The Applicant

You try to feel like a native, not a foreigner; you progress from grammar to idioms in an attempt to talk as if you belonged. Still, you never succeed in feeling at home. You remain a visitor, perhaps only a tourist. There was always something else, something more, another even larger adjustment to be made.

I loved living there, but I don’t know if I would look back on it so fondly if it had been the only life I’d ever known, had I not carried my American roots with me while I was there and elsewhere, had I not been certain that freedoms I couldn’t enjoy in my current reality were just a flight away.

When you live in Paris for more than a couple of years, you see a lot of people come, and you see a lot of them go. It’s a great city to visit for a week, or even a few months, traipsing from museum to café to pastry shop, tearing into baguettes, and capping off the day with steak frites in a bistro with a remarkably decent pitcher of vin rouge mai

But what was different, exactly? A sister easier to shed than a daughter, a mother than a husband. What made her so easy to give away? But she didn’t ask this, of course. She would have felt even more like a child than she already did, glancing over her shoulder to make sure her mother didn’t catch her drinking.