I go to Paris every night.

Ah, isn't it marvelous?
What a lush lifestyle I lead...

But let me clarify; it's not the clean, tourist-friendly, manicured part of Paris that I visit each evening. No, it's something much more robust– the seedy underbelly of a north-western Parisian suburb called Sartrouville. The place I go has some real character to it, and not the kind you see in the movies. This place has a story etched in the cracks of aging drywall and graffitied on stone walls older than the country in which I was born. This story was left out of the history books; it was neither glorified nor white-washed nor ironed out and put into picture books to be read at bedtime, followed by tucking in and exchanging bisous.

———

The place I go is where, upon first introductions, people kiss one another on the cheek; my temperament flourishing in this new, platonic sentiment; the memory of handshakes morphing into something disaffected, unfriendly, cold.

Where everyone smokes cigarettes like the air they breathe; the once-appalling stench becoming strangely familiar— strangely comforting— like the unpleasant, musty spice of your grandpa's basement which carries you swiftly to a place of complete amenity.

Where everything is more petite; the cars, the rooms, the beds, the classes, the people. Where the gaps between meals are unbearably massive, but each time you sit down to dine is an elaborate, prominent event, lasting for hours and hours...

Where the world's best bakery sits happily on each and every city block, the neighborhood stretching out from the scent of fresh baguettes, fearful of establishing itself too far from the captivating smell upon which daily life thrives.

———

With a whiff of cigarette smoke, I'm suddenly descending the filthy, beautiful stairs of the métro, hearing a blind man pour his soul through a tarnished brass saxophone and clutching my purse like my life depended on it.

Each night I catch the scent of my face lotion— the lotion I bought the night before my flight to the country that captivated my heart— and all at once I'm standing in a cramped 4x6 bathroom, emotions soaring, clouded by extreme jet lag, trying to figure out these unusual faucets and worrying that I'm taking too long; 'it's rude to spend too much time occupying the bathroom' I hear Madame Dobernecker saying in the back of my racing mind; I think it's so odd that the toilet is in a different room than the sink; I can't find "I think I have a fever" in my phrase book; wait, what time is it in Ames right now? Oh, what a day it's been; I wonder what we'll have for breakfast...

———

It's a fleeting idiosyncrasy, the ability of a particular smell— more than any other sense— to so rapidly transport you to a different place, a precise moment in time.