“I have no idea how people function without near-constant internal chaos. I’d lose my mind.”

A perfect day today. A perfect train ride through the perfectly beautiful French countryside with my perfect friends to the beautiful Chartres where we spend a perfect Sunday. Walking idly through the empty town, stopping to peer into quaint store windows. Sandwiches and beers and cigarettes on the grass behind the magnificent, astounding cathedral, laying under the sun, laughing, talking, nothing. Ida and I want to stay out sleeping under the perfect sky, Steve and the rest want to go look in the church. “This is what Sundays are for,” I say, my eyes still shut, my face warm. “Yes,” says Steve. “Sundays are for going to church, right, so let’s go?” I pause, consider, turn, lift my sunglasses. “Nature is my church,” and Ida laughs and I laugh and we say “it’s true” and don’t move. Somebody has released thousands and thousands of tiny strips of perfect white paper over the wall and onto the grass where we lay and the float over us, the wind carrying them perfectly. Finally we get up and walk into the building itself. I’m speechless. It doesn’t almost make me want to be religious but it maybe almost makes me want to be something.
And afterwards, somebody suggests drinks, and we find the most perfect cozy café and sit in a corner and sing along to A-ha and drink our perfectly cheap, delicious French beer. Finally it’s getting late, we want cigarettes and a train, so we find both, and we are back zooming through the fields and the most perfect sunset, all of us half-asleep on each other’s shoulders. Occasionally remarking on nothing or something, to nobody or to somebody, it doesn’t matter, every word hangs perfectly in the air in our little compartment, taking us back to the most perfect city in the world.

I will pay the price for all of this perfection though, another week of métro/boulot/dodo repeat repeat repeat repeat. Mornings have become my only time, a few small minutes to sip Earl Grey and perhaps even read before I’m out the door, on the train, at school, between classes, classes, classes, train, at work, and finally stumble home into my bed. Constanty turned on at full speed, my brain is working, working, working. Planning, planning planning. Calling, texting about these tickets to London, or those tickets to Belgium, or Blonde Redhead, or the bar tonight or the café tomorrow or whatever it is I’m trying to squeeze in to my airtight schedule. Constantly shuffling through my agenda, hastily flipping through the pages, momentarily heartbroken when it lands on a date after December, because in December it will be over and everything will be different and Paris won’t be mine anymore.