‘A Home Away From Home’

As mentioned in my most recent blog, this semester I am taking a Creative Nonfiction elective.

The first assessment required me to write about myself and a place. As promised, here is my second piece about a special place.

This also was graded as a distinction which I was both surprised and incredibly excited about.

As a writer, your head is often clouded by self-doubt and a lack of capacity to create something special. I hope, even if very slowly, I will have more confidence in my abilities to be a great writer.

Happy reading!

-tgfs x

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Do you believe in past lives? 

I do.

A sense of already having walked the earth in the skin of another.

I have always thought my former-self lived in Paris in the 1920s. 

How can one have an affinity to somewhere they had never been? Photographs I’d seen online of terrace bistros, cobble-stoned streets and metro stops may as well be featured in my personal albums of yesteryear. 

My heart yearned to head to the city of lights and I could deny it no longer.

Arriving in Paris rendered me with a sense of relief, a sense of home. 

I knew her intimately, and as I wandered her wide boulevards, I was transported to another era, another place, another me.

Her scent remained unchanged as she wrapped herself around me in a welcome embrace. A concoction of cigarette smoke, expensive perfume and freshly-baked bread linger on her skin.

I navigated through her with a sense of direction and purpose. I found my way to what could have been a favourite place of mine, once upon a time.

As I walked through the narrow opening between the tall spoked fence, the tiny gravel stones shuffling beneath the soles of my shoes, I felt the warmth of the sun’s rays between the trees’ foliage in the middle of a July day. 

Jardin du Luxembourg, a paradise situated just off the centre of the city’s winding districts. Ponds filled with small sailboats as children laughed and sang songs. The sound of metal balls clinking as groups of men play petanque on the lawn.

A sanctuary that left me wanting nothing more than to sit by the carousel, listen to its music sing to me, as I watch the world go by, once again.

I was home.