Chapter 14
And so the chapter of my life in which I looked for Paris outside myself and then found it within me began to settle.
I kept my promises.
I climbed the hill every other dawn. I ate soup I made too salty. I called my mom on Sundays, and once on a Tuesday because the light in my apartment looked exactly like the light in our old kitchen and I wanted her to hear it through the phone.
The city shifted from winter to spring as if someone had turned a dimmer switch.
On the morning the trees outside my window finally burst into a green that made my throat ache, I sat down with a blank page to outline the next piece and wrote a single sentence at the top:
Arrival is a choice you make every day.
Two hours later, a message from the paper landed in my inbox.
The administration had announced changes to the international housing program. Students were being shuffled, leases renewed, stipends adjusted. It was chaos.
The editor needed someone to cover an emergency town hall on campus that night.
I checked the time, pulled on my coat, and grabbed my notebook.
As I stepped into the hall, the door across from mine opened, and Terry stepped out in his dark coat with a stack of papers tucked under his arm.
He looked at me, looked at my notebook, and lifted his stack a little.
“Town hall,” he said.
“Town hall,” I said.
We matched pace down the stairs without making a plan to do so. Outside, the air smelled like rain that might never fall. Somewhere far off, a siren sang a soft line and then stopped.
We reached the corner where we always split—my street to the left, his to the right.
He paused. I paused.
He looked down the left street. I looked down the right for a heartbeat.
It felt like standing over one of those old maps with two red arrows and a dotted line.
Then he nodded toward my street.
“You go,” he said. “I’ll take the other entrance. We’ll both get there on time. We don’t need to arrive together to arrive at the same place.”
He stepped off the curb and I stayed on it, and for a second we were a picture I wanted to take and also keep only in my mind.
I turned left.
I didn’t look back.
The town hall had the hum of a beehive and the posture of a storm. Fluorescent lights shook against the ceiling like teeth. Folding chairs scraped. A microphone coughed.
I took a seat on the aisle, notebook open, pen balanced across the spiral.
The dean lifted a hand for quiet and announced the changes like a doctor listing side effects.
Renewals shortened. Stipends consolidated. Certain international leases moved under a pilot partnership with an outside foundation that would increase efficiency.
He smiled like a person introducing a friend.
The room did not smile back.
Hands rose. Voices layered. A student from the music department said her building had already slipped notices under the doors. Another from engineering asked why the pilot had been signed before feedback was collected. A woman behind me stood and said the word efficiency sounded like the word eviction if you let it grow teeth.
I wrote down the sentence and circled it twice.