my birthday cake caught fire and so did my prefrontal cortex
my mom arrived in paris and was arguing with the ticket machine before we even made it out of haussmann station. more specifically, with the apple wallet system. certain things will always be too digital for her, and the paris metro is one of them. i stood behind the barrier for ten minutes watching her tap, squint, sigh, and eventually succumb to the 21st century before the gates finally opened. she walked through like nothing had happened.
it had been about 8 months since i'd seen her. she told me she liked my bangs. i told her i liked her curls.
we went grocery shopping. we weren’t supposed to buy anything. or maybe we were, but not this much. but there are about four different fruit stores and markets on my street, and may is for fulfilling your daily need for vitamin c, and enjoying it a bit as well. my roommate later opened the fridge, looked at my shelf, and told me it looked like i was opening a fruit bazar. he wasn’t wrong.
the next morning we went to the boulangerie i’ve been going to for weeks. we ordered une baguette, s’il vous plaît in perfectly average french (or at least, as average as you can get with a sentence like that), and the woman replied in english asking if we wanted it sliced. i didn’t know what gave us away. maybe everything. the thing with people here is that they sort of contradict themselves in their handling of foreigners. they hate it when you speak to them in english (this i understand) but hate it even more when you speak french and don't sound like a native speaker. even the slightest hint of an accent is guaranteed to earn you a response in english. it is a hopeless cause, learning with the locals.
we spent the rest of the day walking through my neighborhood. whenever we passed a rose bush hanging over a gate, we stopped and smelled it. some had no scent at all, but there’s something comforting about doing something purely for the gesture.
technically, we were walking to “digest.” she claimed it helps. i am not a walking-to-digest kind of girl. i am a lying-on-the-bed-to-question-why-i-ate-so-much kind of girl. but it was a warm day and she was in town. i will call it this week's assimilation efforts. to making healthy choices! to walking after dinner! (i am laying in bed as i write this)
on my birthday, my roommates brought out a cake, lactose-free (my stomach is in luck!) with three layers and lychees in the center. we lit the 22 candles at midnight. both of the handmade 2's caught fire. it wasn't symbolic, i simply decided to hand craft my cake decor out of (now get this) - paper! (highly flammable), and for a moment i was wondering if that counted as a wish. then they sang happy birthday in all kinds of different accents, nobody tried to harmonize, and i think that was the moment i felt most fortunate since i arrived in this big, buzzing city.
in the morning my mom and i had breakfast on the floor of my room. orange marmalade, bread, and leftover cake still in its tin. she gifted me dried elderflowers in a cleaned out pickle jar, to make tea with, and a blue box of cards titled "mon ami l'univers" with all kinds of words in french, like clemence, remercier and la simplicité. she is a highly eccentric and spiritual woman, after all.
then she brushed and cut my hair and curled it with a straightener. i remember doing the same thing for her about ten years ago, and then mercilessly burning my thumb on her curling iron. i had to walk around with a ziploc bag full of ice for about two days before it got better. there were no such tragedies this time around. maybe we both got older. maybe we have left carelessness in the past.
we spent the afternoon in galeries lafayette, letting perfume ladies in suits spray us with things we couldn’t afford. it was a blur of sensory overload, unimpressed expressions, and getting lost somewhere between guerlain and maison margiela. i was fifteen all over again. fifteen with a gift from her, fifteen on a bench next to her by a fountain, eating overpriced lunch from pret a manger.
fifteen euros for three snacks, fifteen minutes under the sun fighting over who has to accept the last piece of pre-cut mango.
i may be twenty-two now, but birthdays are always laced with feeling little again. for a little bit of time.
that evening, i brought her to the train station. she left. i didn’t say the thing i meant to. i’m not sure she did either.
i think the art of reimagining the relationships in your life with the years that go by is that you realize that certain things never change, and others will never be the same. i think many people consider that to be quite the melancholic thought. letting go of the way things used to be to make space for the way they are. but i feel quite peaceful. i don't long for a type of love and warmth i can't receive. i don't wait for people to "come around eventually". i am whole, having lived a quarter of my life learning what it means to finally stop depending on authority figures and mentors to be okay. i feel strangely grown up, walking the streets on my birthday, and not having sadness overcome me for being alone.
and besides, more and more often i am not. slowly but surely, i am developing a social life.
right now, though - two days later - i’m lying in bed with the curtains drawn. it’s 29 degrees in paris. the sun is practically begging me to touch grass. everyone and their extrovert roommate is out watching the soccer game of the century.
i was invited. i was excited.
i’m... not going.
because here’s the truth:
i live my life like i’m auditioning for the role of a high-functioning adult. like i’m trying to prove that i can be that girl. the one who thrives in social chaos, drinks her water, and has energy left after work to go dancing. but i am not that girl. i’m not even her understudy.
i am the girl who has to schedule three business days to recover from brunch.
i am the girl who reads neuroscience books in the park and eats carrots with hummus i accidentally paid too much money for.
i took behave by robert sapolsky to parc monceau. it’s not exactly light reading. the book dives into human behavior (not just what we do, but the biology, psychology, and social conditions behind it). there’s a chapter on fear extinction that stood out. the idea is that fear doesn’t disappear, not really. instead, your brain creates a new association next to it. one that slowly overrides the old one.
in other words: when you’re faced with something that once felt unsafe, and nothing bad happens, your brain begins to rewrite the story. the original fear is still there, stored away, but a quieter pathway starts forming. one that says: this moment is different. this is okay.
picture a person from the stone age lighting fire for the first time, burning their hand and deciding fire is evil. but then they watches it cook something. maybe fish. maybe bread. (i don’t know what they ate. probably not bread.) now fire becomes two things - not just danger, but warmth, utility. both memories exist. but one can rise above the other. that’s how fear works, too. it doesn’t vanish. it just gets outvoted.
(enough neuroscience for now.)
i’ve been applying that logic in small ways. not big breakthroughs, just daily ones. like walking into a place that once made me nervous, and not mentally rehearsing how i might leave early. or saying no to something without offering a thesis on why.
cheers to this week, my little chickadees
i could’ve gone feral.
instead, i cleaned my room and googled if fear extinction works on people.