Petit à Petit

The chaotic charm of settling in

It’s Sunday, an “autumnal vintage jazz” playlist carries piano and sax through the air, and the residue of my breakfast preparations litter the room. An open jar of blood orange marmalade from le Grand Epicerie; a pat of Maison Bordier demi sel beurre, softening all the more by the minute; the Dansk butter warmer I packed in my suitcase, now cooled, sitting atop a small pile of Harry’s Bar coasters. I’ve been inching my way through Cabana’s twenty-third issue — a 500-page tome masquerading as a magazine, only to be reminded that the autumn/winter issue is now available and perhaps my focus should have shifted there by now. In due time.

I’ve been living in Paris for six weeks. So I did the thing. I moved to France. Now what?

It’s one thing to imagine what a new life will feel like and quite another to live it. For years, everything I did was angled toward this goal — getting here. Even when I spent three months in the spring “test driving” the idea, it was different. Then, the future was still out ahead of me, full of clear intent and direction. Now, I’m living inside that imagined life, and it feels both real and entirely surreal.

I’ve been oscillating between these wildly different states: moments where I feel completely overcome with joy and others where I quietly panic at what I’ve done. I’m living in Paris — Paris! — a city I’ve routinely adored and returned to for the greater majority of my life. I get to walk cobblestone streets resplendent with Haussmann architecture, passing pâtisseries where cakes and tarts sit like petit sculptures, fromageries with their glorious stink wafting into the air, and overflowing produce stands where mushrooms, radicchio, and cauliflower are arranged with reverent care. The bouquinistes line the Seine, café terraces spill onto the sidewalks, and the city is bathed in the most exquisite light. As the nights grow longer, a different rhythm takes over — the bistros cast their glow onto the streets, tables filled with people lingering late into the night.

And then there are the times where I freak out a little bit about the fact that I sold my car, got rid of almost everything I owned, and crossed an ocean with a couple of suitcases and two obscenely expensive boxes of books. (Let’s just say the tax on my boxes applied courtesy of French customs was high enough that it earned an honest to God “oh la la” utterance from the La Poste employee who read the packing slip.) It hits me in quiet, practical moments — when the weight of starting over shows up not as a big feeling but as a list of small, relentless tasks. Every day there’s some new small adjustment: learning the quirks of an induction stove, deciphering the unspoken rules of each produce stand I now frequent, fumbling my way through a system that’s familiar in theory but never quite the same in practice.

I’m the rookie here, trying to build a life in a place I love and am completely overwhelmed by. Half the time I have no idea what I’m doing. Every item on my to-do list takes longer than it should, so I’m learning to just give in to the ordeal of it — to let myself stumble through the odd moments until they start to feel less foreign.

There are formalities to navigate as part of my arrival here — I have an official foreigner number and a slew of emails from the immigration office summoning me to mandatory appointments for language assessment and French civics classes. I’ve been scolded for forgetting to weigh my lemons at the market. My French is clunky and awkward; I can order a coffee with confidence but stumble the moment conversation turns casual. Every time I speak, it feels like a performance, rather than a language that belongs to me.

My friend Patrick gave me a phrase: petit à petit, l’oiseau fait son nid. Little by little, the bird builds its nest. It’s what I keep turning over in my head — a quiet reminder that settling in isn’t a single moment but a slow accumulation of small ones. This is what it means to be in the in-between.

More than anything, it’s the friendships that have made Paris feel like something solid beneath my feet. In the spring, I came to test a possibility; now, I’ve returned to people who made those months feel so alive. Coming back now, and actually living here, means returning to real faces, real connections. To morning coffees, gallery visits, and aimless walks along the Seine. To afternoons spent in parks and arcades, talking about everything and nothing, letting the city hold the edges of the day. To evenings that stretch long and easy over glasses of wine, shared plates, and conversation that winds late into the night. That sense of shared time — of belonging, of being known — has colored my entire experience of the city.

This past week, I went with friends to Bouillon République. I was overly excited, sure I’d never been to a bouillon before and had been missing out on a quintessential French dining experience. As it turns out, my first meal at a bouillon occurred decades prior, at Bouillon Julien, in the final hours of 1998. I was eleven-years-old, on my inaugural trip to Europe, ushering in the arrival of 1999 with my family at an extravagantly decorated Art Nouveau restaurant. The grandeur, the scale of it all — I had never seen anything remotely like it. I don’t remember what I ate for dinner, but the profiteroles have lived in my memory ever since. At midnight, the wait staff paraded through the restaurant clanging pots and pans, the room erupting in confetti, streamers, kisses thrown around. I was likely wearing something in brown velvet or olive corduroy from the Gap, but I’d never felt more sophisticated in my entire life.

(Editor’s note: my mother spent the evening at the hotel sick in bed, missing the dinner entirely, and has endured twenty-five years of hearing my family routinely reference yet again the pomp and circumstance surrounding one of the best meals we’ve ever had. Je suis désolé, Maman.)

It’s bizarre how a single dinner can fold time in on itself — how a city I first met as a kid is now the one I call home. Paris is still a bit of a fantasy; it’s too beautiful, and I’m too fresh for it not to be. Last weekend I stood on the Pont de l’Alma alongside a hundred tourists, all of us marveling at the Eiffel Tower, and felt utterly charmed by their joy. I can roll my eyes at tourists as easily as anyone, but it’s hard not to get swept up in that collective thrill. Moments earlier, I was en route to the metro, but when I rounded the corner and saw this iconic emblem of Paris aglow in the night, I gasped and made a beeline for the bridge. They were in the middle of their one unforgettable night in Paris, and I was having my own quiet oh my god, I actually live here moment. And, of course, I was wearing brown velvet. Go figure.