Recalling France, December 2019 (Part One)

Lana Del Rey, panic attacks, a long walk to the Eiffel Tower in an empty city.

I don’t remember the flight from Rome to Paris— likely because I’d taken a Valium, one of fourteen pills. My American prescription was depleted while I was in Czechia, before I had ended my Fulbright early. I doled these ones out to myself every third night or so, while staying in shared Airbnb’s and pet sitting in the Umbrian countryside. Without them, hours would pass as I wove my way through panic attacks, each one startling me awake as I drifted off to sleep, like Groundhog Day in miniature.

From Charles de Gaulle airport I found the Metro. I stood, pretending to read, as the Metro platform filled and filled, and then finally a train came, and we filled the train, and the train got fuller with each stop, until my body was wedged in between several African men, all of them conversing over me. We were unmasked, of course, because Covid had just become a thing in China and no one knew what was going to happen in just a few months.

I watched the men’s faces not understanding any of th…