January 28

Having missed my train from Paris to Montpellier, I had a few worthless American dollars in my pocket, a limited knowledge of French in my head, a sick feeling in my heart, and a 70-pound suitcase full of expensive perfume and uncomfortable shoes. This place was wrong, this life was wrong, I was wrong!

The wind started to twirl and the rain was sinking the ground beneath my feet and the tears were falling and the world was a disaster...until I made my first great discovery here. While I was frantically searching my dictionary for the words to purchase a new train ticket, I realized that the word for “cry” in French is pleurer, which really is a lot like the word for “rain”: la pluie. There was nothing that could have felt more wonderful or more right to me then. I was upset and worried and frustrated, but I was in the place of my dreams, a world where even crying in a train station feels beautiful. Now I am here and all is well. Feels like mystery, feels like hope, but still doesn’t feel like home (yet).

Everywhere I go in this frightening country, I see the left-behind musings of another. How and when graffiti art became such a vibrant part of French culture is something which, just a week after moving here, I have yet to understand. There are long, spidery webs of writing spun around old brick corners; garish cartoon faces splayed across city sidewalks; furious and ongoing debates between multiple authors scrawled on bathroom doors. By night the rain comes down and mixes with the multicolored threads of paint hewn on the wet walls, and the water leaves a viscous sheen that’s better than pure.

It’s elegant, really: the way something so inappropriate somehow feels so right here. Maybe the reason I love this graffiti is because it reminds me how much the people here feel connected to their home. I’m enchanted with the idea of claiming ownership over physical place, especially something old. I know I shouldn’t like this graffiti at all, and it’s something I never thought of as “French” before coming here. Yet now it fascinates me. It’s like a story contained within a wall; a life within a city; a world within an idea. I’m realizing that it might be the collective ownership of history that’s so compelling: how wonderful to think that I will one day be a part of this city’s past.