If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then you will have it with you always, wherever you go, for Paris is a moveable feast.
~Hemingway

I know I should be grateful for getting to live in such a wonderful place for so long... Forget Paris, forget Europe, I just mean this apartment. And Madame. I know I should be grateful to have lived with her for a year...
And I am, so much that it hurts.

I had my last dinner with Madame tonight, and as soon as we finished I almost started crying right there while we cleared the table. This woman is amazing; she has such amazing stories, and she is SO patient with my bad French and so sweet when she tells stories and always has to stop in the middle to think of synonyms for whatever she wants to say so that I will understand.
I want to go to California so much I can’t even explain it to you. But I love this place (city, neighborhood, lifestyle, apartment) so much that it kills me to think about it. Madame has become the French mother I needed to make it through all the confusion of living here for the first time. I’ll be back, I know it– I don’t think I really have a choice. But it will never be the same to come back and NOT live in this wonderful apartment with one of the most amazing people I have ever met. I wish I could explain to you just WHY she is so cool– part of it is her stories, part of it is how every now and then I walk into the kitchen to see her cooking endives in pressed pants with the whitest oxford button-down shirt on, collar, of course, up in the back and folded in the front, but most of it is just her hilarious mannerisms– the way she mutters "zut!" and the way she is always, unfailingly, the most gracious hostess I have ever met.

I had a really amazing friend who used to ask me all the time to sum things up for her: "If you had only one word to describe yourself, what would it be?" and "Top 3 events of this semester– go!" and "Favorite Christmas carol and Christmas pop song?" If she were here now, she would ask me for one word to describe my time in Paris, and though that seems an extremely weighty question, the answer would, of course, be adventure.

It seems nothing that happens in France affects me as being normal. Everything here will always stick out in my mind as being either So Wonderful or Completely Awful (but still an adventure, either way). Mind-numbingly beautiful or heart-wrenchingly ugly. From the things that have happened to me (getting mono and getting my dream job) to the things I have seen in this city that have nothing to do with me (the Louvre and the homeless people), it seems that nothing here is just... average. I’ll miss that feeling of spinning out of control, of being totally given over to the beauty of every situation I find myself in, because no matter the situation, there was always (after my first six days here) the sensation that it was only just real enough to make an adventure, not real enough to permanently affect anything.
~B