Everything is a mission.

Paris, une. Excuse me while Paris becomes my entire personality for the next few (weeks, years) posts.

I didn’t have to flirt this time to find myself on a flight. At least not with a man, though maybe (very secretly, and for many weeks) with my next move..

Sat next to a dream in the window seat with a space inbetween who obviously didn’t have to but very gratefully pissed once in 17 hours on QF33. So polite he asked the man behind him if he could put his seat back, as if he needed permission.

And I love men more than anyone or anything but in my opinion too many were given full rows to themselves as opposed to women.

Freaked out momentarily over potentially not sleeping, I quickly checked myself and rather remembered that I WAS SO HAPPY to sit upright, actually. Excuse me. High on my last minute staff travel flight of $270 from Sydney to Paris via Perth. Only because there was a cyclone approaching Brisbane.

Moved by Anora. A Real Pain was entertaining. Against Anthony Bourdain’s wishes I ate everything (always). For once I didn’t complain about the air conditioning.

Though on arrival in Paris I was fucking freezing. So cold that I actually put on underpants (few will know what this means for me) biting the tag off my shacket on the metro in a panic, with the sirens in the distance taking me back to when I heard them for the first time, on my first trip to Paris when I was 17.

A bought deodorant (I honestly don’t know what’s come over me) and a new outfit after catching my reflection, cursing the trunk of checked luggage I was dragging from Gare du Nord to my apartment in seven degrees at 7am (which I never usually do and never will do again) full of what had suddenly translated to rags in Parisian, promptly making my way to le Marais and settling on a nondescript uniforme noir, straight outta Uniqlo homme.

And I remember thinking how weird it felt to have not flown through the Middle East, and to have the sun in my eyes once again when I should be sleeping. Already asked out twice before I’d shut them, thinking fucking finally and that this just must be where I’m meant to be, and before opening them again, cracking a nosebleed and my phone screen. Something that seems to be a recurring phenomenon in France for me.

And I’m reminded of the first few days of arriving anywhere really isn’t always easy. Acclimatising to new weather, air quality, culture, language. SIM cards and just trying to get the code right to get into your airbnb when your host isn’t answering, on no sleep and without socks or simply enough warm things. With mysterious cuts all over my hands and fingers. As Mercury begins its retrograde in Aries. And Venus for that matter, oh don’t worry she’s feeling it.

Still I will enjoy just a few slow mornings, taking long baths after coffee. I’ll then wander the streets asking myself intermittently how I can live like this everyday. At the same time as how travel as I get older scares me. And how brave I must have been moving around the world the way I did modelling in my 20s.

As much as it is thrilling and girl, do I love running - the world ain’t pretty.

Paris is both the most striking and ugly. Considering the dissonance, I stop to remind myself why I like it here (that’s right: the men, la vie quotidienne and peacocking).

Its beauty outweighs what’s bad, for me. Even if that makes me out of touch with reality (I don’t deny that I am and that I haven’t always been like this) and what truly might be going on here politically, socially. Though please just let me live in the purity, ignorance and anonymity of the first chapter of my holiday, because albeit an absolute fucking mission, this is what bliss is for me.

And because I don’t really know who I am if i’m not away.