Foggy windows on the train. Partly, due to the weather—it’s pouring rain and the humidity does not sit well with my hair. The other part, I’m certain, is from our breaths. Everyone that has just joined the train has been panting out of breath. Something tells me they’ve been running to catch the train too. Not for 4 mins down a hill, like I did, but they have done some running of some sort. There has been a strike this morning—The trains are running on a really slow schedule, and if I had missed the excessively humid train I’m sitting on I would have had to wait another hour and a half for the next one! (In the cold!)
It’s the last day of fashion month, and I’m as foggy with my emotions as the kind I wiped off the windows of the train to see the the view of the Eiffel Tower more clearly—it’s not like that did me any good, the Eiffel Tower is basically invisible underneath the murk.
Off the train now and out into the cold. It’s raining cats and dogs. The Louis Vuitton show is a long walk away. I’ve just ran into two familiar faces; one advises me to go back home because it’s terrible weather out there, and the other familiar face, I will later find out took a shortcut to the show (I wish knew about this shortcut earlier…walking though puddles of water is never any fun).
Fondation Louis Vuitton, where the Louis Vuitton show is happening, is a remarkable structure, but I can’t admire it for too long—-the rain is throwing a fit! My fingers are red and numb, but they have learned not to complain. They can still click when they see a beautiful dress, people running in the rain, the faces of models, and the Louis Vuitton building from a thousand different angles. My big bouncy curls (I spent all of last night styling) have straightened into depressing strings dripping with water from the downpour, but I’m not entirely upset because I got some really cool photos and Fashion Week will be over in a few hours!
The last day of Fashion Week is always bittersweet. You are happy it is finally over and sad to see it go, but I have bigger problems. I’m still a cluster of emotions seeing Paris again. Part of me feels like I never left. Everything feels like yesterday. I find my way to old places without really thinking of how to get there. My feet just know which corners to turn, and by the time I see, I’m there.
It’s been exactly two years since I was last here—Nothing has changed. My french, on the other hand, is embarrassingly terrible. I get really annoyed now when I start speaking French and someone thinks to respond “You speak English?” That rarely happened in the past. I, however, understand french almost perfectly, so it’s either my accent is to the sh*ts or my verb conjugations need a refresher.
I’m a cluster of emotions because, although everything feels familiar, everything feels new, brighter, bigger; and I feel little, overwhelmed, in love, awake, like I’m truly looking at Paris with my eyes opened for the first time, as if I’ve been asleep all the while I’ve been here in the past.
I trace my fingers on the edge of the Pont Alexandre III bridge. There’s almost no one here and it’s starting to rain again. I’m waiting for my friends to show up for a picnic we have planned at the Grand Palais. We are celebrating the end of Fashion month. Miu Miu was our last show, and my emotions were blank when it ended. I wasn’t sad, I wasn’t happy, I was…just emotionless. Fashion week was finally over and I thank God because it really was a wonderful fashion week; I had learned so many things, met so many people, and now the world was before me.
“Did you see Batman the Dark Knight rises?” My new friend at the picnic said, “Sometimes you have to let go of the safety net you are holding onto and jump!” Maybe that was the answer. Maybe it wasn’t. We continued to enjoy our picnic into the night: Bread, wine, cheese, salmon, ham, beer, chips, cookies, cake, candy. We laughed into the cold rainy night: new friends, old friends, photographers, models.
Fashion month is over.
The next morning, I will wake up pretending not to have fallen sick. Putain!