Paris, Without

To go where books and movies brought you, and to find it lacking. Not even art and its contingent romance(s) would allow for the overwhelming. Tell the boy who traveled through three countries to see you that you might cry when you see the Mona Lisa. Four hours after, inside and in tears for reasons beyond catholic art at the Sacre Couer, he whispers, “Buti na lang hindi ka sa Mona Lisa umiyak."

The things to see in Paris, replaced by who. No arguments when the long lines in the museums were enough to turn you away, no compelling reason to stay where crowds braved their own shadows: art will spell the difference between being cultured and being tourist! There was no friendliness here, no dynamism. Dog eat dog world? Survive the tourists of Paris! Walking the streets with refusal at every step, the notions of romance and love are slowly replaced by one sinking feeling - Paris is no magical place. That truth falls with a thud. It isn't so much disappointment, as it is an uneasy feeling about a whole country as commercial entity, one that has been sold to a third world creature like you since forever, and here, engaged in some HHWWPSSP (holding-hands-while-walking-pa-swing-swing-pa), no one was biting. It should've been a warning, the Paris Metro. What with its smell and dinginess, the unfriendly crowd, the contingent helplessness which quickly and necessarily transforms into a dirty finger: ckuf off. That is nothing but a matter of survival. Which is not to say that the Eiffel Tower is any less overwhelming, or that the Arc Di Triomphe is any less majestic, or that skipping the Louvre was an option. But when the overwhelming becomes extraneous to the monuments of wonder, and the feeling is that of being exactly the same, with digital camera in one hand, a bottle of Coke on the other, then you do feel the pit of your stomach in the way that you can meet up with your shadow. You didn't go to Paris to feel the same, did you? So you do it as the locals do. You sit on the grass in your short dresses forgetting to cover your legs, have coffee in tiny espresso cups instead of big Starbucks ones, do some public displays of affection because it isn't allowed where you come from. And you look up at the sky because very few of them do. As the boy takes your pictures, you take pictures of the tips of buildings, of the sun, of the clouds. You take them and make people disappear in your photos. You make them all disappear, looking farther than you ever have even as - maybe precisely because - you hold the hand of the boy who knew you at 12 years old. You walk the red light district, which seamlessly happens on the streets of museums and the Sacre Coeur - the Church of the Sacred Heart - the most tourist-y of spots, where noise and quiet become din. In the midst of sex shops and women with big boobs and bleached hair, wearing lingerie that's made for fantasies and not for procreation, you realize that this is testament to the legal and what it allows. Not just prostitution but a sense of what can be. What remains possible is an end in itself. Where can romance lie, in the city of love? Couples across sexualities populate the city, look at us, we're allowed here! Too many sex-and-the-city friendships walk in groups of four, dressed to kill. Small padlocks are on bridges and monuments, with names of couples who wish for forever. In your head, what a horrible symbol for love = locked in one place = romance = careful what you wish for. The boy shakes his head as you do. What to say when the shoe fits. So through the huge museum that is the Louvre, you fight the noise by singing to yourselves, songs that are only between the two of you as a matter of being childhood sweethearts, as a matter of puppy love coming to bite you both when you least expect it. Maybe in the midst of old paintings and the Venus de Milo, you both realize what can still be, so long after the first courtship, far from who you were then. And as you leave Paris and get on a train on its way to infinite destinations, you realize that you're seeing the end of nostalgia with this boy, and the familiar is becoming nothing but new. You will deal, and fight, and agree, and laugh like you both haven't in a long time. You both know now that your lives are intertwined in the way your fingers are. You know there are no accidents, only signs. Paris, without love and romance, is on that train that moves swiftly away, you and the boy off on this trip of real possibilities of the extraordinary. - GMANews.TV