The Paris we left behind

It took less than an hour for the Paris I lived in, had called home for the past six months, to become something unrecognizable.

My heart sank as I watched the news anchor inform a nation with impossible seriousness of shootings and hostage takings at a concert hall, bombings at a stadium and streets filled with soldiers.

It sank further after seeing the footage of flashing lights along Canal Saint-Martin, across from where we’d sat and ate fish and chips last Sunday and the police barricades hastily propped up around Place de la République, a spot my fiancée and I had walked through often daily, making a game out of guessing which of the skateboarders wheeling around the public square was on the verge of wipeout.

And again, more so even, when I heard the death toll at the Eagles of Death Metal show at the Bataclan, a show we’d been invited to but declined given our flight out to Canada earlier that day, about the shootings at Le Petit Cambodge, that boring signage I made a point to ignore on my daily walks to grab groceries in the Belleville neighbourhood we called home.

There were more places, regular fixtures of our days, names we committed to memory. I think of them now, removed from the mundane that, with time, accompanies living anywhere, even somewhere like Paris. These places are not the places we left behind that day when we unknowingly boarded one of the last planes (dumb luck) before the borders were closed.

In the coming weeks these names will become symbols, just like the names of the 132 people who have died. This is the world we live in.

Belleville, where some of the worst atrocities happened, is not a Westernized neighbourhood. It is not even a French neighbourhood. It is the whole world. It is Asian and African and European and Latin and North American. It is incomprehensibly multicultural. Falafels and naan are hawked at street side across from Irish hipster expats serving up cappuccinos and jockeying between English and French while flustered shop owners flit about dolly’s stocked with veggies from the Far East and boulangeries roll out an endless supply of croissants and baguettes.

Paris is not, of course, “the capital of prostitution and vice, the lead carrier of the cross in Europe” that ISIS describes rather is a kaleidoscope of humanity, of people and culture.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned from nearly a decade reporting on businesses and finances and resources it is that we’re all just passing things around – ideals, thoughts, money – it starts in one place and ends up on the other side of the world. That’s just the way it is. That also why this didn’t happen in Paris, this happened to all of us.

And as we struggle to make sense of it, to convince ourselves that we understand the incomprehensible, there will no doubt be xenophobia and certainly some form of war. But I hope sincere support and solidarity will be the loudest voices.

The Paris we left behind that day may never be the same but there is one thing that won’t change, something that no idealism or misguided fundamentalism can kill – the City of Light will remain undimmed.