Two steps forward, five steps to the side
(Detours, both the romantic and inconvenient)
Moving to a new country is all I think about lately, if you haven’t noticed. The immigration horrors back in America make it impossible not to think about, really. I’m trying to immigrate myself and every week I wonder when the USA passport is going to just get rejected as a way to retaliate for what’s going on. But serious-and-very-real drama aside, one thing that I’ve had to get accustomed to since moving is the concept of a detour.
In France, you take a lot of detours. Your package will never arrive when it says it will, and when you finally do receive it, something will be wrong and it will inevitably be your fault instead of whomever sent you the package. Your washing machine will rip apart a single unsuspecting shirt but everything else in the load will be fine; and when you dry things, it will legitimately take 4 hours to complete and everything will be wrinkled. You will accidentally forget one line on one piece of paper and instead of filling it out there and moving on with your day, you will be sent home and you will have to start over completely before getting back in line with your 100% complete paper. All of these things will cost you more time.
And these things have introduced a frustration like I’ve never known before. It’s not quite rage but something else that’s relatively new to me: suffocating helplessness. Being at the mercy of so many inconveniences feels like watching my competency drown in front of me. And if it were one or two things here and there (the norm) that would be something else. But this is death by a thousand cuts, death by a thousand French inconveniences.
For the past 6 months of living here, it’s been overwhelming to navigate at times, I admit. There have been days where I’ve had to rearrange my entire schedule because a furniture delivery just didn’t show up. One step forward and five steps to the side.
But I’ve come to realize that these are not the only detours I’ve taken in France.
When I was visiting in 2023, I was by myself and working through some heavy things. I had also just visited Ireland with my best friend at the time and we met a Canadian family there, and one of the sons decided to come with me to this chateau in the middle of the Loire Valley. It wasn’t a romantic thing by any means, and ended up being a very annoying situation actually. But as is custom in this country, on the last day of our stay at the chateau, the trains got canceled. I was eager to leave this man and I had an event back in Paris that was important to me. The train being canceled was…incredibly fucking inconvenient.
I had heard these girls talking about an app called Blablacar earlier in the week…it’s like Airbnb meets Uber. People who are willing to carpool in their personal car list their pick-up/drop-off destinations and you submit a request to join them. Sounded horrific to me at the time, to be honest. But we had no other option.
I begrudgingly asked the Canadian if he wanted to do it with me because I was afraid of getting murdered à la Blablacar. He was in the same position and agreed. In order to make it more secure, they required that you upload every single social proof and official document that you have for faster verification; I gave it all except I didn’t upload a profile photo because I my name is masculine in France (Morgane is female, Morgan is male lol) and I wanted to stifle any creepy interactions.
When I started the verification process, there was a woman relatively close who was going to Paris around the time we needed. Perfect; I rushed to fill out all the info. By time I finished, her listing was gone. I panicked. There was a new one that had replaced it; a man going to the exact neighborhood where I was staying, near the event. It was 11pm when I saw it and we were scheduled to leave the next day so I had very little hope that this guy would accept to my no-profile-last-minute request.
When I woke up at 7am, I feverishly checked. He had accepted.
We rushed to meet this man and I was so annoyed by the presence of the aforementioned Canadian that I asked the driver if it was okay that I sit in the front seat. He said something like, “Of course; I’m not an Uber.” We drove for 3.5 hours in mostly silence and later that night when he dropped me off, I had a feeling I’d see him again. We dated for the next 6 months, and I fell in love.
Okay so yes this is the extreme Netflix-special of detours, but there have been others too. And I had to remind myself recently that this is the tradeoff in Paris. You have a few incredibly inconvenient detours and then every now and again it will introduce you to something that will change your life. Because that train was canceled, I met that man, because I met that man I started to seriously consider the possibility of moving to Europe, and because of that serious consideration, I’m writing this to you from a cafe in Paris, just down the street from my new apartment.
Romantic detours, inconvenient ones, and then this weird mysterious space in between. That relationship didn’t work out, and it’s been an on-and-off complex thing for me for the past three years. I can’t pretend that I’ve worked through all of it yet, but I am also aware that there’s a possibility that maybe it just took that train being canceled, it took me meeting that man and feeling something so intensely that it pushed me to where I am now. I have always been in awe of the timing of my life and this is no exception.
I’ll finish this letter with one more. I had a busy week at work last week and because I’m still doing California hours, I was having some late nights. By Friday, I finished around 11pm and I was eager to get out of my apartment. I had been running a lot that week and as you’ve heard me complain about several times before, I don’t live in Paris for their cocktails. And you’d think that I’d love to sit down with a glass of wine after my long week but no. NO. I just finished my wine program and I need a break. I wanted a beer. A really big, really cold beer.
There’s a bar that I used to live across from that’s close by called Cristal. I don’t know that my description could ever do it justice but it’s something like a college bar. It’s not quite dive-y but definitely not high brow. The average age of the crowd is probably 25 years old. It’s messy and the energy is hiiiiigh. Plus, they play Abba at midnight. It’s charming. It’s harmless…normally.
I met a small group while I was enjoying my harmless beer. One thing led to another, and I suddenly find myself with my second mezcal cocktail at a club that they work at. My French was dead, I was proper tipsy, and I laughed almost the entire time. In the middle of a magnetic conversation with one of them, we were told that someone was hurt and they needed help. While he went to the back to address the situation, I decided to take myself home sometime before 4am and I woke up with a little hangover souvenir. So yes, another detour. A moment where time feels suspended and bizarre and romantic.
Next time the French washing machine ruins my American t-shirt I will try to remember this.