Paris in the Rain ✓

Every fairytale must belong in the rain.

Paris sprawled out in front of me, a mess of cobbled streets caught in a cold summer storm. The thundering clouds framed the archangels in the architecture, and the people flocked to find shelter from the pitiless torrent.

I hugged one shivering arm around my shaking torso and clutched my two-euro umbrella's handle with the other. My clothes clung damply to my body, heavy with water, and the rain beat down mercilessly on my umbrella. I wasn't in the mood for fairytales. I was in the mood for hot food and four walls around me.

In an instant, I regretted leaving my friends in the warm, dry hotel. I was fifty minutes away on foot, but no room service was worth sharing the claustrophobic Paris metro with a thousand sodden tourists. In fact, I wasn't quite sure where I was. It was just some excessively flowered backstreet, filled with tiny shops and cafés with rain-streaked windows, fogged up from the heat inside.

Cursing my luck I shook off my umbrella and stepped into the nearest shop, ignoring the little bell that rattled conceitedly above the door.

I was hit instantly with the smell of mould and paper and dusty vanilla, mixed with the damp that came with such a storm. It was a cramped little bookshop, so inharmonious with the saints that hung from the skyline in the city centre.  The door closed shut heavily behind me, and the sound of howling winds muted slightly.

"Le parapluie!"

I looked up.

Sat at the desk, nearly hidden behind a tower of half-rotting old tomes, was a girl. The entire shop – tiny and dark – was filled wall to wall with towering bookshelves. It was cramped and slightly damp-smelling, and there seemed to be a very thin cloud of dust hanging in the air ready to slither down into my lungs.

"Dans le porte-parapluie," she elaborated, pointing urgently at a tall, empty bin by the door.

"Sorry?"

The girl's polite customer-service smile melted into one of curiosity. "You don't speak French?" She rose slowly, drowning in the woollen seas of her jumper. A thin river of steam floated from the mug in her hands.

"No," I said. "What were you saying just now?"

"Put your umbrella in the stand."

It was only then that I noticed the large puddle that had formed around my feet on the coarse BIENVENUE mat. I swore and dumped my sodden umbrella in the stand, but rainwater was still pouring down from my hair and clothes like I was a damp indoor raincloud.

"Don't worry," she said in a voice only slightly tinted with an accent. "Just don't get it on the books. I'll leave you to browse?"

I hadn't even considered that. I'd just come here to escape the gunfire of rain that was now battering the window. Caught slightly off-guard, I said, "Sure," and shuffled off to look at some books. 

It was still light outside, save for the oppressive storm clouds, and the shop was lit thinly by nothing but daylight. Near the back, you had to get right up to the spines of the books to read their titles, all in English. The place was a mess, but there was a strange tenderness to the disarray. It was so empty here that despite being so small and cramped, the entire shop echoed with my footsteps.

I couldn't shake a strange, creeping awkwardness. I shouldn't have left my friends in the hotel. It was for me that they'd come here. Paris heals a broken heart, apparently, and I was the reluctant victim of one, at least according to my friends. To me it felt less like a broken heart and more like a wilted one. It felt like a new, sickening vacancy in my chest I was altogether unaccustomed to. It felt light. It felt horrible.