I Said Goodbye To Paris Today

It may sound overly dramatic to some, but it's no less than a double dose of dramatic for me to say a fond farewell to a city I've only seen once, and for a short time at that.

We stopped in long enough to see most of the Louvre (well, the parts that mattered to us at the time), walk by the infamous Shakespeare Book Store and spy the Notre Dame Cathedral from the other side of the Seine. Everything that Paris is became clear to me, and I wanted to stay for weeks, just to shoot photos and eat and walk around where damn near every artist I admire walked, too.

I think about Paris a lot. I know it's a dirty city, and it has some rude residents. But there's just something gilded about it, a dark rubbed antique gold patina. I have a habit of visiting local grocery stories to get food rather than always depend on a restaurant to produce culinary delights, and I bought the most extraordinary pasta salad, fresh-squeezed orange juice and a really yummy sugared croissant, for less than four Euro. But, my most happy memory was ducking into one of those pharmacies (you know, they have the green crosses?) and buying a lovely bottle of lavender bath oil, so I could soak in the little pink bathtub in the hotel LeFleur, in Montmartre. It was made by Weleda, and it was magnificent.

Well, two years later, I've finally used the last of it.  I savored it, only using it on my days of depression or when I felt a special night coming up.

So, as I shook the last drop out of the purple bottle, I bid farewell to the last of my tangible reminders of the day I ventured out into the streets of a very busy city alone and exhilarated by the sheer enormity of the Parisian world.

I'm sure I can find the same oil somewhere else – the Internet even. But, that was a special bottle of the smelly stuff, and it'll never be the same.

Adieu, little purple bottle.