Summer Fantasies 2023 Nice, FR
Tourists, Parisians, cars, pigeons; I stand with my box of strawberries and blueberries in the eye of a French tornado. Peace, at last. Just earlier in Jardin de Luxembourg, I panicked hard at the quiet readers and meanderers, gaping like a sheep with ADHD. I slowed down only in the blurred rush, in the shrieking crowds in front of Théâtre de l’Odéon. They were outside, and I was inside. Nothing could permeate my skin.
If this chaotic “peace” was a drug to my anxiety, then the past two weeks was probably an overdose: a tangle of sweat, alcohol, and hormones. Was this the “summer of being eighteen” that I fantasized about?
In the foggy distance, someone laughed into the deep green eyes of a pretty Swiss boy, inhaled the smoke stains on a French boy’s shirt, then tumbled into the embrace of a blond boy with eyebrows that soaked of sadness… Dark, cool waves smacked down the scorching boulders on Nice’s Fête d’Été beach. Girls’ belly laughter and “clinks” of the rosé bottles reverberated across the shore. Did I really kiss two French strangers that one night in High Club? Back-to-back with a mass of steaming, drunk youth, our torsos and tongues swirled into a sweaty mess…
If only the summer was nothing but these euphoric rides.
Unfortunately, there’d be something painful like that broken bottle neck I picked up one night, slicing open my flesh and the sweet tipsiness. Stunned at the sudden pang, I watched the wine-colored rose bloom across my palm without blinking.
There’d always be something like the broken glass that’d sober me up. Remember, Lily, when you received a late-night call from your ex calling you baby and you cried helplessly because you can’t help falling for him while knowing, correctly, that he would slash you with his curses again the next day? Or when you take a 30-minute detour to this “nice” Parisian boy’s place at 10:30 pm just for him to say, “I only have 10 minutes”? Do you remember Oxford Bar, where you sat in a corner sipping water while every one of your girlfriends was making out with a guy? The ceilings started spinning; you felt like the lonely preacher of a zealous mass wedding. Then you sobbed wildly.
And there was that socially-awkward Swiss boy whom you always stood up for, but left you alone on the streets at 2am on your last night in Nice. Left for a girl that didn’t even like him. Really, at that point I should have let my tears crash out instead of clutching them in, should have sat on the floor and cried like a baby for him to stay with me and not her. Then maybe he would, and I wouldn’t be chatting alone with the Uber driver in my broken French for the remainder of my time in Nice.
Behind each euphoric story is a tragedy that wants to be forgotten. No one on my Instagram should see the fact that taking photos was as far as I got with the cute guys on my profile, or that I more-or-less spent the same amount of time laughing as crying on my “dream Europe trip”.
Back at the crossroad of Montparnasse with my berries, the tornado has passed. I’m stuck in an odd, bewildering trance as if I’ve once again returned to the real world. But what is the “real” anyways? Was the visceral touch of bodies not real? Were the laughter and gossip less real than the pointless reflections in my head? Why call this a fever dream when I feel more alive in it than out?
6/25/23
