The Full Circle of the Cosmos
A year ago, I booked a trip to France that I planned for months. In the twelfth hour, as I drove up interstate 95 to the airport, a snowstorm in Ireland canceled the entire journey. In the days following, I felt sad and almost wounded to have this trip yanked away from me, especially at the last possible moment. The cancellation underlined the fleetingness of opportunity. I rebounded by booking trips to Canada, Cuba, and Scotland, countries that had never been on my radar before the day I didn’t make it to Paris.
What bothered me most was the intention. I had trains and tours booked and memories and pictures planned. I envisioned myself on the hill overlooking Nice’s beach and eating a croissant by the Arc de Triomphe. Even with new trips, I remain haunted by reminders that anything can vanish even when it’s most guaranteed.
The weekend after my canceled trip, I saw flyers for Richmond’s French Film Festival. A month later, I attended a “Spring in Paris”-themed gala. I took a photo beneath an Eiffel Tower that I’d never see, at least not so soon.
In a friend’s home, I stumbled across a trinket and asked where she acquired it. In France, of course.
In Montreal, I felt inundated by French cuisine and culture. A trip planned on whim, did this replace the nostalgia and meaning of my original trip to France? Did standing outside a replica of the Notre Dame bring the resolution I sought?
Months more went by. I found myself at Epcot in Disney World, tipsy beneath a purple sky and the silhouette of Walt Disney’s fake Eiffel Tower. “I still haven’t been to France, but here I am,” I thought.
In the shadow of the trip never to be, I threw myself into some projects, new friendships, and an accidental relationship. Temporarily, I fell for someone who meant more than France for a month and felt like a canceled trip afterward. For a while, I meant to write about all the French motifs that stalked me, but became swept up in life’s booms and busts, including my fateful fling.
I’ve always been cynical about the cosmos, dubious about destiny, and flippant toward every other interpretation of the moon, palm, or mind. But last year apparently, Venus went into retrograde. This means something for the greater order of nature if you believe such silly things, but I find more objective rationales for quarter-life crises that don’t involve stars or cards. However, that does not mean I am still not perplexed by ironies and unnatural serendipity.
Small things lurk in simple happenstances. Instagram suggested I send a meme to my human Paris. A certain lip balm flavor recalled a particular night. A toothbrush represented more than bristles and a cavity that may rot forever. Radio songs reverberated with the falsest and flimsiest of optimism. Surely, these circumstances inhabit any failed relationship. But it became hard to ignore tiny triggers camouflaged in everyday life, similar to the French motifs that haunted me for the better part of a year.
Six months to the day I told my Paris that I liked her in her kitchen, I expressed affection for a new girl in her kitchen mere blocks from the place where I first fell for my Paris. I do not keep a calendar where I mark the days; I am simply someone who knows the calendar and, perhaps by proxy, I then know the sun’s phases. Is it Taurus or Venus? Is it God and Mother Nature? Or is it the miserable human psyche?
A few weeks later, a thunderstorm snuck up on me as I walked home from the grocery store. A car appeared, and of course it was my Paris. I considered saying, “No, I don’t need a ride,” but inevitably I got in the car.
How many times must someone be exorcised before they are gone? How many trips abroad did it take to forget France? Montreal, Havana, Chapel Hill, Edinburgh, Inverness, Glasgow, Vancouver, New York, Indianapolis, Orlando, St. Martin, and how was Paris still on the brain?
My friend asked me to visit Belgium for the Christmas markets. Brief browsing found a flight into Brussels and out of—gasp—Paris cheaper than a flight to the West Coast. By fate or by some other magic, I saw Paris by the year’s end. I ate a croissant in the Eiffel Tower’s shadow.
Similarly, after being plagued by ghosts and memories for months that I should do more, try harder, and heeding the wisps of something that naiveté might characterize as fate, I reconnected with my human Paris—temporarily. She left me again. I went for runs at night and took photographs of strung lights and street signs that howled it was not over; Venus was in retrograde after all.
I don’t remember when I began to openly consider the cosmos and trace meaning between coincidence and providence, but I found myself sporadically reading both her and my astrology and also our Myers-Briggs and our Enneagrams. I always entertained spiritualists with the enthusiasm of a fantasy reader, but I never supported them beyond bartering once with a New Orleans psychic. Now I risked my spiritual soul by finding false comfort with the diagnostics of pop psych and psyche. I contended that Paris was a metaphor and the full circle of the cosmos was us coming back together—lost and then found.
In mid-winter, we started again, our fourth reboot destined to fail. On a full moon night, she mentioned Mercury was in retrograde and did I know. I did not know, but I wanted to say I blamed it anyway. Had she, too, tried to divine our failures in the cosmos?
Later in the season, I briefly dated a girl who partook in tarot readings. I accepted an offer for a reading. The cards detected a toxic presence in my life who had to stay or go. She asked who it may be. I did not say.
Chaste coffee dates and invitations to romantic musicals, elbows brushing in the dark, drinking wine on my couch and plotting a future vacation to London where she’d show me her favorite spots, my Paris and I filled several weeks. I overslept a late-night text. I moved away. My move had precipitated our first breakup just like the snowstorm that canceled my first trip to Paris.
We initially kept in contact. The frequency and intensity mirrored lunar cycles. When the moon felt darkest, I slipped into familiar paranoia and struggles with self-validation. When she would reappear like Persephone on sabbatical, I hid my bruised ego.
Was it my pride that brought us full circle? Was it her reticence and the manipulation I projected onto the blank screen and miles of silence? Or was it the moon adjusting in the sky and the cosmos shifting to where it had once been comfortable and where it would rest again?
On a Monday in June, inauspicious except it was the anniversary of when she first vanished, I defriended her, tired of our charade and my chipped mask. The night before, I read my horoscope, a habit with frequency I resented yet also surprisingly anticipated as if permitted some foreshadowing for the next week’s emotional turmoil and bliss.
A stranger commented beneath the forecast: “Being with them or not is not the only option, you are also an option.”
As if summoned by a planetary orbit or, more likely, my social media rebuff, she texted. Several conversations later brought us to an abrupt chasm—maybe inevitable even without palmistry and Paris. She said I wasn’t the person she thought I was, and I refused to apologize for sins she drove me to. She said we were done, best wishes, and I did not run after her.
That is the thing with full circles: they must return to where they once started. A year to the day we tried to start over for the first time, we ended for the last time. I wondered if she recognized the date. I doubted it. “Things are not always calculated,” she told me, and I wonder if I only calculated star charts like every other astrologer, to exert some control over the chaos that is the cosmos.
And how was Paris when I finally made it that time in December? A friend asked me recently if I wanted to visit again this fall. I told her, it’s my least favorite place I’ve been.
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