Ten Days From Home

low roof tops like castles crowd the skyline

music wafts out of train cars

this is a story book place

everyone, from everywhere has gathered here

walking along the streets of Paris

I am watching

ten days ago other countries

were nothing more than stories told on the news

and French was a language only spoken in the classroom

I am walking

walking in the Latin Quarter with dinner in hand and the vibrant knowledge

that I am somewhere that I have never been

and may never be again

dancing in the kitchen of my hosts

white knuckled in the passenger seat

and wondering how I could ever leave

I am seeing things I can only see here

looking down on the river with my host mother

in a castle older than my country

I am speechless in two languages

as we round the corner

tired and soaked by rainfall

to the symbol of everything we have experienced

the Eiffel Tower

when I am underneath and in line and in every picture I took of it

I am flooded by the realization that I am a foreigner too

standing shoulder to shoulder

with a man who knows nothing of me

a woman who does not speak my language

I feel lovingly lost

and at midnight

when the sun has crawled back towards home

I am waiting for this to topple over and become fictional again

I am writing it all down before my memory is lost in the Seine

our last night on the boat

I stare at everything as it evaporates around me

I stand and exist for everything

while Parisian men play music in the Metro

I am transported to cobblestone streets flooded by foreigners

and I am overtaken by the opposite of homesickness

when I think back it is like a movie of someone else’s life

and I am awestruck by the reality of it

I was there