1. Yesterday bright sunlight was spilling down through cracks in sooty clouds moving fast on high winds over the streets and the park. Leaving the Luxembourg Gardens, I saw a woman in a blue wool coat. It was a beautiful blue, full of depth and vibrance at once, made all the more striking by the different blue of her jeans, and the brown of her shoes, and the bright yellow bouquet of mimosa she was carrying. I am always writing about mimosa these days. I myself have been wearing a cheap coat I bought last winter when my plans changed. It’s large and dark and formless, but not in an elegant or stylish way. Maybe on someone else, but on me, right now, no. It’s been eighteen months or more of frugality, of putting off for another year the purchases and repairs I’d already put off from the previous one. My shoes, at least three years past their prime, might still have some life left in them yet if I can find the right cobbler. Or not. The left shoe, with a crack of light showing through when I look into it where the sole has separated from the upper. In my oversized coat and spent shoes, I am of indeterminate shape and age. I am balled into my thoughts, awaiting spring or something else, hiding.

2. Here in the stillness of the early morning, my thoughts are like tide pools that can be looked into, past glassy surfaces to all the wet creatures scurrying and waving and holding fast beneath. I can hear the wind from cold, clean beaches of twenty, thirty years ago. The early morning, like a seashell you can put to your ear and listen. There, the silence of the black street. There, the rush of blood in the ears that is calmed by a big breath brought fully into the center of the chest, like a sail. There was rain earlier, but that has stopped now. Now there is only this stillness. 

3. I used to think all of Paris smelled of patisseries, mostly because I was always in and out of patisseries when I’d come here for shorter durations. Then for a while Paris smelled of perfume shops to me, because I was always going into those. Now, in our small studio, I must beg my husband not to let the oil burn in the pan so that the smell of our lunches and dinners doesn’t permeate my clothes and my hair. It’s been a complicated year. Too many moving parts. Too much time spent indoors. I’m sure you can relate to that.

4. I have in my possession a book of dye samples from the 1860s; little circles of wool felt, in 142 shades. There is a green like something made out of a milky, minty glass. There is a dangerous, arsenic green, that I must be careful not to touch. There are seven different shades of oxblood, and nine different shades of dark blue, each distinct. When I first saw all these colors I felt like falling into them. The violets. The salmon pinks. The bright, highly saturated orange. Like a flash of history coming at you. 

5. I am tired. I have been pitching all week, selling stories like vegetables from the back of a van. It is that old feeling of the hustle; emailing editors, waiting for the reply, making adjustments or saying thanks anyway. It reminds me of when I was sixteen and would wake up at 4am in the summertime and hitchhike ten miles to the larger town where I worked as a barista, making espresso drinks for the commuters going into San Francisco in the morning. All those lattes and biscotti, the scream of the milk steamer, my damp hair slicked back in a ponytail, the grimy apron tied over bony hips. Always the bang, bang, bang of the thing, whatever it was called—the portafilter—that you filled with the espresso powder and then cranked up into the machine to have the hot water pour through, your hand turning it tightly into place like wrenching a bolt on an engine, and then banging it down to release the spent mud of the powdered beans. The smell of the scalded milk. The smell of my own exhaustion when I emerged from the steam and the clamor in the early afternoon, the sun hot and hard. I was not on the books and received no wage, just whatever tips I got, the cash stuffed into a goldfish bowl by the city people and then divvied up by us girls behind the counter, so that I could go home that day and take a nap with $70 in dirty bills in a Ziplock bag, to buy food, and books, and clothes from the thrift store.

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