WARM HANDS

It’s December in Paris.

The ghost finger trees that emerge from the boulevards are frigid and barren, holding nothing, supported only by a base of ice that will soon reveal the mouldy dirt beneath them. It’s important to take a walk you think to yourself. Most of your friends have left the city for the holidays. You’re grateful for the ASOS polyester coat you ordered two winters ago. You always thought it would eventually fit you, but alas it still hangs off your shoulders like a jilted mob wife as your only physical protection. It hugs you, but it hangs off you. As you try to find your balance on the uneven streets your phone vibrates. It’s one of your only other friends left in the city for the holidays. The text reads ‘XMAS drinks at mine tonight? Ruta is coming too...’.

To be a single ‘foreigner’ in a country ten thousand miles from your hometown is no easy feat. During the summer months you fail to notice the time shifting and in the same way, you’re rarely confronted with the decision you made to leave your hometown. In the summer, the dizzying sun invites a chaotic frenzy of half-made but always concrete ‘summer plans’. Because you travelled Europe, you have a network of friends from varying European cities. Your instagram inbox and stories are an array of sublet invitations, festivals, rooftop parties and a last-minute invitation to go on a roadtrip with newly made friends and consequential memories that swim in your brain until the ‘Next time we see eachother, it will be great!’. But it’s winter now. Winter does not bend itself to the youthful whims of spontaneity. Instead it lends itself to responsibility to family, community and sentimentality. While this does not irk the individual who has spent their entire life in one country, or a country adjacent to their hometown, it can be an incredibly isolating experience to a foreigner whose entire social world has become dependent on friendships forged in their adopted city.

Christmas day, Ruta and Cerys are your only friends left in Paris. Ruta is from Lithuania and Cerys is from Taiwan. When you met Ruta at an expat dinner party four years ago, you became friends based on shared moral values, a soda-pop sense of humour and love of disco music. When you met Cerys, it was at French school and you bonded over being young, free and light-hearted in a city brimming with possibilities that could only satiate a twenty-something graduate. Now, you understand that the friendships formed through dinner parties and late-night club events have developed into a real sense of responsibility to one another. You understood this one day, when you were crying in your bed hungover and Ruta travelled from one end of the city, bypassing parisian protests, to bring you a burger in bed and hold your hand. ‘We have eachother’ She said as she stroked your hair and wiped the tears from your face. If you were home, you would call your mother. But in that moment and many moments after, Ruta became a pseudo mother, best friend, boyfriend, sister, confidant. When you don’t have access to your birth family, your found family adopts many roles at once. The relationship is reciprocal. When Cerys graduated, you were there with a bottle of wine, graduation cap and a nod, ‘ I am proud of you.’. Often, when young women move to Paris they feel as though they will only be able to access forms of support through romantic partners. Through Cerys and Ruta, you have found that your found family rooted in deep friendship is often the most potent and appreciated sense of support there is.

I go to Ruta’s Christmas party. Cerys is there with an enormous smile on her face and a giggle that could power a thousand generators for a thousand rave parties. Dinner is served, it’s warm in a small parisian apartment in the 16th arrondossiment, because warm hands hold warm hands.

Originally published in Operator Magazine (NL)