Go to Paris

Go to Paris when the lights start to dim. When your eyes strain to see, the small muscles around them contracting and stretching to capture the palest bits of color, and the recollection of your favorite moments of sunlight begin to fade. 

Go to Paris when your bones become heavy. The gravity of the planet hangs from every joint and tendon like an iron bell, and the soft pit of your bed pulls at you like the eye of dark, swirling waters. 

Go to Paris when your thoughts go to black. The gentle meadows of your mind, once a chaotic haven of effervescence, are hollowed out for stones used to build the cold fortresses that keep you. Catacombs of nightmares, deep mines of shame, obscured caves of despair.

Go to Paris when you’ve forgotten the meaning of life. When you wake with a spark of fear, you are moved by the undercurrent of doom, you sleep under a blanket of heavy dread. If you look out your window and impassive absence stares back, and the joy of a child feels like a star in a far removed galaxy rather than the sweet air in your lungs, and you’ve lost the definition between this world and the next

go to Paris. 

In Paris, the ancient and the modern dance as lovers throughout the city, paving the streets in mystery and promise. 

You will find new dreams on your tongue, the flavors of wine and the bite of soft bread breaking open the old colors in your head. 

The people will walk through you; they are smoke, they are paint, they are blood. 

You will walk. You will walk, and walk, and walk. You will turn street corners, littered in skittering trash, unmanaged by the municipality, stinking of indefatigable detritus, and come face to face with astounding beauty, with a choir of angels in ripped jeans, with a surviving emblem of man’s capacity for devotion and love. 

Paris is a candle of wax, forever melting from its eternal flame of joy, sorrow, tears, blood, fraternity, passion, waste, artistry, adventure, wildness, beauty, and vitality. In the streets of Paris, you will have no choice but to remember life. The walls are swollen with it, the roads are cracked from it, the food is infused with it, the drink mixed with it. 

Paris will break you. All things that make life worth living will crawl in through the cracks and sleep in the empty places inside you. You may be less whole, and you’ll certainly be less hollow. 

Go to Paris.