Dumped, schmumped!
My first trip to Paris was my freshman year of college. I was a teaching assistant to my former French teacher, and we found a steal of a deal to Paris over spring break. I’m not sure how that even worked with 1999’s technology, but it happened. Good thing, too, because my boyfriend dumped me (again) a couple days before my trip. I remember sitting on that perfect-place-to-dump-someone park bench, thinking, “I. Have. To. Get. Out. Of. Here.” I wasn’t sure being in the City of Love was going to help or hurt the situation, but I was willing to risk it.
Stepping into the city for the first time, it was like “Boyfriend who?!” I had Paris! My heart skipped a beat marveling at the centuries-old perfection of Notre Dame. I literally got locked inside Père Lachaise Cemetery after paying my respects to my 70s dream hunk, Jim Morrison. I drank my sorrows away with wine out of a paper bag under the Eiffel Tower…which, incidentally, remains the only time I would consider intoxication feeling anything remotely close to “magical”.
At only 19 years old, France stole a piece of my heart.
No. Definitely no.
Since then, I have returned to France once or twice a year, I studied there twice, and I developed an intense infatuation with le midi. Every year, the frequency with which people ask, “So why don’t you live there?” increases. Each time, I see that same hint of wide-eyed surprise when my response is a fast and definite NO.
I love where I live, but I’m not a nationalist. In fact, I don’t even think a “best country” exists. I’m not overly tied to a job, to a house, or even my family (we’re all mobile), and it isn’t out of fear that I won’t move to France. What, then, is it? Why won’t I pull the trigger and move to a place that stirs my soul with every visit?
The answer is simple: I want to keep the magic alive.
Maintaining a Bit of Mystery
My friends laugh and think it’s weird that my husband and I do our own laundry. I disagree. You gotta keep a bit of mystery, I tell them! I imagine that his running clothes smell like a Provençal lavender field, and he can imagine that my underwear are much, much newer and nicer than they actually are. This is how I treat France.
If I’m only a visitor, France’s dirty secrets aren’t revealed. The seedy underbelly of an entire culture is kept at bay, and in my ignorance lies my bliss. More accurately, it’s not ignorance, because I’m aware of (many of) France’s issues. It’s more a matter of being selective in what I experience and how I choose to experience it. Just a few examples:
-As a non-resident, I look at the incessant strikes and find them culturally fascinating–even cute!–but as a resident? Oh, putain!
-Visiting, I know I will soon return to the Land of Healthy(-ier) Lungs, but if I lived in France, I’d likely take to yelling at every smoker I saw about their infringement on my air and the affront to my senses. And if I yelled at every smoker, I obviously wouldn’t have time for a job, and I’d end up destitute, which really doesn’t fit my romantic view of The Motherland, now does it?
-The French have a centuries-old history of being pessimistic. As an American, I am almost inherently not. I tell my students that if cultures were pets, Americans would be Labradors! Despite it being sometimes ill-advised, or even foolish, I love that Americans are optimistic, and I want to guard that naïveté. (Although there are periods where our optimism is put to the test, and although we might not notice this quality on the daily, it truly is a hallmark of our culture.) An American friend who lived in France for a while told me when she left that she couldn’t handle the pessimism any longer; she started to feel it sink in, and she didn’t like how it changed her. She didn’t like how it changed how she felt about France.
A Modern Relationship
So I make a choice: I choose to let France court me. Every time I’m there, the country gets to take me on a new date, attempting to convince me that the beauty I see all around me in its places, its people, its customs and–oh, yes–in the food, are just the way France is, day in and day out. I can tell myself that France measures like Mary Poppins (“Practically perfect in every way“), and there’s magic in that belief. I choose to create a situation for myself in which France always gets to put its best foot forward, a situation where it can shine and only shine.
My relationship with France is like that old Patricia Kaas song, “Mon Mec à Moi” where she sings: il dit des mots menteurs / et moi je crois tout ce qu’il dit. France does lie to me, but only by omission, and like Patricia, I believe everything it says.