Just out of a super hot shower and swaddled in blankets tucked away in the prow of the sleeping quarters on the houseboat listening to Chopin.
It is sweet and dreamy and all things rainy night in Paris.
I am finally not wet and cold.
It rained.
It poured.
It was a deluge.
I had Mike Doughty’s “Sad Girl Walking in the Rain” stuck in my head for hours.
However.
I was not sad.
I was dreamy.
I was bemused.
I was looking at all the things.
I was seeing the poetry in the wet cobblestones.
In the unexpected flair of a red rain poncho covering an old man as he pedaled his bicycle along the Seine.
I saw the heavy-headed peonies, blushing pink and sweet underneath the floral shop awning, drowsed with rain and nodding on their pale green stems.
I smelled roses, drunk with rain and walked underneath flowering chestnut trees.
I got wet.
Oh.
I got so wet.
Drenched.
Doused.
Soaked.
And yet.
My heart felt light and I strode along the avenues, occasionally lost and adrift in the details of the weather and in the welter of my soul as it beat against my rib cage, sometimes it lives there, underneath my heart, just behind my rib cage, a plummeting bird singing a song, sad and melancholic, beautiful and lyric and like the timpani softly chiming it sings a song just to me.
I was not sad.
I was not melancholic.
I was steered toward that direction once or twice when the rain seemed to overtake me and my feet got wet, but the lightness in me kept me warm.
I was surprised to find, when I finally took shelter in a cafe bistro, that my hands were so cold from clasping the umbrella handle that I could not bend my fingers properly.
I had a quiet dinner in a small bistro on Rue de Bac.
Roast chicken and roasted vegetables, sweet and savory in their juices, a Comte cheese plate with a simple mixed green salad and a few drops of balsamic vinaigrette, a small bottle of Perrier, and a cafe creme.
I sat and almost became melancholic and I can feel a sad story trying to escape my heart and perhaps it is just the poesies of the art I saw earlier still nestled there, but I did not let myself drift there.
You are not alone in Paris having dinner you are with yourself and your company is lovely.
I sat and looked at the rain falling outside, the umbrella stand tilted over, heavy with parpluies, the round wooden bistro chairs tucked underneath tables, more peonies and pink roses on the bar, the old man who tumbled by underneath a large yellow and red and blue golf umbrella, chased by the rain towards home, I presume.
I tasted the cafe creme and once caught my own eye in the long mirror to my side and thought, who is that beauty?
Oh.
Ha.
It’s me.
And that made me, for a moment soften and sadden for all those times when my company was not enough for me, not knowing how rich and good it is, and I longed for another and there was no other and I was alone in Paris eating my steak tartar in a bistro years ago somewhere in the 9th arrondissement in the rain.
Oh.
Paris in the rain, you can be so sad and lonely.
Or.
You can shine with lustre like a rare pearl, polished in the fiery embers of the red lights reflected in the wet street pavement.
I am never alone when I am with Paris.
We are lovers.
Yes.
My own secret language of dreams, and do you really wonder why I have it tattooed on my chest, dream, in French, that is.
I saw you as I walked back to the house boat after my lovely well curated little meal, a single swan in the Seine, in the rain, long graceful neck slightly curved beneath the weight of the glory of being its own perfect self.
Perhaps I too am like that.
In moments here and there.
In the light that reflects from the raindrops, in the light that is cast from the bateaux mouche as they traverse the river up and down, constantly ferrying souls to and fro.
There are times I am lonely.
Yet.
I am never alone.
Unfettered and loved.
I am here.
I am there.
I am in the notes of revery between the keys on the piano, the soft hand strikes the ivory and music resonates, pearling into the air about me like staccato raindrops on the roof of the houseboat.
And so.
I go forward.
Warm now.
Sheltered from the rain.
But not quite a part from it.
As it, like the music, like the painting that blew my heart out in the Musee L’Orangerie today, blew it out, devoured it, rendered it changed and altered and smashed my face with soft tears that drifted shamelessly down my face, awestruck in the face of such grace, is now ground into me.
The rain.
The poetry.
The Chopin.
The art.
The city.
A swan of desire upon my fevered face.
I shall not forget soon.
No.
I shall not.
This blasphemous joy.
Auntiebubba 