Liberté, égalité, et fraternité

 Turning 43 in Europe had layers to it that my 21 year old self (in Europe at the time) would have taken her Parisienne hat off to. It was my second time to Europe, but the first on my own.  After wandering an array of hostels and farmstays from London to Glastonbury, kissing one boy along the way named Jonathan and walking up to a coastal tor before sunrise with another boy who pronounced his th like a v, and who gave me his copy of Hesse's Steppenwolf to take away on the train that day, I arrived to the Seine for the first time.  And there I fell in love for the first time.

As they say, you never forget or outdo your first love.  And so, 43 along the Seine, with no interest whatsoever in kissing of prettiest French mouths, I walked and bolstered myself up.  Had I been anywhere else less eternally human and fraught with the apparency of footsteps like my own here many times before, it would have been a much harder series of days.

to be continued...