Living hard in the city of love

Is the "soft life" ever enough?

Passages (2023)

Just a visitor you see / so much wanting to be seen / she’d open up the doors / and vaguely carry us away¹

“Do you need a wedding dress?”

It’s lunchtime on Boulevard de Magenta and the traffic is as thick as the sultry summer air outside. Diamanté encrusted gowns insist upon the road we’re crawling down. Signs splayed across shop awnings cry out; FASHION-SHOP, Secret Nuptial, Le Center Mariage.

Walking through the city feels like swimming through warm soup. Sitting in a taxi isn’t much better. “Not yet,” I laugh. But I think I mean not at all, not ever. I mean I thought I’d know by now, but everything is up in the humid air, precariously balanced on the steam rising from hot tarmac.

What I do know is that the taxi is driving me to Gare du Nord where I will take the train back to England. My 90-days are up. I can’t stay in the EU any longer. Les joies du Brexit, someone jokes and I start repeating it with a shrug whenever anyone asks me why I’m leaving.

I always feel most in love with a city when I am about to leave it. The world opens up like a jewellery box and the grimy streets sparkle like gold. I notice things more. Sun on dirtied marble. Paintings askew on café walls. A guitar player at the steps of the Sacré Cœur asking tourists if they’re happy. The neighbour leaning out the window smoking a cigarette. The old woman below shaking out a patterned rug. Life feels slower. All that exists is this moment then that one on some old cobbled street or other. It is the terminal lucidity returning to the body the day before it dies. I wish life could feel like it does when I’m leaving all the time.

I didn’t move to Paris looking for love, but I also wasn’t not looking for it. Most of the time, I’m a cynical fucker who thinks dreaming of falling in love in Paris would be a little too on the nose. I learnt to quiet that small ‘what if?’ that sneaks up behind me and whispers in my ear. But a new country is like a fresh runway stretching on for miles. There is so much room to play. So much room to make new mistakes.

New words like knives plunged into the night. I tried to speak and got tongue tied on twisted streets with bad men I didn’t know yet. The first time I went on a date where we spoke only French the entire time, I stumbled through the door as giddy as if I’d just fallen in love. I was ecstatic about finally kicking through a wall in a language I’d been learning in my spare time for years. Would a relationship really be more of an achievement than that?

My last week in Paris was blighted by sickness. I spent it sweating in twisted sheets, shutters down in a feeble attempt to keep the heatwave out. That week was hard, but still part of me yearns for the small room and the sickness and the low-level stress that bubbled beneath my skin constantly. I want the exhaustion and the excitement and the confusion of French grammar. A soft, slow life tempts me, but I’m making plans for the hard, rough, spiky one. The one that mainlines adrenaline through my veins and leaves me reeling.

For most of 2024, my mornings looked like this; I would wake up, make a cup of herbal tea and walk down to the sea. I’d followed my nose from London to Brighton seeking space and sea air. True, lasting happiness typically comes from daily routine and gratitude rather than chaotic, spontaneous adventure. So, why did I still crave more? Desire digs its fangs in and tears the quiet moments in two. We wouldn’t be here as humans if it were not in our nature to dream bigger.

Herbal tea on the beach on my last evening in Brighton, a city that is still very dear to my heart <3

The term ‘soft life’ was coined in the Nigerian influencer community in 2022 to describe a lifestyle that prioritises comfort, self-care and stress-free living. It has, of course, been adopted and co-opted by swarms of brands and influencers packaging up five-step soft life guides to becoming that girl and unlocking your princess energy. Yet at its core, the soft lifestyle seems like a convincing route to happiness.

Back in my hometown, where I am living now, life is soft and slow. I feel at peace and energised, and a little guilty about feeling that way. It is the opposite of the uphill battle that is acclimatising to a new country on your own. I wonder if a life like this will ever truly be mine. If I will ever need that wedding dress. If I will ever really want it. I itch, trying to decipher my identity now that I’m back in a small town again. Trying to figure out if this life could ever make me as happy as the other one.

When I was ill in Paris, Emily sent me a video about calm lives and interesting ones. It said that some people’s lives are marked by “a high degree of exploration, psychological understanding and striving rather than settled certainty and equilibrium.” We are always measuring and comparing happiness as though there is some kind of quantifiable scale. As though some of us are doing happiness better than others when there is no roadmap or true destination. “If, on our deathbeds,” the video continued, “we were to look back at a roller coaster of emotions and events, we might smile to ourselves and say, with wisdom and compassion, it wasn’t a calm life or it wasn’t, for the most part, even a happy one, but heaven knows it was a truly and properly interesting one.”

When I tell the taxi driver I don’t need a wedding dress, not yet, he says that marriage, family and children are the best things in the world. He says that now he has children, he is no longer scared that no one will look after him when he’s old. He tells me that children are happiness.

I wouldn’t know anything about that. But I do know that happiness can look like getting on a train alone on a Saturday night and moving to a country where you don’t know anybody yet. Like knocking back pints in jazz bars with strangers. Like watching the sunset with a Hinge date I’ll never see again. Like reading poetry in the basement of an old bar. Like the sound of birds cawing and church bells ringing to announce the baptism of fire that is moving to a new country alone.

I was nothing but a vehicle for all these sensations. A curious body floating through strange streets. A ghost in a thrifted coat. A nobody. A visitor. Sometimes it was too quiet. Sometimes I wanted to taste the cobbled ground, as if consuming it would make it mine. Other times, I could have stayed inside and dreamed forever.

As we finally pulled in to Gare du Nord, the driver warned that Paris is dangerous and expensive. I think what he was trying to say is that if the soft life is an option, I should take it. Only I’ve become adept at making life hard for myself because, above all, on my deathbed, I want to think, “what an interesting life.”

Soft living is not always within our control. You may master a slow lifestyle, then something happens and it’s fast and it’s brutal. We move through life in seasons, painted by all the experiences that ripped us open then put us back together again. I want to be soft and then hard and then soft once more. I want to experience it all.

1. ‘Paris 1919’ - John Cale