I had a very surreal experience yesterday. Déjà vu is an odd feeling, but it’s a common enough sensation to be unremarkable. It's something you appreciate for its novelty in the moment, but like a dream, it's soon forgotten. You realize it's just your brain playing tricks. What's truly shocking, is when you realize that the odd but otherwise dismissible experience is actually linked to a real memory, one long forgotten.Yesterday I was visiting the beautiful Parc Monceau in the 8th arrondissement. I was appreciating the charm of this enclave of domesticated nature when I was stopped dead in my tracks. Déjà vu. I've been here before. I knew it, I was sure of it, but I was just as sure I hadn't been the last two times I was in Paris in 2007, or the time before that in 2001. Then it hit me. The last time I had been in this park I was three years old. Not only had I been here before, after 21 years I was standing on the sight of one of my earliest memories as a self aware creature. It was the fall of 1990, a thick veil of fog was hanging over the city of lights, and my mother, who was the age I am now, had taken me to play in this park. I still remember the way the broken colonnade of pillars disappeared into the mist rolling off the duck pond. I can even recall the outfit I was wearing.
I was left reeling from this shocking, yet seemingly inconsequential, encounter with the deepest recesses of myself. I stood their dumbfounded for a moment, the smell of wet grass and the faint reek of a Paris that was lingering in my mind. What did it mean to be here again after so long? I still don't know, but It makes me feel whole in a way. Like something of who we are, and have always been, persists and does not die under the weight of so many years. I still remember my yearning to be accepted by the older French children, enviously watching them ride their bicycles along the foggy promenades. I asked my mother whether it would be okay for us to go back home (to America) so I could get my tricycle and ride with the big-boys.
Am I still that little boy on the outside looking in? How much have I really changed? Have the joys, defeats, loves, accomplishments, and heartbreaks of the last two decades really made much of a difference? I think the answer is yes. I’m still fundamentally myself, but the long sting of circumstance and experience that lead me back to that spot have armed me with the tools to make the future I want for myself. Someday, when I have seized that future, I’ll complete the circle. On a brisk gray morning I will bring my own child to play in the gardens of the Parc Monceau and I will smile, knowing that one day they too will encounter themselves and realize that they are whole.
