The Magic of Oz

The first time I went to Paris, I was moving there, I was alone, and I was seventeen. I can credit my first love and my first heartbreak to that city. Paris was older, more decadent, and revealing. Being in Paris’ embrace tickled and excited my unknowing skin but I also experienced the most frigid fear and lonesome of my life there. When I had to leave Paris, it felt like a tablecloth was ripped out from underneath the setting I had just finished placing. I was heartbroken. Being back in the US, I felt like a part of myself was missing. The same way you feel a little chipped off the edges after a breakup. 

My last night in Paris was March 13, 2020… a date that became the infamous brink between life and lockdown for the world. I was with Brontë, Solveig, Nicholas, and Timothé at a bar in Le Marais. Selfishly, we wanted a knockout club for our last night in the city but Paris was deserted and beginning to shut down. It was a running joke when we could gasp for air between tequila shots that we could NOT go to Café Oz. 

Café Oz was a bar that hosted seedy locals and exchange students. They played the kind of music that an old French woman would think young American kids would like, and unfortunately, we are a predictable breed, so the music was pretty spot on. The playlist was an extremely uncool compilation of Taio Cruz, the Black Eyed Peas, and big-booty remixes. I wasn’t with people who succumb to uncool because it’s the only option, so there was no way we could show face there. 

We couldn’t find anywhere to go, a problem none of them had ever faced. It made us almost believe the rumors that a global pandemic was shutting down the world. We sulked hopelessly on a street corner, dreading the return to our packed suitcases, without even one final hurrah.  

All of a sudden a black town car screeched in front of us, it’s wheels grating the curb. Brontë walked around the hood and whispered something quietly to the driver, masked by tinted windows. The rest of us stood there looking at each other splashed with the recurring feeling of, “What now?”

“Get in,” Bronte said to us, “We’re going to Café Oz.” 

Five hours later I was in a cab, on the way to the airport, listening to “July” by Noah Cyrus, sobbing, my suitcases piled next to me. Still in my gold shimmering top from our hilariously perfect and fun night at Café Oz, I winced as the dot on the dashboard got closer to Charles de Gaulle airport and I watched the city pass me out the window in the gray and greuling dawn. Twenty hours later I was in Tucson, Arizona, and didn’t leave the house for months. We all watched as people died from an uncontainable virus we didn’t understand and couldn’t do anything to stop besides doing nothing at all.

Two and a half years later, the world seemed to resume its rotation. I was in Seattle, Washington about to leave for Paris, again. I was jittery and nervous like I was going to see an old boyfriend. A week before I left, my friends and I got wrapped up in the idea that life is so cyclical, it’s almost predictable. Two joints in, we came to the conclusion, that something will repeat in your life until you’ve conquered it and then life, in its kindness, will let you move on. Everyone always talks about how life can be cruel but I’m coming to learn that it can also be kind.

Within the first hour, of being in Paris, I was at a café, lost in a book, cappuccino on the table, the French language rumbling around me. That is peace to me. Always will be. Megan got back from class and we walked on cobblestones to lunch. We talked about how grateful we were, how no one in the world really knows each other as well as we do and that if we’ve been friends for this long, we will be friends for our whole lives. We walked along the Seine, buzzed and blowing from side to side on the sidewalk in the subtle summer city breeze. 

We walked into a photography studio in Le Marais. The curator was brushing off frames in the back of the white open space. He had shaggy brown hair, royal blue fingernail polish, stacked silver jewelry, a black button-up, and black slacks. The photos were sensational. One, in particular, struck me to the core. It was the profile of a young woman in an old wedding gown, veil on, looking down at a full martini glass. There was an unspoken air of, “what am I doing?” I felt it through the glass and it hollowed me out and haunted me for the rest of the day. That is true art. 

After dinner, we made a wrong turn and I was hit by serendipity or luck or chance or whatever it is that people pray for. I couldn’t help but laugh at the big yellow letters sprawled across the window that read “Café Oz.”  No way, I thought and of course, we went in. We met two friends, Adrienne and Valentine. Adrienne for Megan and Valentine for me. They spoke smooth French that sounded like small waves sliding against the sand. They walked us around Paris in the dark. We danced with them and kissed them in front of the Palais de Justice de Paris, the colossal home of French judicial powers. A conveniently absent bunch. 

Laughing and dancing with my best friend and two handsome strangers in front of the lacking law perfectly completed my fragmented, unfinished Parisian story. The circle had finally closed. Life at that moment felt exceptionally kind.