grass is always green

Paris is a strange city. Not because of its art or its history, not because of its Bohemianism or its cafes filled with suits, not even for its nightlife and empty streets. Really it's because of a sublime mixture of all of these contradictory things. Paris is one of those rare things: a real dichotomy hidden behind a false one.
Paris is a city of duality manifest: simultaneously ancient and new, conservatively liberal, exotically familiar. This is why all the expatriates disappear to France, or at least that was my reasoning. Paris is so far away and yet so close to home, one is separated from everyone but not by the distance one had expected.
It's a dim life I live, camped in a hotel with countless philosophy books (my sole possessions that I could not wear) surrounded by the old wood and masonry while outside my window, a raging city was surging. I may have been lost, but I wouldn't let me tell myself that. I was there, and I was going to be found. I would make my stand there, build my fortress against loneliness and my own broken heart, and I would build it out of the words of the great existentialists: Sartre, Camus, de Beauvoir.
God I was dumb. Not that I'm any smarter now.
I impoverished myself so that I could live according to the laws of literature. One smokes because the cherry of the cigarette will keep your hands and face warm, one doesn't keep a bed because you need to sleep as close to the radiator as you can during the winter, one writes because one has no other recourse to speak. Give up everything you own, keep your books and paper and pens, move to Paris and become one with the great world that has already passed. Live in your work so that you can live at all.
This was my first summer, autumn, winter, and spring and I spent the better part of all of them hungry and destitute confined to a room no bigger than my American kitchen, trying to sell articles that I thought would change the way people looked at the world and only ended up selling movie reviews. This was my first nine months in Paris until the day I finally looked out the window and saw a world outside...
Mine was not a subtle change of philosophy (for an existentialist, it rarely is... always have to be so dramatic), rather it more or less happened in an instant: A cold morning found me leaning against the window above the radiator, a blanket draped over my shoulders to trap the cold against my body. My window faced another brick and mortar hotel, like my home, the kind of place where cabs would stop in the middle of the afternoon to drop off high profiles dressed like low profiles for their affairs. Also like my home, a place where starving artists could do what they do best. Starve.
Until this particular day, the city had been a massive blur of people and art and beauty, antique buildings being weaved around by the newest luxury cars. One sees everything, writes about the whole, and understands nothing. This day was the first day I focused. And when I focused beyond the blur (perhaps what caused me to focus in the first place) I saw a woman's leg, delicately arched in the windowsill in the hotel room on the third floor directly across from my own. It was dark, and looked smooth (though at a distance, who could really be sure) and it was clearly in view from the right buttock, partially exposed, to the slender arch of the foot. Beyond it, one could just make out a sketchpad being scratched on with a piece of charcoal.
As a man, one is bound to stare at such a thing. There is a romance inherent in the body of a woman that can be accentuated by hiding the rest and making known only a part. One gets lost in the curve of the thigh, the dimple at the knee, the gentle arc of the visible tendons, and the wrist as slides back and forth over the sketchpad, slowly filling it with lines and shades.
At this point she was a symbol for me. A beautiful goddess who could not be mastered, could never be owned completely. Beyond approach, beyond humanity...
She finished her sketch, which again from that distance could have been anything, and began to stand up. As she came into view, I took in the slender hips underneath a colorful dress (presumably floral print) which fell down to cover the thigh. I followed the length of her back until it ended in a tastefully tattooed neck, partially covered by a dark splash of brunette as she turned her head and revealed a Romanesque profile.
I remember, I was just about to close my eyes to retain an image of the goddess across the way, since I figured that what I had already seen was the last gift of this I would receive. As my eyelids extended, I heard a crash: taking a misstep, she had fallen out the window.
From the third floor, she first landed in her own windowsill garden, then ricocheted off that to the second floor balcony, where she bounced around and broke a window, exposing one of those high profile trysts who immediately began screaming and just generally freaking out. Upon breaking the window, she had also become entangled in a curtain which had somehow completely covered her entire torso. Now she fell headlong from the second floor into a laundry hamper on the ground. Still confused and possibly extremely frightened, she stood up and bolted down the street (still covered in the curtain) until she ran into a cafe. Here the curtain swept a candle off the table and caught on fire. Apparently sensing the heat, she began running in an ever-widening spiral until finally she ran into an inattentive waiter who was listening to an iPod and carrying a large pitcher of water. This splashed both of them well enough to ruin the iPod and extinguish the fire. The young waiter was incensed. All in all, I'd say it was not unlike a Benny Hill sketch.
As I rushed down to help her, the city seemed much less blurred. I took her to the hospital where they mended her broken arm, and I learned her name was Gen short for Genevieve (which, don't mention this to her, always sounded more like the name of a Pomeranian to me). I asked if there was anything I could do.
“Could you bring me some music to listen to?”
So I ran to the music store and bought an album I had always liked. When I came back, we listened to the album together and I wrote a review, and as the last scratches of my pencil were lain upon the page, I'd realized that with the fall of my goddess had come the fall of my romantic ideal of a goddess. She was just a girl now, a girl with a broken arm who was upset because she wouldn't be able to draw until it healed. My romantic idealism of Paris, France, Love, Life, the World had diminished into a real vision of these things. My philosophy was no longer entrenched in books and existentialists and an ideal way, but was now more or less just the life I was living, and the person I would become. I was suddenly happy with the world the way it was, and I was no longer struggling because of the ideal being somehow unattainable. I realized that the unattainable was just the difficult, and therefore most worthy, to attain.
Now if only I could get rid of this pretentious ass prose, I should be able to write something worth reading.