I'd Like To Be In Paris

I'd like to be in Paris. I am a different person there. My insides do not shake. My body does not weigh a thousand pounds more than it should. In Paris, there is a world of investigation and exploration and new, brand new. Cafes and boulevards and huge, sacred monuments to forces we humans could not ever hope to understand. When I stepped into the Notre Dame I thought that maybe I would not step out. I thought that maybe a force would take over and make it so that none of us ever left. I did, though. We did. I walked out and all the way down to the Louvre and back again. I would like to walk the Louvre a hundred million times and maybe then the lump in my throat would dissolve. Maybe I could hold my thoughts still. Did you know there are love poems etched into stone that are a hundred hundred hundred years old? I've seen them. I don't think I saw anything more beautiful. Not the buildings, not the paintings, not the bread through the windows or the dogs or the Seine. We saw ancient sculptures and famous brushstrokes and hallowed halls, and I think the ceiling of that staircase was the most beautiful thing I saw. Maybe that I have ever seen. 

Can you imagine a love like that? A love that requires tons of limestone, riddles and symbols, royal force to create decades of proof? 

A love that lasts? 

I don't think I've thought of anything else since.