I know now what instinct compelled me to search for a photograph from forty-six years ago. I was alone in Paris two months ago, a city where memory lingers—memory her mind no longer holds. I write the stories with her, about her, and now, increasingly, without her.
The photograph was taken in a small apartment at 65 Boulevard de Sébastopol. The high ceilings are accented with delicate plaster moldings typical of the Haussmann buildings lining the boulevard. Light from a tall window falls across the oak floorboards, highlighting the worn grain.
The older man studies the photograph. The notebook draws his attention. It rests open on the young man’s knee, the pen poised above the page as if he’s paused mid-thought, searching for a word. The older man recognizes it immediately—the posture of someone writing his way through something he doesn’t understand.
He looks directly into the camera; his gaze is steady, almost calm. He wears a red bandana loosely tied around his neck. He thinks it makes him look like a gypsy. His beard is uneven. His hair falls forward, thick and unsettled. What the photograph cannot show is what lies beneath that calm expression. The young man was not merely writing; he was trying to understand what was happening to his life. He was waiting—by choice, though it didn’t feel that way. His mind kept saying, “I have to,” again and again. If you opened the journal, you’d see it written there: I have to. I must.
The woman he believed was meant to be his life partner had gone to Sweden. She said she needed time to close a chapter from the past—an old boyfriend, a free-spirited musician/meditator. He had read that chapter. He wanted to believe that “from the past’ meant buried, grieved, and goodbye, but the ghost remained even when he claimed he didn’t believe in apparitions.
She had been an exchange student in Sweden at sixteen and had lived there for three years after college. Sweden was an unfettered part of herself, free from the pressures of family expectations. The young man understood. That’s why they were in Paris to let the good times—and the rough times—roll. But not down this cliff. He said yes, but the “No” he kept inside was the raw truth, ready to explode. After that, everything became chaotic.
He stayed in the apartment with Alain and Simone. Walked the streets. Sat in cafés longer than necessary. Came back and wrote. Not because he had anything clear to say, but because it was the only way he could impose order while everything else was shifting.
As the older man stares at the photograph, he wonders what the young man might say if he could step out of the picture for a moment. The question that comes to mind is so obvious it almost makes him smile.
“Did she come back?”
The older man hears the question as clearly as if it had been spoken aloud. For the young man sitting on the edge of that bed, there could be no other question. The entire future he imagined seemed to hinge on the answer.
But the older man recognizes that the question itself overlooks something crucial. “That’s the wrong question,” he says.
The young man looks at him with a mix of confusion and impatience. If not that question, what could matter more?
The older man nods toward the notebook resting on the young man’s knee.
“Tell me what happened to you while she was away,” he says. “What did you learn about yourself during that week?”
For a moment, the young man doesn’t answer. He looks down at the notebook as if he’s seeing it for the first time. When he finally speaks, his answer comes slowly.
“I wrote,” he says. “I didn’t know what else to do. Everything felt as if it were slipping out of my control. Writing was the only way I could make sense of my feelings.”
“And what did the writing reveal to you?” he asks.
The young man hesitates again, searching for words that are both honest and unbearable to say.
“That I loved her,” he finally says. “That I needed her. And that I was terrified of losing her.”
He pauses, then adds something the older man remembers with painful clarity.
“And if I lost her, I would have to let go of the life I believed was meant for her and me and somehow move on.”
The older man listens intently. Time has blurred many memories, but this one remains vivid. He remembers how impossible that idea once seemed—the notion that the life he pictured might simply fade, leaving him to start over.
After a moment, the young man looks up again.
“Did the writing matter?” he asks.
Looking again at the notebook in the photograph, he realizes that the young man holding the pen had no idea how often writing would return in the decades ahead—during moments of confusion, discovery, grief, and love.
“Yes,” the older man says quietly. “The writing mattered far more than you could have grasped then. It taught you to find your truth.”
The young man absorbs this slowly. Then the question that had been waiting behind the others finally emerges.
“Did the life I feared losing actually happen?”
The older man can’t help but smile at how simple the question is. Looking back nearly half a century, he realizes the young man couldn’t possibly know the answer.
“We ended up building a life neither of us could have imagined,” he says.
The photograph remains unchanged. The young man still sits on the edge of the bed at 65 Boulevard de Sébastopol, pen in hand, struggling to grasp his overwhelming fear. The camera captured a single moment.
Memory doesn’t stay still. Looking at the image now, the older man sees far more than the young man could have known. In that moment, there was the possibility of loss, the beginning of change, and the first signs that writing would become the way he learned to understand his life.
The life he feared might vanish had already begun.