Retour

He knows this now. He did not know this six weeks ago when he took it in the wrong direction for twenty minutes before a teenager said something to him in French that he didn't understand, and then switched to English and said, "This goes to the city, the airport is the other way." He had said thank you four times. The teenager had looked at him with the particular patience of someone who encounters lost tourists professionally, which is what he was, which is what he had been the entire time without fully admitting it.

He is going to have to explain this.

Not now; not at the airport, not on the plane. But eventually, when he is back and in a room with Raul, he is going to have to explain why France specifically, and the explanation is going to be: because of you. Because of the baguette and the market and the plastic Eiffel Tower and the way you haggled with that man for eleven minutes over something that cost four euros and won. Because that was the last time he remembered feeling like a person in his own life and not a symbol in someone else's, and he thought if he could get back to the place where that happened —

He hadn't accounted for Raul not being there.

This seems, in retrospect, like a significant oversight.

Créteil is grey-green in November, the same as everywhere in November, the trees doing what trees do when they've decided to stop trying for the year. He walked it for six weeks. The market on Wednesdays. The bakery on the corner of the street — he was fairly certain, was Raul's street, or near it; he didn't know the exact address, had never needed to know the exact address because Raul had always just said follow me, and he had always just followed.

He pointed at a lot of pastries.

The woman at the bakery started recognizing him after the second week and would sometimes just hand him the usual before he could point, which was the most socially integrated he'd felt the entire time and which he found both touching and somewhat embarrassing in equal measure.

He doesn't speak French.

He took three lessons on an app before he left and retained: bonjour, merci, excusez-moi, and a phrase about a blue pen that has not come up once.

The train goes underground and then comes back up, and the suburbs give way to other suburbs, the specific sameness of the periphery, and he looks at his phone.

Airplane mode. He hasn't turned it off yet.

He's going to have to turn it off at some point. Not now. When he lands, maybe. Or when he's in the airport, and there's no other way to be between things, when the decision has already been made, and the only remaining question is what happens when he's back in a room where people know his name.

He knows what happens. People will talk. He'll have to say things. There will be a version of events that gets constructed for the public and a different version that exists between him and the people who were actually there, and he'll have to navigate both simultaneously while also figuring out how to be in a body that spent six weeks pointing at pastries in a suburb of Paris because he missed his best friend and didn't know how to say it.

He looks at the phone.

He turns off airplane mode.

The notifications take a moment to arrive.

Then they arrive.

He doesn't read them. He opens the contacts. Finds the name — it's near the top, it's always been near the top, years of being the first call — and looks at it for a moment.

He doesn't call.

Three words. He looks at them. Adds nothing. Sends it.

The read receipt appears in under four seconds.

He looks at it.

Something in his chest does what chests do when they've been braced for a long time and suddenly don't have to be anymore. Not fixed. Not resolved. Just released, slightly. Enough.

The train pulls into CDG Terminal 2.

He picks up his backpack.

He goes home.