My roommate returned from Bagelstein and said something along the lines of 'I think there was a shooting just down the street, there are a lot of police cars and ambulances.' I am confused. I think it's something small, a bar fight, some drunken violence. We turn on the tv and as the hours go by, and the updates come in, the situation becomes more and more surreal. The numbers increase. More locations. More bodies. The borders are closed. It's a national state of emergency. I stay up until 4:30 in the morning.
I wake up past noon. I make coffee. I'm not hungry but I prepare a meal - pasta and salad. A handful of mâche (lamb's lettuce) and a handful of roquette (arugula). I concentrate on slicing my cherry tomatoes, perfectly down the vertical, into equal halves. Pepper, paprika, olive oil, lemon juice. I shower and put on makeup. I want things to be artful and graceful.
My roommate and I put on music, 90s sentimental. We decide to go out, down our street, down Charonne. A five minute walk. We are surprised to see many people out, it feels normal. We arrive at the corner opposite La Belle Équipe. There are crowds in front of the closed restaurant, we think they are lighting candles. There are tv vans and reporters. We look at the store behind us and see bullet holes in the glass. I do not want to take a picture. I am suddenly nervous and I tell my roommate I want to go. I think of clichés. Criminals don't return to the scene of the crime. The randomness overwhelms me, the bullet holes scare me. I don't know where to go.
We see Jeff de Bruges, a chocolate shop. I buy 8 Euros worth of chocolates and we eat some. We eat at a fallafel place on Rue de Roquette. A group of Americans come in and try to order pizza in English and Spanish; I am tempted to help translate but they seem to manage okay. My roommate drinks her Fanta and half of mine. Outside, we part ways. I tell her "I promise I'll be back." I realize I can't be certain I can keep a promise like that.
I think about the locations of some of the attacks - Charonne, Voltaire, République. The main metro line that I take is the one that has stops at these locations. I go to Voltaire Metro station. There are not many people on the platform. This is the first time I am truly afraid. I get on the train. There are not many people in the car. I watch the stations pass. I hold my breath at République. I think about taking the same metro back home later; I wonder if there is a bus instead; I think about the London metro bombings. I transfer at Strasbourg-Saint Denis. When I get to the platform, I have difficulty breathing. I touch my throat and I can feel that my pulse is elevated. I wonder what a panic attack feels like. I become more afraid and I want to give up and start crying. The train comes and I sit down. I notice the man beside me is reading Talleyrand. I brought Fitzgerald with me, This Side of Paradise. I open it and try to focus on the words. I still want to cry; two things stop me. A teenage girl sits down across from me. She is wearing a sweater that has a letter K sewn on backwards. And I hear two English speakers. They talk about Ottawa. I look over and tell them my family lives in Ottawa. We exchange a few words about the smallness of the world and it's enough to get us to Saint-Michel. When I get out of the station, I feel free and I start to cry. I go down a dark street and sit on a step at the corner of Rue Serpente. I hope nobody talks to me. Nobody does. I think about randomness and uncertainty.
I go to my bookshop, and down in the basement where the used books are, I feel safe, surrounded by old books and fellow solo book hunters. I settle into my familiar habit of going through the books, going through stacks and stacks of titles, English and French.
I go to my café. It is not a cool place and it is never full. The café crème is overpriced and the cream yellow and forest green decor is ugly. But it is familiar and it is close to my bookshops and I feel safe there.
I sit and I look out the window. I see toddlers. One falls, cries, gets up and clutches her knees, then flops over her mother's shoulder. Two girls walk by, one with a beautiful purple velvet hat, covering her hair that is caught in the wind behind her. The cinema across the street is still open.
I think about existentialism - nothing matters except the human experience. I think about nihilism - there is no meaning. I think about Camus and absurdism - to know that even though there is no meaning, to go ahead and make the most of it anyways. I think I like Camus, he sounded hopeful.
I think about the messages I received. People came out of the woodwork of a life's history. People from years of shared life, people I met once. People I love and once loved. I think they all knew I was okay - you never actually expect the people you know to be the ones who don't respond. But there are the people who received messages and their loved ones received no response.
I don't feel anger or hatred. I don't feel much of anything. I feel like I am standing at an edge, a sliver, and around me things are crumbling and falling, bodies falling, and I am standing still. I think about Joan Didion's collection title, We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live. We want to make sense of things. Do things make sense? Where does violence and hatred come from? What impels us as humans? We all feel; we all feel deeply. Where do we channel it? Does it make sense? What is it that we can withstand? What is it that we can accept and live with? Faced with hate and anger, do we push back equally? Or can we absorb, catch it gently, let it cut through and bleed out, to be released? Courage, its root word is heart, coeur. Avec coeur, even a bleeding broken one, is it a way?
I want to be still and to bring to me love and art and beauty. Do things like art and beauty make sense? Perhaps they are equally senseless and equally meaningless as hatred and violence, but perhaps they are the counterpoint, the vessels carrying the light counterpoint. I want to gather small life details to me - the tomatoes, the toddlers, the purple velvet hat - to gather them into a house that is a haven, a beautiful construction that can absorb and withstand the outside, to shield.
My café closes early tonight, I leave and go to the metro again. I do not want to cry. I offer my seat to a small old lady. She smiles at me and refuses and I insist, and during our back and forth, some guy takes the seat. He picks his nose. I want to punch him (for the seat taking, not the nose picking). The voices of Sara Bareilles and Ingrid Michaelson fill my ears - Is love alive?
The stations go by and this time I am calm. République, Oberkampf, St. Ambroise, Voltaire, and then - Charonne.
I go home.