Dear June: Week 4

June,

My stomach is in knots as I type you this farewell. I just had to check my calendar and count the weeks to be sure we had come to this. Anyways, I will try to put down in words what has been keeping me up at night for the past couple of days.

When I first arrived here, I thought the ten months I had in this city would ooze by slowly like the melted chocolate in my morning pain au chocolat, but as christmas passed and winter snowballed into spring, I found myself grappling to hold on to this newfound home, this place I had nested in. It is a funny thing being a permanent visitor, a temporary installation, here just long enough to call it my home and *nearly* cease missing the one I left behind, long enough to fall into a routine, but not long enough to stay. Not long enough to be anything more than another tourist who didn't want to leave quite yet. And it stings a little bit, when reality shades back into focus and the brilliant splendor of my year-long daydream comes to a shimmering close, like the night we laid under the eiffel tower as its final one a.m. supernova bursted and collapsed into a black hole of what used to be.

I remember thinking to myself - one night in my tiny studio, staring at the ceiling - that these are the days I will remember. When I'm stuck in class, at work, at home... when I'm old and my legs have given up their ability to chase after the world like a child after a kite string... and I willed myself to hold on tighter. But that's the thing when you're inside a dream like Paris... it's impossible to soak it all up, take it all in, make a part of you what is such an entity of its own. And I think that's why we come here, why we - as artists - become so addicted to it. Because it's everything we strive to be: the enigma and the sheer beauty, the unadulterated prettiness of it, like the poem by Stevie Smith.

I am in my last few days here. And as much as my tiny fingers strain to hold on, I will never be more than a visitor. And I think, June, that I like it better that way.

Here are a few of the photos I have taken in your days and weeks, June. Thank you for giving them to me.

Love always, and see you soon June,

Coral