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I sought our daily exploration pairing by zooming in on my over-starred map. Two corners of the city threaded together like a loose stitch.
The amphitheater opened up like an exhale, stone and silence cupped in the palm of Paris. Students sat in clusters, unwrapping sandwiches, their voices hushed like they, too, were trespassing on history. A woman read with her back to the stone. Pigeons shuffled in the ridges where crowds had once roared.
Les Arènes de Lutèce
Les Arènes de Lutèce, the bones of Roman Lutetia. A stage for gladiators, poets, and orators. It could hold 15,000 at once. Now, it holds leisure on quiet days. The stones have lost their purpose but not their weight.
My sisters had already started climbing, mittened palms against the wooden railing.
“It’s steeper than it looks,” one of them called.
I followed slower, my fingers grazing. The wind threaded through the sycamore branches, shadows breaking and reforming across the stone. It was peaceful in the way ruins always are, built for something grand, left for something small. A place meant for spectacle, it was now perfect for an afternoon of nothing at all.
Paris Jazz Corner
They were ahead of me, already drifting toward the Paris Jazz Corner. I could almost hear a Miles Davis riff curling at the edges of my thoughts, waiting. The shop was thick with the scent of aged record sleeves and the low hum of a needle against wax.
My sisters ducked into restaurants, emerging with still-warm croissants and small coffees, their hands wrapped around them like votives. I trailed behind, capturing angles where shadows met stone, the afternoon light stretching long over worn facades.
Saint-Étienne-du-Mont Church & Ernest Hemingway’s Apartment
A striped shirt rolled over the crosswalk. The city is dense; you’ll never see every corner. The photo for now marks where I need to return: Saint-Étienne-du-Mont Church, where Sainte Geneviève, the Patron Saint of Paris, is entombed.
We passed Hemingway’s first apartment. He lived here in the early 1920s, newly married, newly poor, walking these very streets, carrying stories in his pockets. Later, in A Moveable Feast, he’d write about how he remembered those who walked these streets:
“They say the seeds of what we will do are in all of us, but it always seemed to me that in those who make jokes in life the seeds are covered with better soil and with a higher grade of manure.”
The day stretched thin. Paris held onto us a little longer, the past pressing against the present, urging us forward.
