Andrea Ruggirello The Seine
In a fluorescent aisle, in the middle of Paris, I poked through spools of thread, searching for one that matched my flesh. Back home, the woman behind the make-up counter at Macy’s told me I was a winter with blue undertones. I told her that was a great band name, and she laughed too hard, and I bought nothing. I found a spool that matched well enough then struggled to pull it from the row with my bulky black-gloved fingers. It was warmer in the supermarket than it had been outside, and my hands were damp with sweat. The day was cloudy, same as yesterday when I’d arrived. I’d flown into Charles De Gaulle and fumbled my way through the Metro to the Chalet hostel, where they luckily had space. In the dank second-floor room, two metal bunk beds stretched toward the stained ceiling tiles, and a narrow door led to a bathroom barely large enough to turn around in. The other occupant was a plump, older, Australian woman who had just left her job as an au pair and was making one last trip around the country before heading home. “I’m afraid the sunshine will make me go blind,” she’d said, when I asked her if she was worried about adjusting to back home. She lit a cigarette and blew the smoke out the open window like the fog rolling out, and she asked me what brought me here. I took out the small gold padlock with mine and Owen’s initials on it. “We were supposed to do it together,” I said. She didn’t remind me that the locks were all being taken down anyway, or that the tradition was for now-