A love letter, of sorts, to Paris — from a foreigner

My Paris is the broken signal box and monday morning commuters stuffing into the delayed metro like soggy baguettes, overcooked in winter jackets and trying to protect our ridiculous white basket runners from being sullied by wet winter urban grime.

My Paris is bad English and worse tourist French.

My Paris is VOSTF and sitting in cinema seats that are too small, in rooms that are either too hot or too cold, eating cardboard popcorn and wondering if Coolock was really as good as it gets.

My Paris is rats and piss by the Seine, a hundred hungry people queuing for a hot meal on wet Monday nights and beggars in the metro, apologising for the gêne occasioned.

My Paris is soldiers on the streets and forcing myself to not stare at them- just in case.

My Paris is CRS aiming for the eye; it’s metro strikes, school strikes, petrol protests, pension strikes, tax protests, train strikes, bin strikes, reform protests; it’s going to a climate march and getting tear gassed for the first time; it’s gilet jaunes buring cars and building barricades, and the black block tearing up the champs elysées and using its cobble stones as weapons; it’s smashed banks and the weekly friday evening ritual of luxury shops bordering up their windows.

My Paris is tourists pretending to avoid it all and living their best lives by taking the five same selfies in the five same places in the five same poses.

My Paris is passing the endless procession of models and brides desperate for a photo that will change their lives; my Paris is Fashion Week, but never being invited.

My Paris is lonely weekend afternoon walks, stained by red wine and coffee, imagining what it would be like to be someone important.

My Paris is getting lost trying to find the cheap train in Montparnasse, and missing it.

My Paris is the strained friendship of a relationship that for some reason never got started and now is too late, and the lost heart of an old friend fighting a war of attrition against life to find his place.

My Paris is poetry dredging up the stale colours of failure and disappointment and personal discontent and blending them together into some sort of burnished alloy that has all the more beauty for its stains.

My Paris is €9 pints of bad Guinness and €3 glasses of good wine.

My Paris is jazz.

My Paris is John Hamon’s smugly inscrutable smile and wondering who the fuck he is but feeling happy that he’s up there on that wall anyway.

My Paris is Falafel in the Marais and being with pals having summer beers on the canal.

My Paris is Saturday mornings in the boulangerie and being amazed by how so many people can be so specific about how they like their bread.

My Paris is getting another Carafe d’eau because the first seven table water glasses were so small you wonder how French people don’t shrivel up and die from dehydration.

My Paris is being able to breath and wander in the empty city in August, but still somehow not being able to get a seat on the metro.

My Paris is Big George Jacques Danton standing in his cast iron statue, like O’Connell himself; his last words before the Guillotine, as impertinent as his life: Show my head to the people, it’s worth the effort.

My Paris is early mornings at work, and praying that you’ll be lucky enough to get a fresh-out-of-the-over pain au chocolat, because you know they know how good they are — and — in a tiny gesture of human kindness, they always give you the warm ones, even though there’s already some laid out; and you feel it in sagging under it’s buttery weight as you walk to work and when you eat it, it’s thick and falls away from the bone like slow cooked shredded beef.

My Paris is pretentious afternoons in museums only to eventually realise that you might be able to see some beauty in art after all.

My Paris is fast piano in St Lazare and students signing gospel pop with belting voices and once or twice pretending to wait for a train, but really going for no other reason than to watch them sing.

My Paris is being so insistently, overwhelmingly, unrelentingly, intolerably, indefatigably, unwaveringly, psychopathically, impossibly, tyrannically, oppressively, despotically pleasant

that the grumpy doctor’s office receptionist or the bureaucrat or even — god help us- the car hire sales rep will have their brutal blasé, soûlé insouciance cracked open to reveal the human spirit deeply buried within layers of Parisian cool.

My Paris is remembering being under the sun and kissing that girl by the Seine and feeling the dense silk of her beautiful red dress on my fingers.

My Paris is Haussman; And who cares if the signal box is mise en panne because when you walk in this city thinking of Cezanne and Rodin you feel lucky to live in this architectural plan.

My Paris is feeling superior to the clichéd tourists visiting Shakespeare and Co- even though I still go.

My Paris is pretending not to love the Eiffel Tower, but watching it through rain streaked windows everytime you pass it in a late night taxi, and being secretly happy to see it’s sweeping radar light beam, orbiting the whole sky, keeping you there.

My Paris is watching Notre Dame burn and beginning to learn that maybe I’m not just a visitor anymore.

My Paris is Place Dauphin and beating the aul lads at pétanque on your first go, even though they were much better than you and struggling to stifle a laugh as you watch them getting annoyed at each other when your beginners’ look doesn’t seem to fade.

My Paris is the water colour scene at Pont Des Arts after its rained; my Paris is deep pinks and glowing oranges of evening in April; it’s contrails curving over an endless blue dome in summer; it’s slate greys and blues and cream stone walls changing hues.

My Paris is reading under the willow tree on Île de La Cité.

My Paris is conversation.

My Paris is home, for now.