The funny thing about winter in Paris is that you probably have never heard of it.  Everyone is sold on the idea that springtime is the ideal time for lovers, who walk arm in arm along the Seine to the backdrop of budding trees and chirping birds, and tourists seem confident that summer is the perfect season for skimming stones along the Canal St-Martin and gazing through the haze to the tippy-top of the Eiffel Tower.  But nobody seems to talk about winter in the city of lights, which you’d imagine would be even more brilliant what with holiday spirit in the air and Christmas decorations twinkling along the avenues.

Still, nobody talks about winter in Paris, and I will tell you why:  it’s cold and grey and doesn’t make you want to do much of anything, let alone bubble over with excitement about a city that sometimes feels like a bad addiction.

For six weeks straight, in November and December, we didn’t see the sun, and the rain was pierced only by bitter days that sealed in the cold with a humid fog.  Tucking in your chin to protect yourself from the wind on such days, all you see is the slate grey of the sidewalk – without glitter even – and the varying shades of dog droppings that make you wonder whether the Paris water is making you sick, too.

Americans have always entertained a love affair with Paris, but in the winter, it feels more like a bad marriage – the kind that you know you ought to call quits but just can’t bring yourself to do so.  On those misty days – the humidity piercing through coats and the fingers of woolen mittens – it is all too clear that everything we were warned about is true: there really is nothing romantic about living quarters the size of a closet or the suffocating desperation that you’ll never find a ‘real’ job.  The café terrasses – irresistible stages for adventure in the summertime – are now only mere reminders of your loneliness, with their tables and chairs stoically awaiting the return of diners to warm them up and bring them back to life.  After taking refuge from the cold in the nth café on a given day, it no longer seems so glamourous to drink black coffee and inhale other people’s smoke, or observe the theater at other tables of liaisons and done-deal handshakes and surly students chainsmoking cigarettes.  In fact, you begin to wish that, instead of being a mere observer, you, too, were part of the frenzy.

Like many before me, Paris seduced me the moment I set foot here, and not least of all because of the visual feast it provides.  Walking the streets made me feel like I was in a film – a world exotic enough to be magical, but still real enough for me to believe my fortune could be found here.  When the cold came, I spent my days at an actual movie house, losing myself in another version of almost-real fantasy by taking advantage of a deal that, for the price of two movies, allows subscribers to see an unlimited number of viewings a month. 

In the beginning, this arrangement seemed like the perfect answer to my mere twelve-hour work week and laughable salary.  Sinking into a cushioned armchair beside my friend Rebecca, a freelance writer with a schedule as untraditional as my own, was a delicious luxury.  I would smile almost purringly and lose myself in the film, letting myself forget that other people were holed up in stuffy office buildings.  But later, I became restless as I watched the adventures on the screen – my own toes falling asleep inside my shoes – and I began to wish that I, too, had urgent business to tend to.  If Paris is a movable feast, wintertime can give foreigners hunger pangs; I had begun to feel like a street urchin gazing through the window at table groaning under the weight of a Christmas banquet.

It was my writer’s imagination that brought me to Paris in the first place, and with the coming of winter (I proclaimed myself ready for spring even before the December solstice), I felt like it might also be the death of me.  After all, dreams are only useful when you think there’s a chance they’ll actually come true.  By wintertime, my fancies only seemed a mocking reminder of how much my life in Paris left to be desired.

When I was younger, I often preferred to be alone, and found refuge in writing, because it allowed me to create the world I dreamed of instead of being constrained to the one that really existed.  But here in Paris – the city that is the real-life version of those dreams – I began to tire of merely imagining happiness.  Writing began to feel like a pitiful substitute for living – like cubic zirconium when you wish for diamonds – and my muse seemed to have disappeared along with the sun.  She, it seems, hates the rain as much as I do.

Whereas during the summer I was mesmerized by the castles and palaces lining the avenues, the wintertime façades now seemed to mock my reveries.  The chic swagger of the women of the city’s western disctricts drew my attention less than the dirt-streaked, runny-nosed faces of little gypsies who spend their days in the darkness of the metro corridors, at four years old their only skill knowing how to beg (at which they are aces).  The Christmas lights and screaming advertisements for post-holiday sales remind me of the misery of the vagabonds in their makeshift bedrooms under the bridges of the Seine.  And elated lovers – those, it seems will always exist in Paris, regardless of the season – seem only to remind me that I may write whatever I please, but that still does not mean my musings will come true.  The words that appear on the page as my fingers dance across my keyboard will do nothing to make my apartment bigger, or my job more satisfying, or the boy who has gotten under my skin suddenly decide to love me back.  If summertime was a time for inspiration, winter was exhaustion; there was, it seemed, nothing left to write.

With the muse off in hiding and my days an agonizing string of hours to fill, I let the cold and grey of Paris get the better of me.  I took long naps, and stayed bundled under my blanket even during waking hours.  I began to stop listening when my friends, my family, everyone around me told me to enjoy my adventure.

It’s hard for people at home – caught up in the humdrum of everyday life – to imagine that things could be anything less than magical in the City of Lights, but by the time winter had rolled around, the novelty had worn off.  Waiting in line for a dryer at the laudromat, doing the groceries, paying the bills, and cleaning the bathroom are tasks that don’t go away, even in Paris.  And in November and December, with only twelve hours of work and no prospects for additional employment, with the cold having stifled any desire to stroll or dawdle, those banalities seemed to be the only structure to my days.

The hours of solitude left lots of time for thinking – about Paris, about the future, about writing.  This last one, I discovered, would not provide the key to my happiness – after all it is not the words that appear on my computer screen that really matter, but the feeling in my heart as I type them, savoring the musical clickety-clack as my thoughts spill out to become words and paragraphs and pages.  And most of the time, once winter arrived, that feeling was as heavy as the inpenetrable fog casting a gloomy pall on this city that had once inspired such vibrancy.

Nonetheless, I have decided to try to coax the muse from her hiding place, dust her off, and put her back to work again; in much the same way I’ve made a promise to remember the little pleasures, untouched by the grey, that Paris has to offer – like the light zing of red wine on my tongue and the tell-tale aftertaste it leaves on my lips, the city lights at nighttime trying to pierce through the thick winter fog, even the patter of the unrelenting rain beating down on my window pane.  I will revel in the bittersweet triumph of landing the perfect job with the absolutely imperfect salary of zero (in both euros and French francs!), and the inebriating dizzyness of not being able to express, in English, my thoughts at a dinner party because French words have invaded my head. 

And then of course, I always do have the written word, which, despite it all, I know I can never really give up for good.  And though it won’t change the trials and tribulations of everyday life, I am almost certain that it will render them, somehow, more romantic in the retelling.  And that, for a dreamer like me, is not such a bad consolation, especially considering we’ve only got two months till spring.

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