I’m sitting on the Eurostar back to London after a few days in Paris with my sister and her boyfriend. We stayed in a little attic apartment in Le Marais and had a lovely time strolling around the city, sitting in cafes, wandering through galleries, cooking, drinking wine and eating offensively footy cheeses.
It’s been a couple years since I visited the city and I’d forgotten how seductive it is. I fell in love all over again on every street corner, with every beautiful Parisian that passed by.
Comparisons don’t always help much, but Paris has a beauty and infectious bon-vivantism that London can’t touch. It’s such a celebration.
Many of my friends say living in Paris is terrible and depressing and it kills the romance, but as I look toward the new year and my expiring UK visa, I see opportunity there - just like I’ve seen it in Barcelona and Budapest and a dozen other cities.
For a while, I’ve been viewing my boot from the UK (if I do get the boot) as a sentence to go back home, but in the end I can go almost anywhere if I’m willing to fight hard and make concessions. I made a lot of them to stay in London and even now, the fight is still daily for me.
I guess I’ll fight a daily battle wherever I end up next, though: my struggle with the world is not linked to geography, it’s deeper than that; it’s a battle with myself, with my ambitions and with the meaning of life. I can’t shut that off. There’s no snooze button for philosophical crises.
In the end, going back to Canada isn’t such a bad option, if that’s what happens. It would be great to spend more time with my family. Seeing them once a year is the worst. It puts too much pressure on hellos and far too much weight on goodbyes.
I do want the adventure of new places and spaces - it’s good for me to live outside my comfort zone, to start fresh, rebuild and learn to understand the world and myself in different ways. It would be nice if I could achieve that without neglecting relationships that are important to me.
Living abroad and having the freedom and mobility that accompanies that is an amazing privilege, but it also demands sacrifices and trade-offs. Saying goodbye to my sister today - and every time - hammers that message home.
Home - now there’s a difficult concept.
