was heartwarming. They were slightly taken aback by my joy at inviting others into my living space at first, but their confusion quickly gave way to equal delight once I explained to them my reasoning. The food I prepared aided in my endeavors quite successfully.

I was lucky that my apartment had a window which could see across the river and the glittering lights of the city. Windows slightly open, carrying a breeze which floated the smell of the candles around the room made us feel connected to the city and cocooned in our own little world at the same time. The wine which accompanied another round of Jean-Phillippe’s boasting of some grand adventure he had by the Black Sea loosened tongues and led us to darker subjects.

My newfound friends had avoided asking me about the situation back home, but with the city in a slight state of agitation with the student protests and my origin being what it is, the question as to why I was in Paris finally took center stage. The academic discussion of politics clouded over my jubilant sunshine with a solemn gloom as we edged closer and closer to the elephant in the room.

Aymeric was a similarly somber individual. He sometimes felt more like a ghost observing us. My time with the group had opened me up to joviality more frequently, and I even got laughter out of Claire at least once every two or three nights, which is a better record than anyone else in the group. Aymeric, however, seldom spoke and laughed even less.

That night, he asked how I thought my country could resolve its current crisis peacefully. A dark laugh slipped from my core, which felt borderline psychotic in the flickering candlelight. My voice was cold and bitter, and I am certain that my expression radiated negativity in all manners. Jean-Phillippe looked uncomfortable with who I became in that moment.

“Violence is the only way forward; we’re past the point of no return.”

Then Aymeric asked, “How can you be here when your home threatens the world?”

The boldness stunned everyone in the room, except myself. I had been anxiously waiting for this particular hammer to drop for some time. The truth is, I wasn’t entirely sure why I stayed in Paris so long. If it was genuine fear, or a desire to build a life I could love even if it wasn’t where I had initially imagined it. To be reminded I was an outsider on thin ice was difficult.

So, I offered the distasteful truth as to why I had originally made my way to Paris.

“I wanted to see Paris before I die. I know blood will stain my hands and that I will not see the brighter tomorrow, so I wanted to give myself a gift before the storm arrives. Rest assured, when the wire snaps, I will be on the first flight home to die for the right reason.”

The brutal honesty stunned everyone in the room even worse than Aymeric’s question. I hadn’t meant to take such an accusatory tone, but I had to admit that my time in Paris was a way to delay my apportioned fate. It was uncomfortable coming clean about my mentality, as it threw open the doors to all the dark secrets and thoughts which had rattled around my head for far too long, unknown to my friends.

Aymeric’s hostility did not go unremarked upon by everyone else. Jean-Phillippe gave me one of the most genuine compliments I had ever received while rebuking Aymeric. He said, “What a tragic waste of such a beautiful soul it would be. Should you possess a fragment of his bravery, you would be far more noble a man!”

Needless to say, the debate quickly killed the night. One by one, my guests excused themselves leaving Élise and I alone. She collapsed onto the couch with a heavy solemnity while I cleaned up the remaining dishes and started to extinguish the candles. She told me the next morning she was grateful the shadows hid her tears.

That evening, however, silence hung above us, a blade ready to fall. I apologized for the inelegant way the truth was revealed, which she dismissed out of hand. She promised me it was despair for the situation, and none of it was directed at me. Lethargic as she was once the boiling pot had exploded, she shot her hand out to grab mine when I came to recover a plate of chocolate covered strawberries which remained half-finished when tensions flared. I brought her hand to my lips and kissed it as I knelt beside her. Her grip was so tight her knuckles turned white, as though I’d vanish if she let go.

Élise had said a while before that she adored the way I spoke to her and treated her. She had been burned once too many times by French men with honeyed words and insincere promises. What we fell into was so perfect in its simplicity, uncomplicated and genuine. Connection rather than cunning brought us together.

“I had tried to remember what this was, something temporary. Yet I never imagined an ending,” she whispered into my ear while her arms were wrapped around my neck. She breathed my name out, still slightly awkward on her lips even after all this time.

“My dear, if I didn’t have something I could avoid, I’d have worked every day towards putting a ring on your finger. This was only ever temporary because I was never fated to have a happy ending.”

We took our time getting up the next morning. Even with our respective responsibilities, there was a hesitancy to part ways for the day as we so easily had before. The last songs of the birds in the trees each morning were a funeral dirge. Every night at the café was a bitter remembrance. We never mentioned my inexact impending departure again, but the anxiety infected every member of our social circle. Sorrowful looks were traded constantly, and everyone would linger each night a hair longer than they wanted to merely because tomorrow was no longer promised.

Each of us watched the news with rapt interest. My anxious habits from home had finally caught up with me across the ocean and poisoned my loved ones as an insult to injury. One morning, three weeks after the conversation, the news broke. A nation fractured apart by sporadic gunfire. Battle lines were drawn and residents became refugees in an instant.

I hurriedly packed while Élise drifted through the apartment in tears assisting me. I took only the essentials, nothing sentimental. I was unsure how long those precious things would last. They were safer with her.

The whole crew arrived to see me off. They had abdicated their responsibilities for the day because, as Noelle put it, “Family is too important.” Every goodbye was heartrending. Aymeric apologized sincerely. Jean-Phillippe stained his shirt and mine with tears when he kissed my cheek farewell. Claire laughed a single laugh at my last attempt at a joke. Each and every one of them down the line made me feel as though death had already caught up to me.

Then came to Élise. Words were impossible to find for several minutes, so we held each other so tightly that we threatened to become one. Amidst the crowd of the typical Parisian indifference and impatience, we had no capacity to care what they thought of us.

“You were the sunshine in my winter, my love,” she said, voice cracking. Being poetic in English was never Élise’s strong suit, but she persisted for the sake of our farewell. The image of her green eyes begging me to stay, messy hair waving in the breeze, and the tremble in her lip as she tried to stop a sob will haunt me for my remaining days, however few they may be.

“Everything still left is yours, as it always was meant to be. Goodbye, my beloved. Remember me as I was.”

With one last somber, agonizing, devastating kiss, we parted ways for the final time. I couldn’t help but look back as I walked away. I was the Orpheus to her Eurydice; though death had not taken her, it had laid its claim to me. It was merely waiting across an ocean to collect. No trophies of my triumphs preceded me, but I had lived well in what would be my final few months to put to rest any fears of a life unfulfilling.

I only prayed that when she found the ring which was always meant to be hers, she didn’t curse my name too loudly.