The Price of Getting (Almost) Everything You Wanted

On the parts of living abroad that never make the grid.

It was a smooth flight from Newark to Orly. I can’t write “smooth flight home” because I can no longer say with clarity which is which. I’m coming up on eight years in Paris. Eight years since I locked the door on my Williamsburg loft for the last time and headed toward JFK with a takeout deep-fried cheeseburger (from an erstwhile Slovakian resto in Park Slope) and a one-way ticket on Norwegian Air (a transatlantic route that has also been discontinued).

French Bee hit us with a little upgrade. Mimi fell asleep before takeoff and didn’t stir until the seatbelt sign illuminated and the flight attendants perched for landing. I downed a glass of champagne, popped an OTC sleep aid, and drifted off to Little Miss Sunshine (an early-aughts indie film with a banger of a cast that I will report, dear reader, holds up!).

We breezed through customs. I didn’t get sequestered by border agents, as usually happens to me, on account of my paperwork for the temporary lift on Mimi’s interdiction de sortie de territoire. (You can read that backstory here.) My seven-year-old, metro-riding socialist didn’t put up a fight when I told her, “We’re definitely taking a taxi.”

A cab is whisking Mimi and me, her head resting in my lap, from the Left Bank to the Right. I’ve tapped my already-rusty French to successfully negotiate the cab fare, which blinks 52 euros on the meter, but I know by now that the prefecture-set standard rate from Orly is 45. I gaze out the window, taking in the relative quiet of Paris on the cusp of August. My eyes drift along the tea-stained Haussmannian façades; the deep blue street signs that look like mini briefcases; waiters emerging from doorways balancing trays of wine glasses and carafes. It all seems like vignettes of someone else’s life. I’m certain that I live in the most beautiful city in the world. And yet, something inside me wilts like the tangled leaves of the monstera plant barely surviving in my un-AC’d apartment.

My friend Bea recently penned a piece for Dazed about the trend towards earnestness in art. She ends it with this:

“Personal experience, no matter how honestly or ‘bravely’ it’s articulated, must offer the audience more than the knowledge that it was sincerely felt.”

I inject personal experience into a lot of my writing. But I push myself to consider: What is the point of this, for the reader? Why should they give the teensiest fuck, not to mention a sliver of their precious time?

I suppose I’m writing this because, like many wannabe modern-day Hemingways in Paris, I do share those rose-tinted vignettes, and people sometimes tell me that I’m “living the dream,” which is just about the most obnoxious thing you can commit to words. But this life was, for a very long time, my dream. I am a writer in Paris. I eat a lot of excellent food, oftentimes for free, and I interview dedicated and inspired restaurant people. I get to sit around, frequently in men’s Uniqlo boxers, and craft stories about it all.

But grid photos and restaurant write-ups rarely transmit the cost of living here. I feel the weight, like a boulder, heavier than ever after a month back in New York, surrounded by my people. They say the grass is always greener, and I’m saying that feeling travels every direction.

Our taxi shuttles across a bridge over the Seine. A giant Ferris wheel appears, and I know how goosebump-pretty the view is from way up there—to the dome of Sacré-Cœur and all the mansard roofs in between. Meanwhile, my mind swirls with sounds and glimpses of where I’ve been: the red string lights in the K-town karaoke joint, bashfulness giving way to determination as I belt out “In the Navy,” saluting in tandem with my best friend Ari, who I’ve known since I was two years old; the jingle of the ice cream guy’s bells in LBI and the Pavlovian response of our kids, who slap together their sandy hands and sprint up the beach, trailed by my mom, dutifully trudging behind them with her wallet, stuffed tighter than a chorizo; holding my best friend Brady’s newborn baby, Maple, in my arms at a wood-fired pizza joint in a tiny mountain village, feeling her warmth against me like a tender little meatball; my brother, tending to steaks with surgical care, nipping at a tumbler of Japanese whisky while the barbecue sizzles; my sister’s contagious laugh and unwavering optimism as we lead our gaggle of kids up and down the island of Manhattan, the way my stress melts when she assures me, “They’re having a ball.” The next day, riding across two Catskills towns just to buy potato knishes, then sitting in the Stewart’s parking lot, squeezing spicy brown mustard packets onto the pillowy, potato-y goodness. When summer days move that slow, it felt like a thing to do.

The feeling of being known—not for what I’ve written or where I’ve traveled, but for who I am. Seen as a person who’s Borscht Belt-witty and prone to daydreaming and, at times, a little too rigid, and loved for all of those parts. Admiring my friends and family and the lives they’ve built that I mostly only get to observe from a great distance.

You can love the life you’ve cobbled together abroad and be excited to return to it, while at the same time feeling a needle-sharp wistfulness each time you’re reminded of the people you’ve found yourself so far from—and of the life you can imagine for yourself had you stayed. When living in the most picturesque snow globe in the world, the grass back home seems fresh-cut-lawn green. So green I can smell it.

I returned to Paris, heart heavy with moments and people I cherish, wishing I’d done more—that I’d stayed up a little later with my brother and sister; that I’d skipped a morning jog to just sit and sip coffee with my mom as she looked out our solarium windows over the woods. Occasionally, she’ll dart to the door and onto the porch to get a better view—the fox that pops out from under the giant rocks; the blind bear that lumbers through the ferns. “Cait, come see,” she’ll call to me in a whisper that holds the heavy vowels of her Bronx roots. I wish I were around more often to spy on locals with her.

Back in the 9th arrondissement, I unpacked our carry-on suitcases as soon as I got home. I stashed my American charger in the kitchen drawer and plugged in the Euro one to charge my devices. Mimi and I went to our favorite sushi spot just down the street. The next day, I dropped her off at her dad’s. A childless month stretched ahead of me like an interminable runway.

In August, I have a full itinerary—Brittany and the Pyrenees; Vienna and Geneva and a couple of nights in Burgundy. Some of it is for assigned stories, some of it is for stories that are still coming together in my head, and some of it is for pure pleasure—eating buckwheat galettes with butter-crisp edges and amber-hued yolky eggs washed down with the crispest cider while sitting on the edge of cliffs that jut out into the endless green-blue sea kind of pleasure. Even if I’ll be doing a scaled-back version of ‘work’ most of the time, it’s a summer plan that would have sounded delusional back when I was living in New York, navigating two annual weeks of PTO.

I’m heading off with plenty of anticipation, but I also welcome the distraction—from the imperceptible hole left by the closeness I felt during a month in New York that always passes too fast; and the foregone possibilities that felt so real.

What I'm excited for, back in Paris!

• Trâmette

• Akatcha, the new spot from 228 litres

• Le Poisson Volant, the new spot from the Cornichon team

• Bus Palladium — still haven’t been.

• Le Chateaubriand — what the hell, I still haven’t been. As a French food journalist recently DM’d me: IL FAUT UNE FOIS DANS SA VIE. [his caps, not mine.]

• Alsooooo, The 75 Interviews are on summer hiatus, but I’m excited to dive back in in the fall. Who should I interview? New and now is nice but not necessary. Most importantly, it has to be a spot that people love, and want to return to. Drop your suggestions in the comments!!