“If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast.”
― Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast
It was an early autumn that was creeping over the streets of Paris that August of 2004. I had arrived for that glorious waste of scholarship and money known collectively as the "semester abroad." I had been to Paris and its environs many times before, but never to live.
The details of my stay must be left for another time. I met wonderful people, many of whom have remained, in one way or another, great friends. I lost myself in copious bouts of bacchanalia, wandering the wet twilight streets at dawn and spent my time otherwise reveling in the platitudinous ways all others have before me. But the most permeating of those memories, the one that continues to creep into my everyday contemporary life causing me to stop and turn away in remorse and sadness, is the absolute freedom one feels by conversely being confined to the historical enigma of that place, contrasted with the very real and present sense of fleeting youth.
I have been back since then many times, though it has never felt quite the same. In the end I know I am doomed to a fate of longing. I miss that place in that time like no other experience in my life. I miss the rain and the shuffling of masses and the dreariness and the old crumbling stones. I miss the history at every turn and the smells of food and people and I miss the churches' silent placidity. But most of all I miss feeling tied to something bigger than myself, through no other action than by simply being there.
