on my way home

We hosted a dinner party this past week. We, as in my housemates and I, and it was lovely. Lovely because the intention of moving into a house with three strangers was to actively build a community and feel at home in Los Angeles. It's working.

And yet, looking back to September, when I left Paris for London for L.A. (I flew out of Heathrow), I felt the magnitude of this great truth: “You will never be completely at home again, because part of your heart always will be elsewhere. That is the price you pay for the richness of loving and knowing people in more than one place.” Such beautiful melancholy as articulated by Miriam Adeney.

That night, I ventured out into the drizzle to dine with my my sister. I hadn't been happy with how we'd left things before Amsterdam so I wanted to make amends... as well as enjoy familial company as my "EuroTrip" ended. Fast forward to present day and we just had the most warm, light conversation. She landed in New York late last night, closing her own collegiate study abroad experience.

When I started recapping these twelve days I spent with family and friends in London, The Hague, Amsterdam, and Paris, I described the trip as "hard, and long, and so freaking good"; the same could be said of this past season in Los Angeles. Ironically or not, I've never been so ready for a year to end nor so eager for a new one to begin. Oh, and have I mentioned Marie is visiting in January? It's funny, I think, how people and places intersect, how we're able to better understand--or rather, appreciate--both through the lens of the other.

je t'embrasse

It's been three years since I lived in New York, four months since I was last in Paris, and I've attempted to write this post far too many times in the past two weeks. However cliché, distance does makes the heart grow fonder. But my longing as of late is much more than that, amplified by the realization that support and strength is oftentimes most felt through the physically "being there".

Lunch with Lauren, coffee with an old professor (x two), drinks with Rithy, dinner with ma famille, breakfast with Lou–check.

I spent our last hour in Paris lying in bed with a migraine, dozing off between the soft murmurs of sparrows in the courtyard. Though unwell, I was secure, calm. And then I almost made me and Rachael miss our train back to London because I needed more photos and a pain aux raisins for the following morning. The truth is, I hadn't wanted to leave; not when (where) everything made sense again.