April in Paris

I stare across the cute little café table while you fumble for something in your pocket. All around us shoppers and lovers stream past in this city for romantics and hopefuls. The sun is warm, the breezy a balmy promise, and the cherry trees lining the Champs Elysées are dripping with blowsy pink puffballs of blossom. April in Paris. It should be perfect, especially when I see what was in your pocket. A black velvet box, the kind that only holds one sort of ring. It should be perfect, but it isn’t.

I’m thinking of the last time I was in Paris, twenty-five years ago now. It was April then too, and I was just twelve. My mum took me here in a last-ditch attempt to save her marriage--strange choice of travelling companion, you might think, but Dad insisted. Enmeshed in an affair I knew nothing about, he didn’t want to be alone with his wife. It was an endless, miserable week.

Dad hid behind newspapers and excuses of work, and Mum dragged me to the Tuileries and the Eiffel Tower. Going on thirteen, denied the school trip to Rome, I was sulky and resentful. And Mum wasn’t much better. She eyed the entwined couples on the Champs d’Elysées in tight-lipped silence, and barked at me when I stopped to gaze at a pair of high-heeled leather boots in a shop window. Neither of us said much at all, but one thing I remember.

We were sitting at a little sidewalk café with bowl-sized cups of hot chocolate and a plate of croissants--an edible heaven--when Mum looked straight at me and said, “Never love someone more than he loves you, Jess. It’s hell.” Then she blinked hard, set her face in its familiar, discontented lines, and turned back to her chocolate.

Now I’m here with you, at the same kind of café I sat with my mum all those years ago, and it should be different. I’ve been so careful for so long, guarding my heart, making sure I didn’t fall in love with someone who couldn’t care about me the way I cared about him. Making sure I didn’t end up like Mum. And you’ve been wonderful: steady, stable, comforting, caring. I could make a shopping list of wished-for attributes and you’d tick every one.

You wooed me gently, made me laugh. You sensed my shyness and you waited patiently. We’ve been dating four years, and I’ve insisted on going slowly. You insisted on Paris.

So here we are, and I hear your words as if they’re coming from a badly-tuned radio at the next table. You talk about love, and hope, and even children, and finally marriage. I can’t pretend to be that surprised, not after four years. Not after Paris. Yet sitting here I’m reminded of my mum, and the words she once said to me.

Never love someone more than he loves you, Jess. It’s hell.

I haven’t actually talked to my mum in years. After that trip my dad finally left and my mum descended into a depression that I, as a rebellious teen, just found annoying. Her desperation to keep her marriage, especially when I learned of Dad’s affairs, only made me scornful. Didn’t she have any pride? Any self-respect? And when I told her as much, she just bowed her head, accepting my contempt. It made everything between us worse, and by the time I’d developed a little more sensitivity and understanding in my twenties, it felt too late. Another broken relationship.

And now this. You. Smiling at me so gently, the velvet box opened in front of me, the diamond ring glittering in its little pillowed case. And not just any run-of-the-mill diamond, either. It’s surrounded by a cluster of tiny sapphires, because you know they’re my favourite gemstone.

It should be perfect this time round, but it isn’t. And as I stare at you, knowing you are waiting for my answer, for my cautious and tremulous yes--for you wouldn’t expect exuberance from me now, would you?--I know why.

Never love someone more than he loves you, Jess. It’s hell.

I took my mother’s warning to heart. I fashioned my life around it, choosing certain safe relationships and foregoing others. Guarding my heart as a point of pride. I wasn’t going to be like her, I wasn’t going to love someone more than he loved me.

And now I’m here, realising it works the other way round. You loving me more than I love you. This, I realise as I stare silently at that gorgeous ring, is hell for you. And I know no matter how gentle or patient or understanding you are, I can’t say yes. I don’t love you enough.

Is it ever a kindness, to break someone’s heart? And while your heart is breaking, mine is cracking open like an egg, the shell around it finally dissolving. It took breaking your heart to heal mine, to realise I want a relationship that’s equal, total, all-in. I want to love someone as much as he loves me.

But I’m sorry I had to hurt you to realise it.

You’ll be all right, though. A year on I see you with someone else, a brunette who lays her head on your shoulder in the kind of adoring way I never could--or did. And as for me? I haven’t found that man yet, the one I’ll love with my whole heart, the one who will love me back the same way. But I’m going back to Paris. It’s April again, and the cherry trees are gorgeous and the sky is a pale, fragile blue. I’ve bought two tickets on the Eurostar and this time it’s not a doomed love affair. It’s a redemption, a healing, or at least the first tentative steps towards those things. I’m going to Paris, and this time I’m taking my mum.