Paris is beautiful as ever and I’m still very in love. I came back initially because I felt like the city and I were not quite finished with each other yet. I’m not ready to leave now—et pour être honnête, je ne pense pas que je serai jamais—but I feel like this chapter is drawing to an end. To be revisited later, perhaps, but no longer unfinished.

There come moments—traversant Pont Neuf lorsqu’il fait nuit, la ville étincelant sur la surface d’eau; déposant des baisers légers sur les lèvres de mon amant endormi très tôt le matin; riant des conneries de mes amis chez Coco lorsque la sensation chaud de vin déborde mes veines. Simple moments that make me step back and look at everything from the perspective of five year old Victoria, growing up in suburban New Jersey. This life seems impossible. Some days I can’t help but feel like this is all too much to be possibly my life and that I’ll wake up at any moment, back in New Jersey. I mean, I live on a boat in Paris. I don’t know, do you ever feel like that? This feeling that reality is completely surreal and that it doesn’t truly belong to you? Like you’ll wake up at home and realize that you had just dreamt everything?

I like that I’ve become of those people that finds absolute wonder in the everyday moments. Perhaps I always have as a photographer, but there’s something about being here again that’s elevates that feeling.

I am doing quite a bit of reading these days. Public transport sucks up at least an hour or more each day, which I don’t mind because it’s great reading time.

The whole process of reading has changed though, as I’ve started to read only in French. I’ve become a lot more proactive about learning new words so I try to underline every word that I don’t know, which makes me linger on the language more than I ever have in my life. I picked up a stack of one euro used books at a bookstore and have been making my way through French novels of questionable quality, but I devour them greedily anyway to learn new words, new constructions, new ways of being in French.

Closest book you ask? At the moment, the book closest to my heart is In Other Words by Jhumpa Lahiri, a linguistic autobiography written in her adopted language. She moved to Italy in a self imposed linguistic exile from her mother tongues. She started start writing only in Italian in her journal, which was to later become this book, written in Italian with opposite pages in English (translated by someone else, shockingly). The collection of essays details her relationship with Italian and finding her voice/identity as a writer in a foreign language. We share very similar experiences as expats, framed by nearly identical backgrounds as American raised women of color with a linguistically divided upbringings.