We’ve entered that phase where we’ve shifted from being on vacation in Paris to living in Paris.  And living in Paris can be rough on us.

Ever since the heat wave last week, I had been fighting an odd depression that I could not seem to shake, that seemed to grow and grow with the days.  It was a combination of being fed up with the noise, fed up with the concrete and cars, fed up with everyone speaking a foreign language, fed up with our small apartment, fed up with the kids … fed up with just about everything, and at the same time feeling completely uprooted, completely untethered, completely disoriented.  Try as I might, I could not seem to shake it.  I’d tell myself, ‘You idiot, you are in Paris, look around you!’, but even that would not help. I was deeply, deeply sad, extremely uneven, and (although this may come as a shock to some of you) even irritable.

It was my wife, of course, who came up with the solution, a fairly simple solution that I knew all along but had forgotten — exercise, hard aerobic exercise.  It always seems to improve my mood.  So Monday afternoon Will and I went for a long Velib ride around the southwestern part of Paris, getting drenched part of the time.  When I came home I was panting and tired … and still felt beyond crummy.  The next day I accompanied Suzie on a Velib ride to her class, near Notre Dame, and after dropping her off I had the opportunity to do something which also usually makes me feel better, taking pictures.  Here are a few from that bike trip:

Now you would think that riding along the Seine and through the streets of Paris, amidst all this beauty, would cure even the worst case of the blues.  But here’s the thing — I didn’t even seem to see it.  I felt like a automaton, duly pedaling along, duly taking photographs of beautiful things.  I sense that I may not be generating much sympathy here, but it was an very disturbing experience.  After my routine sightseeing, I pedaled home as fast as I could, and arrived sweaty and hot but still feeing like hell.

I had a French lesson with a new tutor at noon, so I had to quickly shower and take the Metro all the way back to the center of Paris.  I used to love the Metro.  Coming from a place where it is drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, the idea of getting on a train at Point A and being transported, almost as if by magic, to Point B, much faster than you could ever drive, seems miraculous.  But of late the Metro is starting to lose its allure.  It still does the magic transportation thing, but it’s hot, it often smells bad, often the walk between lines at stations seems unending, it’s loud, and the Metro passengers aren’t very friendly.  So by the time I got to the St. Michel station, the city had started to grind on me again.  I was hot, sweaty, hungry, depressed, sad, disoriented, and thoroughly discombobulated.

I walked to my lesson.  The tutor (a very nice young man named Nicholas) lives on a small street straight across the Seine from Notre Dame:

The bell doesn’t work, so to get into the building you have to wait until he comes to the window (he lives on the very, very top floor), sees you, then throws down the key to the main door in a small pouch.  So I was sitting waiting for him to do that, looking at this scene:

So I sat looking at this and … here’s the thing again … I didn’t even seem to see it.  There was this massive, heavy thing that seemed to be pressing down on me, obscuring everything, obliterating my capacity to feel any joy.  All I could feel was sadness and an incredible, incredible loneliness.  At that moment, maybe for the first time, I think I had an understanding of what people who are truly depressed feel.  An awful, grinding despair, there for no apparent reason.  I sat there and struggled not to drop down further; it was if I was underwater and drowning.

Then I heard the key land in front of me, and heard Nicolas call me up to my lesson, and I was grateful for the diversion, grateful for the opportunity to engage my mind in something else for two hours.

After the lesson, something wonderful happened.  Suzie had planned to meet me after my lesson, and she was down in the same little street when I got through, and the two of us had two hours with absolutely nothing to do.  We went to a small cafe and had coffees and sat on the sidewalk and spoke in French to one another, and I could feel the fog start to lift.  We had a wonderful 45 minutes of conversation, then went for a walk in the adjoining neighborhood, and then for a walk along the Seine.  And by the end of the two hours, whether it was from two days of exercise, or whether it was because I really love my wife, or whether it had no reason at all, that awful feeling had almost completely disappeared.  When we looked down the river together at the water and the bridges, I could again say, I could again feel, ‘Wow, this is incredible.  How lucky I am to be here.’

Suzie says that what I’m feeling is perfectly natural, and that the other times she’s gone away to foreign countries for a long time, the same thing has happened to her.  The oddness and newness of everything, the difficulty in doing the some of the most simple things, is just wearing after a while.  She’s no doubt right, and it is definitely a more heartening explanation than some others I could think of.  (And what did you do in Paris?  Funny you should ask, I had a major breakdown there!)

• Cunning Bison; Bridges and Socks; Observed in the Bois de Boulogne
• It’s Rough Here at Times, Part 2 (aka Our Petite Introduction to the French Medical System)

Categories: Travel -- France