Fancy Hippie

2013.05.18

Even better than the first one.

2013.05.16

Twenty-Nine

Last year, on the eve of my twenty-eighth birthday, I found myself on a beach in Phuket. The shoreline was alit with glowing lanterns, and teeming with tourists and locals.

“What are the lanterns for?” my friend Erin asked.

“Good luck. And in Thai tradition, releasing a lantern into the sky is like letting your problems and worries float away,” I answered.

“We have to light one! You’re going to be twenty-eight in an hour.”

And so we lit our lanterns, and let them go. We sat on the beach in silence, watching the lanterns light up the night sky, and then drift away into darkness.

Tears streamed down my face the entire time.

—-

That was the year, my twenty-eighth, when I was discovering that not all of the promises would be kept, that some things are in fact irrevocable and that it had counted after all, every evasion and every procrastination, every mistake, every word, all of it.

Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem

I was fifteen the first time I visited Paris. The day I went with my tour group to visit the Eiffel Tower, our guide Libby told us, “You guys are in for a treat! This is the absolute best view of the city.”

I remember thinking, as I gazed out over the city, that being on the Eiffel Tower meant I couldn’t see the Eiffel Tower.

Over a decade and several trips to Paris later, I have determined that the best view of Paris is from the roof of the Centre de Pompidou in Beauborg. On my last night in Paris, I made my way up the five levels of hamster tubing just as the museum was closing, to take one more look at the city that I had called home for the week.