On the weekend we went to see Paris, Je T’aime. It was patchy, as you would expect a bunch of short films strung together to be. There were funny ones and sad ones and silly ones. But there was one story, the very last one, that moved me profoundly:
Now, I hate Paris. I spent three days there when I was 18, and I was sick the whole time. I dragged myself around the sights, vomiting in the gutter as I went. The thought of Paris just makes me feel nauseous even now. (Later I found out I was pregnant at the time, but that’s another story.)
While I didn’t feel anything other than sick in Paris, I have felt all those feelings that she describes so simply in her school-girl French. I have mostly always travelled alone, and that lonely, lost, disappointed feeling as I wandered around a new place is a very familiar one.
But I have also felt that bittersweet euphoria, and it is one of the best feelings I have ever had. Among other places, I have felt it on a hill among the wild rosemary in the south of France; while freezing in St Basil’s Cathedral in Moscow; and almost every day that I was in Japan.
I will always be glad that I travelled alone, because I don’t think you can feel like that in company. It is so linked to solitude, that feeling, that it never occurred to me that other people might feel it too. That is why this story moved me so deeply.
