edith piaf, where are you now?

I woke up to a beautiful blue sky.

I felt good. Feeling playful, I headed to the hairdressers down the street, where a very chic French woman with pitch black hair cut my bangs for the price of nothing. This is unlike me. Haircuts make me sweat, and ‘shorter’ isn’t a part of my vocabulary. But I wanted my hair out of my eyes, and I was feeling whimsical. I even thought about getting it all cut short. Hell, why not? I'm young, single, and it's about time I started experimenting.

Happy with the results, I headed confidently down the street, where a man stopped me to ask if he could take me out for a drink. I refused with a smile and kept walking.

Unfortunately my lighthearted mood didn’t last long. I don’t know what it was, but as I set off discovering the “trendy shopping district” of Oberkampf, I got hit with the blues. The Parisian blues.

The blues follow me around all the time, and I never know when they’re going to creep up on me, suddenly making me wish I had a husky voice and a saxophone to make sense of them.

Soon everything felt wrong, my hair felt stupid, my heart heavy and my body tired. I kept walking.

And only when you have the blues, do you walk over an air vent wearing a flowing skirt, and watch in horror as you expose everything underneath it. Luckily I started laughing, and decided to take the event as humorous. I didn’t look back, but no one in front of me even seemed to notice, or look twice as I walked down the street laughing into my hand and clenching my skirt.

Soon I was so tired, and so filled with waves of anxiety, that I had to take off home. Sometimes the city is overpowering, and I get hot flashes, suddenly feeling anxious and insecure, as if all my senses being attacked.

I can’t believe how quickly my wallet empties, and how vulnerable I feel in the material world.

Back at home I turned on the TV. Normally not a TV fan, I’ve been using it to unwind, to distract me from loneliness, and to improve my French. You should hear the voice-overs on the Simpsons.

After dinner I decided to give the city another chance. I took off to Starbucks dreaming of a decaf coffee and Wireless Internet, only to have the cashier tell me they were closing as I approached the counter. After two long metro trips to get there, and a feel of unease all the way, I decided this was not my day.

It’s the kind of day where nothing fits right. Your hair doesn’t fall right. Nothing is comfortable, but even more so, nothing is comforting.

I called home to get the answering machine.

I picked up the computer because I had no one to talk to.

I turned on the TV because I didn’t want to hear myself think.

And I realized that even in Paris, you get the blues.