Some part of me wants to believe that if I move to Paris, my depression will be cured.
It’s a ridiculous sentiment to be sure, I’m old enough and smart enough, to know that there is no person or place that can burn the sadness out of me. But somehow in Paris, it seems possible.
It’s the same feeling you get as a kid stepping into Disney for the firs time and it’s like every dream you ever had has life breathed into it. You feel dizzy and lightheaded and your chest tightens like a cardiac arrest of the imagination because nothing you could dream up would be better than this.
I had different dreams for myself. I did not know that life would be so much. That this what I would look like at 21, that this is what my heart would feel like, that I would carry so many secrets.
But Paris somehow makes my childhood musings tangible again. Makes my wildest, deepest dreams only barely past my fingertips. Maybe I can be a writer. Maybe I will feel love. Maybe the life I have written for myself isn’t the right one.
It is a city that breathes with art and love and poetry and all the things that have kept me alive. It is a coping mechanism with a zip code.
It’s funny, French stories never have a happy ending, but Paris makes me believe I just might get mine.
Diary of a mad brown girl 