Notes from France

"The road is messy in the way that real life is messy."

To riff off Elizabeth Bishop, the post-travel transition is never easy to master. Especially when you come home to a toddler ear infection, an Instagram hacking incident, and a few other micro disasters. It has now been over two weeks since we returned from a whirlwind ten days of gallivanting around France and settled back into our problem-imbued reality. And yet, the post-vacation jolt of inspiration has lingered with me since, enabling me to navigate life with the outlook of a (slightly volatile) Buddhist monk. It’s important to remember that no matter how much shite life throws your way, there is always a light at the end of the tunnel—and, in my case, it leads me right back to the Russian-overrun sanctuary of Beaulieu-sur-Mer. 

Here are a few takeaways that started out as Notes app scribbles, but I have decided to etch into eternity via this newsletter. 

You can make old places feel new again. 

Unlike most of my trips with Dave, which usually involve exploring new destinations together, this one was planned around a wedding in the South of France, a part of the world I had been to multiple times (starting with a very peculiar study abroad program in the late nineties). And yet, there was something about re-experiencing one of my favorite places with my partner that hit different, making it new and special and belonging to us. Suddenly, St Tropez is not just a billionaire yacht haven I dragged my girlfriends to in 2018 to help me get over a miserable breakup, but also a town I spent a rainy day roaming around with Dave, buying gifts for our daughter and drinking too many ambiguously names spritzes. Provence is not just a place I last visited with said ex, predominantly arguing about our status, but also a serene oasis I spent three days in with my partner, celebrating our friends and planning our future. No destination feels the same way twice, and layering on new memories only enriches the tapestry of your collective experiences. A kaleidoscope of beautiful moments blended together, isn’t that what life is all about?

Desperately seeking spritz ID!

The road is messy but illuminating. 

Over a cocktail at Senequier on our night in St. Tropez, I decided to pull up a Dbag Dating post I had written after my aforementioned trip there—a vaguely unhinged exploration of a girl’s trip that had started with a party sejourn in St. Tropez and had ended with a thought-provoking few days in Sanary-sur-Mer. (Unpopular opinion: I’m not a big fan of St Tropez. There’s just something about partying amongst a surplus of Patek that doesn’t vibe with me.) There was a Gloria Steinem quote I kept referencing: “The road is messy in the way that real life is messy. It leads us out of denial and into reality, out of theory and into practice, out of caution and into action, out of statistics and into stories—in short, out of our heads and into our hearts.”

I remember coming back from that trip with such clarity about who I was, what mattered to me, and the kind of person I wanted to spend my life with. While this trip left less room for self-analysis, something about my reflections—gathered during early morning runs and haphazard scribbles—yielded a similar outcome, bringing me back to the core values from which I had felt myself disassociating this year. Travel, especially the road trip format we find ourselves returning to, is a beautiful disaster – electric chargers, confusing roundabouts, local radio stations, debates over everything and nothing in between. It takes you out of the hypothetical and tests your ability to cope with life together through more tactile experiences, through friction, through the ability to overcome problems and keep on going. The layers of bullshit that so often infiltrate our relationship slowly get peeled away, bringing us back to ourselves—and to each other. 

Because nothing bonds you quite like roadside pizza.

There are so many ways to live. 

This is something that’s easy to forget when you live in a place like Miami, a perspective trap of a city if there ever was one. Stay here for too long and you too might start thinking that there is something wrong with your life if you don’t exercise with a 60K Cartier stack—or, god forbid, don’t own a boat. Meeting new people and reconnecting with friends all over France reawakened my awareness of the myriad ways people are choosing to shape their lives. The retired couple who bought a villa in Provence and are now running a bucolic bed and breakfast. The couple from South Africa who just got engaged, inspiring her to learn Arabic to understand her future children (damn). The friends from Russia who fell in love with the French Riviera and moved there practically overnight, with two children in tow. Along with these life choices come different lifestyles, most of which don’t involve waking up at 7am to jump right on the hustle hamster wheel, or dedicating one’s life to paying for private schools and health insurance, or living up to anyone’s expectations other than your own. Much like reading, meeting people outside of your bubble opens you up to new worlds—and yet, there is something about the in-person experience that leaves a deeper imprint. You have one life to live and so many ways to go about it, and travel never lets you forget that.   

P.S. Speaking of books, looking for an easy summer read? Yellowface is the way to go.

Best enjoyed over a two-hour breakfast.

Some places will always call your name. 

Every time I land back in France, it shocks my system to realize how much I still love it there. The best analogy I can find is having sex with a person you have extraordinary chemistry with—a sensorial connection, an undeniable spark you forget about until you reactivate it all over again. For years, I have tried to downplay my love for this part of the world, knowing deep down that one of the hardest decisions I ever made was opting into a stateside life (at least, for the next decade or so, as I’m lucky to be with a person who doesn’t quench my relocation daydreams). And yet, every time I return, I feel that jolt again—that undeniable joy that comes with inhaling the smell of a boulangerie at 8am, or stumbling across a farmer’s market and seeing what fresh produce is supposed to look like, or hearing my favorite language spoken on every corner. 

And the bougainvillea! The bougainvillea!

And yet, the one takeaway of having lived in five cities to date, is that you realize that there is no ideal place to live, no nirvana that will fulfill every one of your needs. I know now that it’s best to raise kids close to family, and that it’s often worth making sacrifices for. I also know that the beauty of your surroundings isn’t everything—it can’t always overshadow loneliness, or lethargy, or boredom. For every idyllic Parisian day there is a never-ending rainy season and the negativity of the French. For every beautiful drive down the PCH there is the dull monotony of Los Angeles itself. For the incredible New York energy there are the freezing cold winters and the grind. There is no one perfect place to live—there is just a perfect place for you for where you are in your life. 

All that said, expelling the place you love from your consciousness, the way I caught myself doing with France over recent years, isn’t necessary either. Rather, you can find solace in knowing that there is a place in the world where your mind can escape to even when your body can’t, a mental sanctuary for when things get tough and there is a dire need for a daydream.

In the meantime, I’m sending Sasha to French camp – how’s that for manifestation?

P.S. For anyone looking for a beautiful essay on all the dream lives we won’t get to live, this is it.

My mental sanctuary.