Rain drops in Paris that glimmer like scales on cobblestone streets. The Sacre-Coure where I once fell in love with myself again, I woke up at sunrise to take it all in. It's cloudy and chill and my socks are wet from puddles. But no second time is like the first -- I'm coming from the other side, and so I see parts I had never seen before, the steep staircase and ski lift that takes you up from this side to the cathedral and the most divine view of the city. It's raining in Paris and I'm caught in it.
You'll be somewhere better when you're gone
You'll be wrapped in tongues that never tell
We spend the day walking to the Arc de Triomphe, down the Champs-Elysees and past the Moulin Rouge and back to the apartment. Along the way, we stumbled upon the cemetery I found four years ago, the one whose name I didn't get before (Cemetiere de Montmartre) and I found the statue that inspired me to write this poem way back then.
We do not think at all, really
We breathe, we move...
from want of excess
to want of scarcity
Never balanced, always tipping
over the edge
Until someone walks by our tombstone
and says,
"She must have been loved."
I don't understand how I can keep looking around me, and seeing the world, and keep falling in love with it all. I'm constantly falling in love with the silliest of places. At every corner -- Iowa, New Hampshire, Paris -- it doesn't matter; I see a future where I'm turning around it. And I allow myself to imagine that future, the decades that would come, its tragedy and wonder. But I know I can never turn them. It fills me with this bone-deep sadness and I can hardly breathe. What terrible beauty, all of this is.
