Comments on: Rebekkah Dilts, The Last City I Loved #2: Paris, France

By: Madhu Sethi

Madhu Sethi — Mon, 24 Sep 2012 06:58:25 +0000

This is a beautifully written piece on ‘the city of love’- Paris. Paris has a way of getting under your skin and you have managed to capture that so wonderfully in your writing! I myself love Paris – have spent only a week there, but would like to go back again and again…

By: Karletta Moniz

Karletta Moniz — Sun, 26 Aug 2012 05:24:24 +0000

Thanks so much for this lovely piece. You managed to put into words the sense I have always had about what Paris means to me and my life…merci.

By: Deborah

Deborah — Tue, 17 Apr 2012 00:59:38 +0000

Thank you so much for this piece. I related to it so much! I fell in love for the first time when I was 13, with the city of Paris. I spent the next eight years devoted to getting back there, and did, for a study abroad experience during college in a host family remarkably similar to the one you describe (though without the handsome young man across the hall ). I ended up moving to France – though not Paris, Bordeaux – after college, where I fell in love in that more durable, real way – and ended up staying there for seven years. When I returned to the U.S., the heartbreak and grief were worse than any I’d ever experienced breaking up with a man. I’d realized the dream of my youth and gone and lived in France and now I found myself, for various reasons, back in my home country, facing a future of big portions of bland food and a society where people work way too much and enjoy life too little. I thought I’d never readjust (though I don’t think I’d ever been “adjusted” to life in America). I’m happy to report that, five years later, I am living in San Francisco and in love with it – rediscovering my hometown as an adult has been amazing. I’ve found people who love to love life, who love good food and wine, and who actually enjoy hearing my stories about life in France. Still, I haven’t gone back to visit. I’m sure I will someday, when I feel ready. For now, it remains my Moveable Feast, blending with my life here in a magical unique mixture that you describe so well – the places we love inhabit us, as surely as we inhabit them, even long after we leave. Encore, merci.

By: Rebekkah Dilts

Rebekkah Dilts — Thu, 12 Apr 2012 01:48:17 +0000

Oh, thank you! The book is called The Quilt: http://www.booksmith.com/book/9780688038250

By: Annie

Annie — Thu, 12 Apr 2012 00:19:40 +0000

So lovely. Please, if you know or remember, what was the name of the book about the quilt your mother used to read to you?

By: Alanna

Alanna — Wed, 11 Apr 2012 14:50:25 +0000

Beautiful description of this situation…one many of us who have loved abroad have had, I think. Something about the unreality of it- that anything is possible because it all feels like a dream, and somewhere inside you know it is fleeting.