Mixing Seawater Anonymous

When I was sixteen years old, I stayed for two weeks in the heart of the third arrondissement with a bronze-colored, balding man named Antoine and a white cat named Snodgrass. My mother was there too, of course, and it was technically a bed and breakfast, but the three-hundred year old loft felt a lot more like a home.

Actually, that isn’t very factual. It felt nothing like a home. The bathroom faucet was quite a confusing contraption, the toilet had two buttons, and the coffee made my eyes water.

I have good news, however: I got used to the coffee. Google is international, which helped me to discover that button one is a hasty flush, while button two is the full cleanse. Antoine, my mother, and I raised a champagne toast on seventeenth birthday with a brise making its way through the open window.

The thing about traveling to France (or anywhere, really) is that it teaches you more about what it means to be American - we are so rarely cognizant of our own culture that displacement is the one of few means by which we can realize the water we are treading in. Sometimes you forget how to swim. When this happens, remember: button one is a hasty flush; button two is the full cleanse.

I want to spend my undergrad years learning about...