Rhi Axtell – Writer

Image: Me on the London tube after a long day of travel

Paris is warm at 5am. I don’t regret wearing shorts as we weave through the streets towards Montparnasse, metro line 4 and onto Gare du Nord to catch the first Eurostar of the day. The city is blinking sleep from its eyes, the usually busy roads are still quiet, and our journey is only interrupted by the occasional jogger, pigeon, or rat. Julie comments on how bright it is already. She expected us to be wandering through the dark, but the sky is already a pale eggshell blue. I try to think of something smart to say in return, but it’s 5am so my vocabulary is limited to uh huh and mmm.

It’s been a weekend of not being able to find my place. Everything has been a little too fast, or a little too slow. Most of the time has been spent trying to catch up or looking back, stumbling through a mental smog of minutes and hours. To top it off, I spent most of yesterday curled up on a couch because my famously bad digestion reacted poorly to a chocolate mousse.

I feel grey, and stretched out. I’m a thin scraping of butter on stale bread. My mind is on a loop of my worst hits of the last few days – the joke I sent to a friend on WhatsApp that didn’t quite stick, that time I stumbled over French words in a Korean restaurant and ended up waving in desperation at the waitress, that other joke I sent to the same friend over WhatsApp, to try and make up for the first one, which landed even worse. That friend has stopped responding to my messages.

A small part of me considers sending another joke.

The chocolate mousse. That damn chocolate mousse.

In moments like these, I try to be grateful. Grateful that my sister-in-law got a mattress topper so that metal bar in the middle of her sofa bed doesn’t give me backache anymore. Grateful that my natural rhythm woke me up at ten minutes before the alarm so I didn’t have to fight to activate my brain. Grateful that Paris is warm and I don’t need to worry about my exposed legs. Grateful that, despite everything, I can travel to Paris and back again on a weekend with relative ease.

The gratefulness comes a lot easier when I get to the Eurostar, and finally have my first hot cup of tea of the day – paired perfectly with a very overpriced croissant. Bliss.

Sometimes it’s the simple pleasures that make the day.

See you next time.