The Problem With Elsewhere

On being in Paris while wanting New York, living in New York while missing Paris, and never quite arriving anywhere fully

Let me begin this by saying that I am extremely nostalgic. Painfully, insanely, all-consumingly nostalgic. I will walk past a man smoking and smell his cigarettes, and it will take me back to a July afternoon when I was six, running through the sprinkler in my grandparents’ front yard, and suddenly I am violently yearning to be six years old again, transported back into that exact time and that exact place.

I feel it’s important to start with this because it helps me understand why I am the way that I am. And I feel like Substack, if anywhere, is the place to find other nostalgic baddies who just get it.

This time last year I was living in France: in a gorgeous one-bedroom apartment with a balcony overlooking the city, where I would wake up to the sound of church bells each morning. It was late spring, and all I could think about were my summer plans.

Living in France, a “Euro summer” was a given. Sixty-euro flights to Greece. A quick train ride to the Côte d’Azur. Spontaneous weekends in Puglia. All of it made up my life there, and in turn, my idea of what summer was supposed to be.

At that time, summer had come to mean many things to me: a yearly re-read of Call Me By Your Name, followed by a yearly rewatch of La Piscine. Dinner and white wine and cigarettes on the balcony with my best friends, fresh peaches from the market and olives and silk dresses. Anise liquor and going to the movies, friendship bracelets and sleeping with the windows open and music festivals and trips to the countryside. I had never loved summer before I lived in France, and I have never loved summer as much as I did living there.

And during my first summer, I ended up staying for a week in a tiny apartment in a tiny town just a few steps from the sea.

When my train pulled into the station from Nice, I lost my breath. I will never forget the smell of the sea in the air—how thick it was with salt, how the late afternoon sun shimmered on the surface of the water. It felt almost unbearable to see something so beautiful. I remember thinking I wanted to live my whole life inside that feeling.

And each summer I would return to that town and fall back into the same rhythm: sleeping late, waking to the sound and smell of the sea, drinking coffee in a bikini and linen shirt, picking up a sandwich from the boulangerie in town, and placing my towel down on the same warm rocks by the water.

I rediscovered the joy of floating on your back in the water—something I hadn’t done since I was a little girl—of flipping through pages of a book with wet and salty fingers. I’d swim and float and lie in the sun until I was too warm, then go back and do it all again. Day after day, in a drowsy haze that felt like happiness rendered in slow motion.

And once the sun would go down I’d walk back into town, shower and get dressed and go out for a meal all by myself. There were only a few places to choose from and each night started the same: with an Aperol spritz that left rings around the table because it was still so damn hot outside.

I’d eat an incredible meal for an incredible price—moules frites or grilled fish or salad—drink until I was tipsy and walk myself back home. There were street cats sleeping outside and church bells to mark the passing hours and so many beautiful people that had all been kissed by the sun all summer long.

Then I’d fall into bed and wake up and do it all over again. Day after day it never got old. And every time I left, I returned to my city feeling lighter, more at peace, and more certain of myself than before.

And yet, while I was living what I now describe as one of the happiest versions of my life, I was also deeply elsewhere.

I spent that same year in France dreaming of New York with a kind of obsessive devotion. I imagined it constantly: the streets, the pace, the possibility of becoming someone entirely new. I wanted it so badly it almost felt physical.

And now I am here.

And sometimes I think about how strange it is that desire never actually settles, it just relocates.

I have friends in New York who dream about Paris. Friends in Paris who dream about New York. Girls everywhere looking sideways at lives that are not theirs, convinced something more complete is always happening just out of frame.

And all this time I’ve been wondering if that meant that I was never satisfied—that I’d never be satisfied. That somehow I would always be missing something essential in the place I was standing.

But maybe that’s not it. Maybe I’ve just learned how to fall in love with the idea of elsewhere.

Which is inconvenient, really, because I keep arriving places I once wanted desperately and, before I’ve even fully unpacked, I’ve already started wondering what it would feel like to leave. As if there are always a few too many ways to be a person, and I am only ever occupying one of them at a time.

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