My first night in Paris I met an American who not only went to the same university as me but lived in the same apartment building. We did not meet because of my band. She didn’t even know an American band was playing and frankly if she did know my band I imagine I would not be writing this. We met because my monolingual lizard brain had built a gravitational pull to the sound of English in foreign countries. We talked about Virginia and coincidence for half an hour, added each other on Facebook, and I left Paris the next morning.

What I didn’t know that night is that I would graduate college. That I would move to Boston. That I would get a job as a software engineer and be given one week’s notice before being sent back to Paris for four months. That when I got to Paris I would have one of the loneliest weeks of my life. That the very same week would end with me reading The Sun Also Rises by myself in a bar. That I would Google translate how to ask the chic Parisians next to me if they knew of any other good places to be stereotypically lonely. That I would end the night with that same couple in a photo booth at a club in Pigalle at four in the morning.

I didn’t know that the next day I would remember my friend from the concert. She would give me a tour of Saint Germain and take me to a party that night where the amount of people I knew in the city would expand ten fold. We would go dancing. We would run into each other at Montmartre the next day and get lunch. We would watch a rugby game and get interviewed by reporters despite not knowing anything about rugby.

I would spend a full year living in two different countries.

I would go fishing at the Seine and dancing at Le Carmen. I would meet Swedish pop stars and strangers at restaurants who know my best friends. I would watch the fireworks on Bastille Day and dance with firemen who acted like strippers dressed like firemen. I would go to Provence, Barcelona, and London. I would go to my first concert back in Paris and see a man wearing my band’s T-shirt — that man being the drummer for the very same English band I played with my first time in the city.

I didn’t know I’d be at an open mic in Montmartre reading something penned to the prompt of “a wave of emotions that cannot be adequately explained”. I didn’t know that in thinking of such a thing I would only be able to think of Paris. So here it is.

I left Paris that first night with anxieties of a future that would never come. A mental roadmap of boring jobs, lost friends, bad marriages, suburban dread, a failed band. I’d weigh the pros and cons of complex choices I’d surely have to make in a week, in a month, in a year. There was nothing particular about that night. This was and often still is the way I spend a considerable amount of my cognitive ability.

Paris taught me what the chaos of every day life tried and failed to. It showed me that my world is confined only by my willingness to open myself to it. That as much as I think I might know where my life is going I don’t have any fucking idea what’s around the corner.

The city showed me that the visions of my future have been about as accurate as a six year old’s accounting of my past. And if thats true I might as well say yes. I might as well spike my hair with blue gel and say hi to the stranger next to me — they probably know a kid who chanted something almost true in first grade.