The heat was all around you and inside you when you breathed. The weatherman said the air was blown up from the Sahara and that this was desert air. It was but it was also humid. You sweated but the sweat was no use. It fizzled on your arms. All manner of objects became fans in the hands of women in repose. In the shadow of the Sacré-Cœur, hawkers with plastic tubs of melting ice sold chilled water for two euros, twice their regular price. Demand was up and they were good capitalists. Beneath the Sacré-Cœur was the square Louise-Michel. The square Louise-Michel was a terraced garden with many stretches of grass and in the grass people lay trying to hide from the heat which of course was impossible.

I walked down a serpentine path that ran along the grass until I found a grocery store where I got a baguette and some cheese and salty prosciutto and some chilled white wine. I lugged all of it back up the hill to my apartment and up the many marble steps to the cream colored room with nothing on the walls and nothing on the hardwood floor save a soft mattress and next to it a little table and opposite that a marble fireplace you couldn’t use. There was also a window overlooking Paris. It was a wide window that ate up half the wall and you could throw open the shutters and listen to the sounds of people in the street, and if you were lucky, the wind would blow cool through the room. The room as I said before was bare save for a bed, table, fireplace, and window but it did have one more elegant detail. The bare cream walls were crowned with the impression of olive branches.

The heat broke the next day in a series of Thunderstorms. The streets of Paris bubbled and cars spat water speeding off and people crowded under cafe awnings during the worst of it smiling. I liked these people very much and took shelter with them. My french was poor and I saluted monsieurs and comment ça-va’ed sparingly. Lightening flashed. Somewhere beyond the 14th arrondissement thunder broke like a wave. The rain kicked up and came slanted under the awning wetting us and again there was the smiling.

Fall came the next day despite it being July. The rain had knocked leaves off the trees and by the end of the day they had dried and curled in the gutters of the streets so that when I scootered down the Boulevard des Batignolles the leaves cracked beneath me. The air smelled cool and earthy. I sped along in the dappled shade of trees feeling covertly joyous alone in the early evening.

Late the next day I crowded along the Champs-Élysées and peered with everyone else down the grand avenue into the sun where the riders of the Tour de France peddled their bicycles at high speeds, around the Arc de Triomphe, and down the boulevard eight times to great fanfare. During the sprint finish, the announcer’s voice swelled in French that seemed to me one continuous word frantically detailing the race climaxing one kilometer down the road. The boy next to me balled his fists and stood lips open like a statue listening. Caleb Ewan won the sprint and Egan Bernal won the tour. They crowned him as the sun set behind the Arc de Triomphe. It was all very ceremonious.

I scootered back towards Montmartre and disembarked and walked in the cool evening air up the hill towards the Sacré-Cœur which one could always walk towards. It was always visible up on the hill and especially at night lit up by floodlights from below. Soon I passed the boulangerie that sold hot baguettes for one euro and then I was on the quiet streets that led back to my apartment.

Sacré-Cœur as shot with a telephoto lens

In my cream-colored room I called up a friend and chatted while I packed and after I packed we kept chatting. I leaned my forearms on the railing of the balcony where my wet shirt was draped and drying next to me flapping softly in the wind. After she said goodbye I continued the conversation with myself. I was grateful that I had gotten to know so much. Knowing Paris and the balcony in Montmartre and the cheerful din of cafes and the endless sky-blue days of Stockholm and knowing the smoke and flash of Amsterdam and the allure of the Alps in Austria and Switzerland and the shocking cold of glacial lakes and the old canals of Venice once great and the rising star of Slovenia with the blues and greens of Triglav and the quiet capital Ljubljana and most of all knowing the beaches of Dubrovnik and the midday heat eating mussels and bread after swimming and swimming some more and skiing the bright flat surf with her. I would head back to the States tomorrow and I was not sad it was over. It was a sunburn on my memory. In time it would tan. How else to describe the before and after? Not just this, but with anything like it? How to convey the living we do that makes the before the before? The before is the before and afterwards that’s what you have. Afterwards you’ve changed and you can’t go back and that’s the beauty of it.

one night from la Basilique du Sacré Cœur de Montmartre

I landed in Newark the next day and my dad was there to meet me. He picked me up and didn’t make me do more than I had to because that is how he shows his love. We stopped to eat lunch at a rest stop. He had a grilled cheese and I had a salad with yogurt and afterwards we went to Starbucks. He drove home and asked me questions about my trip and once the questions had been asked and answered we listened to a podcast. I shaved in the bathroom of his house and went for a swim at a nearby pool. The pool stank of chlorine but there were children splashing around and the pool was outside rather than inside and the swim relaxed me. I felt lithe and clean-shaven laying by the pool. The sun was beginning to get low. This would be a thirty-hour day for me because of the time change. Towards the end of it, I was walking up the main street of what had been the neighborhood of my youth with a boy much younger than me, and suddenly I noticed the humid summer smell of home and how much I had missed it.