Surprisingly, the city was still dark when I landed a little past eight in the morning. Sunrise in January, I would come to discover, did not occur till nearly nine. Peering through the darkness, I caught sight of the faint outlines of buildings, other planes, the orifice of the corrugated jet-bridge coming towards the cabin door like a monster sandworm from Dune. 

In the brightly lit lobby of Charles de Gaulle (CDG), I stopped to retrieve my Field Notes notebook from my money belt. Though small, it held everything important: day-by-day itineraries, hotel directions, packing lists, useful phrases, emergency contacts—each page filled to the brim with my notes and anxiety. I checked my to-do list for arrival: 1) find tourist information and obtain a city map and museum pass.

At the TI booth, I approached a sleepy attendant for both documents.

“I’m sorry but we’ve run out of passes,” he mumbled.

Already? I was suspicious. But the locals aren’t exactly known for their hospitality, so I didn’t press the matter. Instead, I took a map from the shelf and made a mental note to buy the pass elsewhere. Overhead, I looked for signs to the train. Like airports in most major cities, CDG sits on the outskirts of town: to reach the city center one has to either take a taxi or public transport.

After navigating through a maze of corridors, escalators, and automated walkways, I arrived at the station. A clinging cold permeated the lobby from the outside. I bypassed the throng of confused travelers huddled around the automatic ticket machines and headed inside the staffed office. After a short wait in line, a ticket agent handed me a métro card and a paper ticket for the Réseau Express Régional (RER).

“The ticket has a magnetic strip so keep it away from your phone,” he said in a bored monotone, having repeated the warning countless times already.

Clutching my ticket, I returned to the lobby and scanned the various platforms until I spotted one with a large sign hanging over its entryway.

Ver Paris—to Paris.

—

I hadn’t planned on seeing Paris again.

But when a childhood friend invited me to spend some time with her family in Bourg-Saint-Maurice in southeastern France, I found myself buying a ticket to the French capital, where I planned to spend four days alone, to get over the jet-lag. I had first visited the city over a decade before, in my early twenties, accompanied by my parents. The family vacation, our first Eurotrip, had been an exhilarating but exhausting affair: three countries, ten cities, squeezed tightly into twenty-one hectic, hilarious days.

But that was then, time BC–Before COVID.

Now we were living in a different era: January 2023, three years AC–After COVID.

Before / After.

I have often wondered about this simple yet definitive pronouncement. Time, it seemed to say, could be easily separated, and life conveniently reset. As if everything could be cleaved by the slash into two neat parcels—as in the before/after panels of a teeth whitening ad, a weight loss infomercial, or a teen movie makeover with a shopping montage—their sharp edges excising anything bothersome, complicated, or unwanted in between. 

But ultimately these magical transformations only exist in the hypothetical, the commercial, the cinematic. Because in real life, befores and afters cleave to each other like conjoined twins, bodies fused together, impossible to tell where one ends and the other begins.

—

There were many things against my going on this trip: the timing (a friend: “Who goes to Paris in the winter?”), the chaos (another friend: “Airports are crazy right now with long lines, delays, and last-minute cancellations”), the health risks (my parents: “There’s another variant coming. Are you sure it’s safe?”), and the private struggles (me: “How will you manage when you can’t sleep anymore?”)

But sometimes the division between going/not going is hardly indicative of choice.

Instead, the slash, wielded like an ax at a beheading, marks a death sentence either way.

To be / Not to be.

To go / Not to go.

And yet, it is this illusion separating befores from afters that sustains much of travel: before every trip, one could hope to return a different person afterwards.

Even though I was staying just a few days in Paris, I spent months preparing for the sojourn: interviewing for TSA PreCheck, aggregating a list of English-speaking doctors, getting another Covid vaccine, and filling my suitcase with innumerable healthcare items—rubber gloves, antibacterial wipes, N95 and surgical masks, rapid test kits, cough medicine, a large bottle of Tylenol. 

At night, my insomniac brain continued to whirl furiously, trying to plan for other contingencies, including the new one surrounding my appearance:

Anti-Asian Hate Crimes Rise by 348%. 

Asian-Americans Targeted in Nearly 3,800 Hate Incidents in Past Year.

3 People Wanted for Anti-Asian Attack in Queens. 

These headlines loomed large like billboards in my mind. 

On cable news, one frigid November day, I had witnessed sickening CCTV footage of an Asian woman being beaten unconscious in the lobby of her New York apartment, followed by an elderly Asian gentleman getting slammed violently onto the sidewalk in broad daylight in San Francisco. 

“Both suspects have yet to be apprehended,” said the newscasters in a monotone, not dissimilar to the RER ticket agent, before swiftly moving onto the next topic.

Then, a few days later, a close-up photograph of the former president’s speech at an old coronavirus task force briefing reappeared online. On the page, clearly visible, was the word Corona deliberately crossed out and replaced with the word Chinese in Sharpie. I let out a mirthless laugh; as if he would have forgotten the racist rhetoric otherwise.

Work hard; be grateful; don’t rock the boat.

These were the unspoken tenets to becoming the model minority class in America. 

But what happens when the title suddenly gets taken away? And overnight, the WELCOME TO AMERICA rug is withdrawn and replaced with a new mat scrawled with the words GO BACK TO CHINA in bold, menacing letters?

“But I’m from Vietnam,” I remembered another Asian man saying in a shaky online video, trying to defend himself against a racist incident during these hate-filled times.

Sorry, sir, but that’s not how discrimination works, I wanted to interject. 

Because when it comes for one, it comes for all: discrimination is, ultimately, indiscriminate.

“Don’t wear your red winter jacket in Paris or make eye contact with strangers,” Mom warned. “And stand away from the train tracks while you wait.”

I nodded, knowing her concerns weren’t just motherly anymore.

—

My insomnia: it’s hard to pinpoint exactly when it began AC. Like sleep, it came slowly, then all at once. A few minutes here, a half hour there, and before I knew it, I was lost. Initially, I convinced myself that the condition was temporary, short-lived, an aberration that would, with enough groggy, passing days after only a few hours of shut-eye, dissipate like fog.

But the clearing never came.

Each night, after doing just the bare minimum to get through the day—working, eating, breathing—I would carry my tired body and mind to bed, lie down, turn off the lights, and let the darkness unmoor me. There, I would float in a dreamlike state, unmoving, unspeaking, feigning a sleep that I knew would never come. 

As a child, I used to fall asleep by telling myself stories. After reading the books of my favorite children’s authors—Enid Blyton, E. Nesbit, and J. M. Barrie—I would make friends with the characters and imagine myself into their tales. My appearance was always temporary, a guest spot, showing up for just a few scenes where we would play and exchange dialogue, and before the director could call cut, I would already be away on my next adventure in dreamland. 

But as I grew up, the stories ceased, along with my faith in these childhood make-believes.

—

For nearly a year before Paris, Mom had tried to help me with my condition. 

“Drink this, it’ll help you sleep.”

I took a hard look at the concoction: the draught, a Chinese folk remedy, consisted of just two ingredients, hot water and 莲子心—water lily plumules. I swirled the pool of menacing, needle-like shoots tipped with green spires and watched them sink to the bottom, shipwrecked treasures.

“God, it’s so bitter,” I cried after taking a sip.

“What you expect?” she chided. “It’s medicine.” 

“Still, I didn’t expect a flower to taste so awful.”

Mom sighed. “This the problem with you young people today, cannot chi ku.”

吃苦—eating bitterness.

Like a wedding dress, a crested locket, or an old photograph, it is a life-lesson heirloom passed down by immigrant parents to their children: endure the hardship, embrace the suffering, because if one would just swallow enough bitterness, then one would be protected against the vicissitudes of life.

Clearly, I hadn’t ingested enough.

So I drank.

—

At the platform, the RER had already arrived and was awaiting passengers on the tracks. Boarding quickly, I sat down across from a middle-aged, Caucasian man wearing a thick coat and wooly scarf. He immediately pulled out his phone and started scrolling, while I, eager to take everything in, stared fixedly out the window. 

That’s the magic of travel: suddenly every house, tree, field, cloud, sky glows anew. 

Before long, the automatic doors closed and the train lurched to a start. An olive-skinned man wearing a flat cap wandered into my carriage. I eyed him warily as he chose to lean against the doors rather than sitting, then reached in his bag and pulled out—of all things—an accordion. Soon, a lively tune filled the air. I breathed a sigh of relief, letting my clenched heart relax so it could dance along to the impromptu serenade.

At Gare du Nord, I got off the train to switch over to the Paris métro, hauling my suitcase through the dizzyingly vast station, past multiple halls and platforms, to the labyrinthine tunnels teeming with harried passengers on their morning commute. Through a long connecting corridor, I emerged onto La Chapelle, the aerial métro stop high above Boulevard de la Chapelle. Taking care to keep my “social distance” from other passengers and the tracks, I took off my mask and let the cool air soothe the deep grooves carved into my face by the straps.

Even under the heavy blanket of impenetrable, gray skies, Paris still looked radiant.

—

When we visited Paris as a family, it had been to celebrate two major milestones: my college graduation and the attainment of our US citizenship. The latter, the arduous journey of immigrating to a new country, had also been more than a decade in the making, as we drifted across three continents, four countries, and two states, before we finally found a foothold in the United States.

In a large downtown Minneapolis courthouse, we had stood excitedly in a courtroom fitted with rows of plastic chairs next to many families like mine—colored skin, accented English, eating dishes others labeled “ethnic” but to us was just Mom’s cooking—and recited the Pledge of Allegiance before an outstretched American flag. 

Afterwards, the smiling judge overseeing the proceedings offered to take photos with everyone to commemorate the special occasion.

“Welcome to America,” she said warmly as we stood next to her.

And we believed her that we were welcome.

We had no reason not to, then.

—

As the métro glided through central Paris along the viaduct, I sat back to savor this interlude of beauty. When people think of Paris, they probably picture either the Eiffel Tower, the Arc de Triomphe, or the glittering glass pyramid by I. M. Pei at the entrance to the Louvre. But in my opinion, Paris’s true emblem is the Haussmannian apartment. 

Once a ramshackle medieval village plagued by overcrowding and disease, Paris, under the decree of Emperor Napoleon III to Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann, the city prefect, was transformed into a modern city of light and air. Haussmann ordered the bulldozing of countless cramped, tortuous medieval lanes to make way for new public works—parks, squares, kiosks, benches, street lamps, the opulent Palais Garnier Opera House—and broad boulevards lined with these gray stone apartments.

Each Haussmannian apartment stood at most six stories tall so ample sunlight could always reach the sidewalks below. Ornamental wrought-iron window grills and balconies on the second and third floors added a touch of sophistication to the elegant limestone facade. Then, at the very top, the small but charming attic-like rooms known as chambres de bonne have come to define the look of Paris with their sloping mansard roofs and slender chimneys dotting the skyline like candles. 

But as with every interlude, it ended too soon. 

The métro entered a tunnel; the darkness swallowed me whole again.

—

Aside from all my healthcare items, my luggage also contained a notebook and fountain pen. Because beginning in September 2022, I also had the good fortune to be a writing fellow at a literary center, the fellowship having come as both a surprise and a burden. The application, submitted many months prior, had been long lost inside my sleep-deprived brain. So when a voicemail came from the center’s coordinator to offer her congratulations on my acceptance into the year-long program, I was left feeling a little bewildered.

Had I applied?

I must have.

Why else would she be calling?

There were twelve of us, divided into three literary quartets: fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. I was a member of the nonfiction ensemble, having submitted a draft of a humorous travel memoir (“The Asian Vacation”) that chronicled those (mis)adventures from my family’s first jaunt across Europe.

During that first fall meeting, at a potluck at another nonfiction fellow’s home, a jovial fiction writer had come over to me and asked, “So, what are you working on right now?” 

My mind drew a blank; the honest answer was nothing. Instead, I stammered something about the travel memoir, even though I hadn’t touched it for nearly a year. Over the course of the next few months, the fellows met at the literary center on various weekends and sat like writerly knights around a square table as our mentors taught us the elements of craft and how to organize a manuscript, and worked on different writing prompts: write about a time you felt limited by your language; write about a time you felt you needed permission to do something; write about a time when your experiences were discounted, made invisible.

Except each prompt had felt like an unsolvable riddle to me. 

I watched in awe as my fellow fellows conjured up one stunning paragraph after another, while my pen and notebook sat quietly on the table, untouched. Instead, I used my words to sing their praises and conceal that I had become a writer who could no longer write.

—

I got off at Pigalle, a district in Paris famous for its lively and decadent nightlife. But at present the place was quiet, sleepy, perhaps a little hungover. I took out my phone and made a panorama of my first impressions of Paris: a Monoprix grocery store, a local pharmacie marked by its emblematic neon-green cross, an eyesore of capitalism (McDonald’s), and a colorful poster for a kimono exhibit currently on display at the Musée du quai Branly. A nearby sign pointed in the direction of the funicular up to Montmartre.

Walking away from the sign, I weaved through a tangle of Parisian lanes—some still narrow and winding despite Haussmann’s renovations—occasionally stepping off the slender sidewalk to let the opposite person pass. Then, rounding a corner, I came across the neighborhood bakery, Boulangerie Cyprien. The scent of freshly baked goods lured me inside: warm, fluffy croissants; thick croque monsieurs lathered with gruyere cheese; an assortment of stuffed quiches; petit sucrés, or little sweets; and stacks of crackly baguettes piled high like firewood.

I made an immediate plan to return here for lunch.

A few minutes later, I reached my accommodations, Hôtel George Astotel, the top-ranked choice on Tripadvisor. The whimsical hotel’s lobby was furnished with an eye-shaped clock, a blue sofa with a stuffed octopus cushion, and a stretch of umbrella-patterned wallpaper adorned with a mustache. At check-in, a friendly Asian-French receptionist handed me the prettiest keycard I’d ever seen, picturing the silhouette of a chic Parisian woman wearing a red beret and wind-blown scarf, standing before the city’s famous landmarks.

“Do you know where you’ll go first today?” she asked, marking up a map with all the famous attractions nearby.

I nodded and told her the name of a museum of my past. 

She looked up before adding a new circle.

—

During insomnia, time moves with a different flux. While each passing minute could stretch on for what felt like hours, the night would snap by seemingly in seconds, the edges of my drawn curtains illuminated by a ghostly sheen, the harbinger of daybreak after another sleepless night. 

“You are too young to have sleep problems,” Mom said, worried. 

But illnesses have no minimum age requirement. Like befores and afters, they just happen, occur, transpire. We tell ourselves stories in order to live. Sometimes, when I couldn’t sleep, I would ponder this line by Joan Didion and try to recall the abandoned bedtime stories of my childhood. What tales had I told myself to encourage sleep? Would rereading those books help me now? But as with every abandonment, the question one really wants answered is who had forsaken whom? 

Me my stories, or my stories me?

When a person becomes lost on a trail, the mind furiously backpedals in an attempt to recall the last visible landmark, the “/” before one became lost. Because if one could just return to that demarcation point, then one could become unlost and all would be well. But no matter how far I trekked, the grounds of before felt as unreachable as the after.

At home, day after sleepless day, night after sleepless night, I continued to drink Mom’s bitter concoction hoping that soon I would have swallowed enough bitterness for sleep to return to me. Gradually, after months of sipping, the bitterness did seem to lessen, my tongue slowly desensitized to the remedy’s flavor. 

Maybe I had misunderstood the lesson: one cannot swallow all of life’s bitterness; one simply grows accustomed to its acrid aftertaste.

And the body, too, learns to do with less.

—

A high wall wrapped around Musée Rodin, hiding it from street view. 

As I entered the cobbled courtyard, a guard directed me to the ticket office where I finally obtained a museum pass. The museum, housed inside the old Hôtel Biron, was once an artist’s haven, its sequestered location providing writers, painters, and sculptors with the solitude they needed to create away from the frenzy of Paris. Auguste Rodin, who came to the mansion on a recommendation from the poet Rainer Maria Rilke, immediately fell in love with the historic mansion and its surroundings. He rented out the entire ground floor, turning the south-facing rooms into his personal studio where he worked happily and prolifically. Before his death, he bequeathed his life’s work to the French state with the promise that the chateau would be turned into his personal museum.

Clutching my camera, I walked through the main door, past the grand curving staircase leading up to the second floor. Sunlight streamed in from the expansive bay windows, illuminating the roomful of marbles, bronzes, and terracotta models on plinths. Unlike in other museums, most of Rodin’s work sat out in the open here, unguarded, allowing museum patrons to get up close to each sculpture, circling it, studying it, embracing it with our hearts like the passionately entwined subjects of Rodin’s The Kiss.

I never forgot this feeling of intimacy. For it was here that I learned to appreciate art, to grasp the inimitable realism and expressive vitality Rodin infused into this works—the detailed musculature, the complex expressions, the emotive power—all of which held me, moved me, stayed with me long after we left the museum.

And yet, after spending only a few minutes inside again, I was clothed in unease. Even though January was supposed to be the slowest season, there was a crowd in every room. My ears, as if specially COVID-calibrated, caught every sniffle, sneeze, and throat-clearing cough, each one sending a shiver of dread down my spine. As I circulated the rooms in my N95 mask, I found the close arrangement of the sculptures claustrophobic and every unmasked visitor’s approach cause to take an equal number of steps backwards.

This time, instead of intimacy, it was distance that I sought from Rodin’s works.

—

Unable to stand being indoors any longer, I made a break for the museum’s garden. Outside, the gilded dome of Les Invalides hung majestically over the horizon like a gold crown. Rodin, who loved nature nearly as much as art, had placed a number of his greatest works outdoors: The Burghers of Calais, The Thinker, and on a dark slab facing Boulevard des Invalides, The Gates of Hell. 

I stared at the bronze sculpture, a vertical battlefield of two hundred writhing bodies and wondered about their agonies. 

Could they also not sleep? 

Or write?

Near the alcove of conical trees surrounding The Thinker, a young Asian woman in her mid-twenties, wearing a beige peacoat, approached me, her sheath of dark hair cascading alongside her face like black curtains.

“Could I trouble you to take my picture?” she asked politely in perfect English.

I nodded, took her phone, and snapped a few photos.

“Are you visiting from Korea?” I asked, handing it back.

Her eyes widened in delighted surprise.

“Oh my god, you’re the first person to get my nationality right! This whole trip it’s been either ni hao or konnichiwa.”

“Well, we don’t all look alike,” I smiled. “Annyeonghaseyo.”

Except with our masks on, we probably did: a distinctive yet homogenous group easily corralled into a pen like cattle as needed. For the longest time, I debated whether wearing a mask would keep me safe/unsafe in Paris. Because in the metropolis of 2.1 million, now mostly unmasked, the shield meant to protect my face somehow made it feel more conspicuous, naked, exposed. Initially, every time I boarded a crowded bus, métro, or train, my anxiety would rise, my fists clenching automatically, my breath holding involuntarily, my eyes watching and waiting for danger. 

Like a solvent, racism strips its target of that invisible layer of protective varnish. 

Like a suicide cluster, the first attack emboldens the next, spreading as easily as a virus.

But after two days in Paris, I found myself regaining some of that protection, having been relegated to the safety of another disregarded minority class: tourist.

—

Leaving the museum, I felt distraught by my altered feelings towards Rodin. As in a break-up, when one conducts a postmortem on the failed relationship, one always ponders the same three questions:

How does one come to abandon something they once cherished?

When did love cross over to hate?

Who changed?

I only had answers to the third: obviously, me.

Turning left off of rue de Varenne, I walked slowly towards the Eiffel Tower where I had a reservation to climb it for the first time. Though I had loaded the directions on my phone, it really wasn’t necessary. There was no missing it: gleaming over the Parisian skyline like a beacon, the latticed metal structure called port to all those lost at sea. 

As I zigzagged my way through the maze of Haussmannian buildings, I paused intermittently to admire the quintessential Parisian sights: the nautically themed lamp posts, the distinctive green park benches, the woven sidewalk bistro chairs, the haughty Frenchwoman walking a fluffy poodle with shaved legs as slender as the cigarette in her hand.

After half an hour of meandering, I reached the Champ du Mars, the park-like stretch of lawns before the tower where I nearly twisted an ankle on that memorable family trip, trying to get Mom to capture a jumping action shot of me in front of the monument. It was an iconic spot. Even in winter, I expected there to be families, friends, couples—albeit in smaller quantities and more layers—spread out on the grass on colorful picnic blankets with baskets of fresh baguettes, cheese wedges, hot chocolate, and bottles of champagne from Champagne. 

But there was no one. 

Instead, every grassy section had been cordoned off with chain-link fences, forcing pedestrians to walk on the gravel path lined with barren, skeletal trees. As I approached the base of the tower, I found the monument blocked off too. A ten-foot barrier of two-inch thick bulletproof glass had been erected around its periphery, preventing me from walking right under the tower as I had before. The wall, I later learned, had been retrofitted in response to a terrorist attack in 2015 that left 130 people dead and more than 400 others injured.

It seemed Paris had changed too.

—

When you revisit a place, memories of the past haunt every street corner you pass: I’ve been here before; I saw that last time; I remember this place well. 

Once, I looked up the etymology for the word “haunt” in a dictionary: twelfth century, of uncertain origin, perhaps from the Old Norse word heimata meaning “to fetch, to bring home.”

Why had I really come to Paris? Was it to be fetched home?

In retrospect, I realized that my itinerary, planned out to the extreme in the Field Notes, allowed me to faithfully retrace my every step in Paris, taking me back to not just all the places I had been, the sights I had seen, but also to the person I used to be. 

Because if the after only affords a person confusion, then perhaps the clarity I was so desperately seeking could be found here, in the before. Being in Paris again meant I could see it through the dyadically illuminating prism of then and now. And there was a sense of comfort in the accompanying déjà vu, of finding myself in a past life. Because even if I couldn’t return to the beforemath, there was still solace to be found in the do-over. 

A visit to a new place is a journey.

A visit to an old place is a homecoming, however haunted.

—

That night, exhausted and foot sore from nearly twelve hours of walking, I collapsed onto the small bed in my hotel room. Lying diagonally, I called my worried parents to ameliorate their fears and to share all that I had accomplished in just one day.

“Ha! And you blaming us for doing too much last time?” Mom laughed, relieved to hear my voice. “Now you going everywhere we went and more. Where are you visiting tomorrow?”

The plan was a new museum, one we hadn’t been to before.

“Okay, then go get some sleep.”

If only it were that easy.

Even though I had been awake for nearly twenty-four hours, it seemed that my insomnia, like déjà vu, had followed me abroad. As I lay there, staring at the slanted ceiling, I replayed an Anthony Doerr line in my head like a mantra: sleep is a horizon; the harder you row towards it, the faster it recedes. 

The only way to fall asleep is to stop trying.

Eventually, my jet-lag overcame my insomnia, though not for long. When my bleary eyes reopened, they glanced over at the bedside alarm clock: 5:37 am. I turned over, knowing the battle was already over. Instead, I reached for the notebook and fountain pen on the table, hoping to make a record of my first impressions of Paris. But the words sputtered out like a bad engine after just a few feeble sentences.

The proprietress of the boulangerie looked surprised when I returned as her first customer of the day.

“Bonjour. What would you like?”

Everything. 

The goods, all freshly baked on the premises, had been arranged immaculately behind the well-lit counter like jewelry. I took my time going down the aisle, tracing a hovering finger over the glass like an eager child. Eventually, I settled on two oversized pastries: a pain au chocolat set with chocolate emeralds and a brioche bejeweled with glittering sugar crystals.

Conversely, the French did not believe in eating bitterness for breakfast or for life.

Taking my food to go, I ambled downhill towards a different métro station, Saint-Georges, as the wintry dawn in Paris bloomed slowly like a lavender flower, each unfolding petal replaced by another of a lighter shade minutes later. In the short time it took me to finish the brioche and chocolate croissant on the empty underground, I emerged breathlessly, after climbing up a steep set of stairs, onto Place de la Concorde. The grand public square, now a major roundabout for Parisian traffic, was once the site of numerous public executions: both King Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette were beheaded here during the French Revolution. 

At this early hour, only a smattering of cars came around. 

I crossed the wide boulevard onto the island with a centerpiece obelisk. A gift from Egypt, the three-thousand-year-old monument, taken from the Luxor Temple, was tattooed in hieroglyphics exalting the reign of the Pharaoh Ramesses II. I remembered the obelisk and the two beautiful fontaines flanking it. Made from cast iron, now patinated, the Fountain of the Seas and Fountain of the Rivers glowed like a pair of turquoise lamps in the soft morning light. I approached the stone basin adorned with figures of tritons and naiads, wondering if the fish they held still sprouted water. 

No. 

Both fountains had run dry like my pen.

—

When I could still write, I would do so in the quiet hours of the night, after a workday overflowing with Excel workbooks and meetings. On a bed tray table, I would prop up my personal laptop and begin a second workday.

I wrote because I couldn’t sleep. 

I couldn’t sleep because I wrote. 

Some nights, I wondered if the cause for my insomnia was my writing: exploiting the bedtime stories I used to tell myself for publication instead of sleeping. 

During the summer months, I would work with my bedroom windows open, the whoosh of passing cars replaced by the swoosh of the night breeze, my billowing curtains a lung, expanding and collapsing steadily. Sometimes, I would match my breathing to the rhythms of my curtains, inhaling and exhaling, my respiratory tides also governed by the full moon outside.

In / Out.

Push / Pull.

Write / Not Write.

In the gardens of Musée Rodin, Rodin had placed a sculpture he made of Honoré de Balzac, one of France’s greatest novelists. Clad in the monk’s habit he wore as a writing cloak at night, Balzac stood like a monolith, solemn and austere, his intense gaze staring just beyond as if standing sentry over someone—himself.

Like insomnia, night writing is a vigil one holds for oneself.

—

The Musée de l’Orangerie sat on the corner of the Tuileries Garden left of Place de la Concorde. Though my reservation was for ten, I was let inside as soon as the museum opened, along with a handful of other visitors. In the welcome hall, the sun-polished floors glinted as waterfalls of morning light flowed through the floor-to-ceiling windows. I followed the small group up an incline that delivered us inside an ovoid gallery.

Nothing could have prepared me for the impact.

There, on the curving walls, spread out like a cyclorama, was Monet’s Water Lilies, enveloping the room in an all-consuming embrace. Composed of seamlessly interconnected individual panels, the four panoramic canvases captured Monet’s water oasis throughout the day: from the dreamy wisps of white mist that tinged the pale indigo dawn to the gloaming yellows and shuttering oranges burning of sunset, the series was a sundial of moving light that illuminated the ineluctable passage of time.

Both time and reality seemed to suspend as I stood there, as if caught in the bardo between before and after. 

There were no other paintings in the room; this was all there was to see. 

All that I needed to see.

Feeling vertiginous, I took a seat on the elliptical sofa in the center of the room, to quell my enchanted disorientation. Then, as the other visitors entered the next gallery, I had the room all to myself. 

I stared at the north-facing canvas entitled Green Reflections. 

It was a work of full immersion: no trees, no banks, no horizon line, no easy focal point for the viewer to find their footing. All that remained was the water, a swirl of muddy greens and murky blues, and the water lilies—real and refracted, silent and esoteric—floating in the unfathomable nothingness, a luminous, sleepless abyss.

—

Postcards, tote bags, candles, books, prints, scarves, pillows, posters, pencils, mugs, figurines; despite there being more famous artworks to see downstairs on -2, I spent an inordinate amount of time in the intervening museum gift shop searching desperately for a souvenir that would allow me to hold onto this moment. But nothing felt right. Every item I touched seemed too commercial, too artificial, too incapable of capturing this numinous experience. 

Just as I was about to give up and leave empty-handed, I spotted a stack of slim notebooks on a corner table, the cover a print of the Water Lilies divided into strips like a collage. It seemed ludicrous to buy another notebook that I could no longer fill. 

And yet.

That night, after I returned to the hotel following another long day of sightseeing—standing atop the grand balcony of Hôtel de la Marine, strolling along the stony embankment of the Seine, eating authentic duck confit at a French bistro—I tried but failed to find the English words to articulate the moment to Mom.

“Well, we have a saying in Chinese: 出污泥而不染, out of the sludge but not stained,” she replied. “It mean one must remain pure and unspoiled even if surroundings are dirty and corrupt. That’s how water lilies grow.”

I looked up the details on a botany website: rooted in the dank mud at the bottom of the pond, water lilies produce long, elegant peduncles and petioles that rise to the water’s surface where they give birth to the notched lily pads before blossoming into star-shaped flowers of primordial beauty.

It took me another sleepless night to understand Mom’s wise words.

For the three years AC, I had found myself wading deeper and deeper into a bottomless ocean of bitterness, swallowing one mouthful after another, and ingesting it as real life: the virus, the news, the noise, the politicians, the pundits, the lies, the frustrations, the hatred, the racism, the violence, the losses. All burrs that accumulate on one’s body over time, impaling it, clinging to it, weighing it down, accompanying one wherever one went. For if we’re not careful, we could become stained by these “dirty and corrupt” things.

But to sleep, to write, to live, one must rise above them like an emergent water lily.

—

For the rest of my French sojourn, I slept like I hadn’t been able to in a long time.

The cure, it seemed, was water lilies after all—just a different kind. 

But boarding my return flight two weeks later, I started to worry again. Because how could I hope to dream without Monet’s psalms of color? Paris’s hymns of light? 

Instead, I was certain everything would revert to before, again returning me to my lonely, restless vigils. But then, a week after my return, a library book came for me: Last Light: How Six Great Artists Made Old Age a Time of Triumph by Richard Lacayo. I couldn’t remember ever requesting this book. Timelines for library requests had become entirely unreliable AC; a biography of Fernando Pessoa came two years after its publication. 

I scanned through the table of contents of the artists covered: Titian, Goya, Matisse, Edward Hopper, Louise Nevelson, and, much to my delight, Monet. I immediately flipped to his chapter; it was all about the creation of his Water Lilies. Like me, Monet had suffered a dry spell. “Grief has desiccated me,” he said after the death of his beloved wife which left him unable to paint for months—until he began to conceive of his dreamy, wraparound installation.

As I continued learning about Monet’s struggles, I was forced to face my own when, at our very next session for the fellowship, our poetry mentor asked everyone to write an ekphrastic poem, the hauntingly beautiful word coming from the Greek– ἐκφράσις, or ekphrasis, meaning “to tell over, recount, or describe vividly.” 

Write a poem that vividly describes a work of art. 

Naturally, I picked Monet’s Water Lilies. For weeks, I walked around my house like a mad man trying to make the words rhyme. Eventually, after much effort, I managed to squeeze out sixteen short lines. When it was finally shared in class, another fellow said my poem reminded her of a lullaby sung to help a child fall asleep.

—

I have come to love the word ekphrasis. 

It reminds me of the word metamorphosis, the biological process of change that every living creature undergoes, because life is also a process of ekphrasis, of trying to find the words to describe the changing pictures of our lives. And that the success/failure of one’s life is ultimately one of ekphrasis: does the story of our life match the one we had pictured for ourselves?

In Last Light, I learned that Monet had a habit of painting the same scenes over and over again, but through different hours of the day, seasons of the year. What is life if not also those same daily scenes painted over and over again under that transitory light? An impressionist painting composed of a flurry of seemingly incoherent brushstrokes that only coalesce into meaning when you step far enough back?

For my very last meeting with my nonfiction mentor, we had to submit a piece for a one-on-one conference, a culmination of sorts for the fellowship. As the deadline loomed over my head like a guillotine, I debated if I should attempt something new or just submit more pages of my already completed manuscript. 

After all, there were no guarantees I could write anything anymore, let alone in time. 

But reaching for the Monet notebook that I thought would forever remain blank, I uncapped my fountain pen and watched the now scratchy nib lay down these timid, halting words: maybe life really could be cleaved into two halves—before/after Paris.

Even if nothing/everything has changed. ■

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