So I danced like a madman, covered in sweat, the joy and suddenly strangely deep connection you enjoy at weddings with many random strangers who are suddenly best friends from another life

(we’ll stay in touch, you facebook friend it up, rarely if ever see them again)

—a wedding is a bubble in time and sparks beauty, community,

family gatherings of 30 for dinner along four long tables, half Spanish, half French, then there’s me, struggling happily in French, awful to nothing in Spanish, but everyone is kind and beautiful in their each own way and stylish, wow,

and the wedding is atop a little mountain overlooking the vast sea and there are vegan options and the woman you’re with

and you might irritate each other and fail here and there but she’s a good kind loving soul even if she’s hangry or ready to faint with hunger once a day or is mad at me because I’m mad at her for ignoring me when I don’t know anyone. But she’s a maid of honor so it’s my job to support her to support beautiful cheerful all-accomplishing Monica, and her Top Chef handsome kind Samuel, both of them working so hard and loving so fully, with such dear fun troublemaking friends,

just now saying a bien tot a Antoine in the Gare de Lyon where Hadley lost all of her Hem’s early writings.

And we’re back a Paris and we’re on the sixth floor, the top, overlooking beautiful apartments and I wish I could live in the past before everything became cheap but it would have to be a past with equity and anti-racism and climate crisis awareness, instead of just eating up this planet and

so the only choice is to turn around and embrace the world as it is now but try to better it. Less plastic. More vegan, less cruelty. More education, more voting rights, more coming together to fight climate crisis, peaceably, with everything we’ve got.

So the moment is now and I’m back here with Michelle and couldn’t be more grateful, a Paris.