1
MILA
Itold people I was here for the work. The truth was, I was here to see who I became when no one knew my name.
Paris had a way of pretending it didn’t care why you came. It received you the same, regardless—cool, beautiful, unbothered. The city didn’t ask for backstory or intention. It didn’t lean in or offer reassurance. It simply existed, ancient and alive, letting you orbit it like a temporary moon.
That was part of the appeal.
I’d landed three weeks earlier with two suitcases, a camera case I treated more gently than either, and an address written in the Notes app on my phone.
A residency.
A polite word for permission to disappear with purpose. Twelve months of quiet obligation, of art-forward conversations and borrowed studios, of expectations that didn’t follow me to the grocery store or haunt me in the shower.
When people back home asked, I said it like a headline:Photography residency in Paris. I let them picture mewandering cobblestone streets at golden hour, croissants in hand, success inevitable and aesthetically pleasing.
I didn’t correct them.
The apartment the program arranged for me sat on a narrow street in the Marais, the kind that smelled like stone after rain and wine corks and old paper. Four flights up, no elevator. I’d cursed the stairs on the first day and come to appreciate them by the third. They forced awareness. They made my body known to me—thighs burning, breath quickening, heart steadying as I reached my door.
The mirror by the door caught me in passing—dark hair loose and unstyled, falling the way it always did no matter how much effort I put into taming it. Long lines, narrow shoulders, a softness to my mouth that made people underestimate me. I looked the way I usually did: unremarkable at first glance, more noticeable the longer you stayed. I’d learned to live with that. Even to use it.
Inside the apartment, everything was pale and imperfect. Uneven floors. A window that opened inward, framing slate rooftops and a slice of sky that shifted colors like a mood ring. The furniture felt chosen by someone with a strong opinion about restraint. A bed. A desk. A chair that looked uncomfortable and was.
It was perfect.
The residency itself was housed in a converted warehouse on the Left Bank, all exposed beams and whitewashed brick and the faint, lingering smell of turpentine.
There were other artists—painters, sculptors, a woman who worked exclusively in sound. We nodded to each other in passing, exchanged polite smiles, bonded over bad coffee and mutual exhaustion. No one asked too many questions. No one pushed.
I liked that, too.
Most days, I walked. I let the city move me where it wanted. I photographed shadows pooling beneath café tables, hands wrapped around porcelain cups, the way light caught in the seams of old buildings like it had been waiting there all along. I took pictures of reflections—faces fractured in glass, bodies doubled in mirrors. I was drawn to the in-between moments, the almosts.
I told myself it was about the work.
In truth, I was cataloging myself. Measuring the distance between the woman I’d been and the one I was becoming. Seeing what changed when no one expected anything of me except that I show up and look closely.
I stopped posting as much. That surprised people. They were used to seeing my life in squares—carefully framed, lightly edited, proof that I was doing something with my time.
Paris, it turned out, didn’t want to be documented like that. Or maybe I didn’t.
I wanted to feel it without translation.
There was a café I favored near the river, all narrow tables and scratched wood and a barista who never remembered my order and somehow always got it right. I sat there, camera resting against my ankle, notebook open but mostly blank. I listened. I watched. I let the city press in around me until my own thoughts softened at the edges.
It was there, one afternoon, that I first felt him.
Not saw.
Felt.
The air shifted. That was the only way I could describe it later, when I tried to make sense of the moment. Like the room had inhaled and was holding its breath.
The low hum of conversation dipped, then resumed, as if nothing had happened at all.
I looked up.
