Paris, a photo essay

Paris, you raised me in ways I didn’t yet know I needed.

(best read with a lil French inspired playlist by me)

I was eighteen, and Paris was my oyster. I cracked it open with eager hands and a half-baked accent.

I moved to study French — or at least, the version I thought I knew. The one I learned from a well-meaning American with a Minnesota lilt back in high school, where we conjugated avoir in colorful workbooks and spoke English until called on. I’d done well, but that didn’t prepare me for the real thing: the pace, the slang, the sounds between sentences, the sheer musicality of it all. This French didn’t wait for you to catch up, and didn’t sound at all like your American high school teacher.

But Paris— Paris I already knew. It had been my first city abroad at seven years old, and ever since, it became the dreamy backdrop of my most romantic ambitions. At one point, a university destination. Paris was the source of my creative pulse. It appeared in my scribbled notebooks and moody paintings. I had drawn it before I could define it. It was my subject. I had to return — but this time, alone.

I moved with two large suitcases into a hotel-converted-dorm apartment in the 8th Arrondissement and met my German roommate. I’d be commuting each morning to my language immersion school. Classes ran from 9 to 6. Monday to Friday. Not a whisper of English.

Dépaysement — a word that has no direct English translation, but is something like the feeling of being so far from your familiar, a little out of place, but at the same time, the butterflies of excitement are flying in.

I’d romanticized the whole thing. A Parisian chapter. A young woman abroad alone. Language, baguettes, art. But the reality of immersion smacked me across the face. I sat in class unnerved for weeks, fearful of my strict French professor making slights at my expense. My classmates — from Brazil, Kyrgyzstan, El Salvador — were fluent in three or four languages. They picked up French like it was a song they’d heard before. I, the American, waded through my second language like quicksand — and really, what was my excuse?

And then— an American girl. My age. From New York. An artist too. We spotted each other across the classroom battlefield and immediately mouthed a silent hello. We found each other in lunch breaks, in jokes that needed no translation, in a shared curiosity and wonder for this beautiful city in the middle of spring.

We wandered through the arrondissements, documenting everyday life, and over time, the vibrant smells of the Metro went unnoticed. I came to Paris solo and left with a friend. That’s the quiet magic of travel: you arrive as one, and return with a small constellation of people who change you.

She was admirably diligent about attendance. I… less so. Somewhere I realized I couldn’t spend my time in Paris chained to spotless attendance. I was eighteen. In Paris. And the world was too wide, too lovely, to stay inside.

I took the train to Geneva to visit a friend from a previous chapter of travels. Then, Brussels for a day. I wandered through Giverny to feel closer to Monet’s genius. And at the Musée de l’Orangerie, I sat in front of my favorite painting for four hours, utterly undone (true story).

Evenings were for long conversations on my balcony with neighbors from Saudi Arabia, trading stories about our home country, what we expected from Paris, what surprised us, what would stay with us. It was our daily communion.

And slowly, the language found its way in — not with fanfare, but in quiet victories: fluent orders at the café, casual exchanges at the market, easy laughter with the woman in my local boulangerie. It was taking root and expanding. The once-immovable fog of confusion began to lift. The immersion was working.

Paris, you let me marvel, you let me stumble, you raised me in ways I didn’t yet know I needed.

I’ll spill all the Paris tips soon — the stops to skip, the ones to wander twice, the boulangeries and parks that changed my life. Until then, this is the origin story. The overture. The preface to the photos I made quand je vivais à Paris — a small visual diary, a postcard from that curious, beautiful, unrepeatable time.

A parting piece of advice— study language in immersion, let yourself get caught in the current of confusion; have some grace for the process. It’ll find you in the middle of the grocery aisle when you least expect it.

Thank you for being here, until next time 💌
xx Raye

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