My Own Vows

Parts of who we are change, just like the autumn leaves do. Some become more light and golden, others more dark and dry. We have to learn to let go; to fall from great heights, but to find the beauty in that. Because the autumn leaves don’t just fall - they detach, and then they dance. They let the wind catch them, and take them new places. Their change is actually breathtaking, and ours can be too.

Someone re-shared these words I wrote with me at the start of this month.
I hadn’t forgotten them, but it had been some time since I’d revisited the passage, and as I did, it made me reflect on how, in the three years that have passed since I wrote it, and the five since I began my life over in Paris, so many parts of me have changed.

While every season comes with newness, we seem to feel it most in the fall. September is when France celebrates the changing of a new season with La Rentrée, but October marks the anniversaries of a few of my most significant changes.

Five years ago, on October 1, I sat in front of the Eiffel Tower with one hand holding my cell phone up to my face and the other wrapped around the neck of a champagne bottle. My thumb was resting under the lip of the cork, already uncaged and ready to pop with my friend, Emily, who had come for moral support. My divorce was moments from being finalized, over Zoom, after over a year of my life spent in a strange state of limbo. I had already been moving on in most ways - creating my own business, my own life, my own career - but I had not felt fully and freely able to do it as I wanted to while still technically tied to someone.

I’d learned that the Eiffel Tower was sparkling pink that night, only that night, so I’d decided to take my digital court session (set weeks beforehand) at Trocadero so I wouldn’t miss it. I sat there thinking how I’d always dreamed of getting married at the Eiffel Tower - what could possibly be more beautiful, or romantic? Now here I was doing just the opposite. But ironically, I did find it beautiful (and I daresay romantic?) to be there instead, making new vows, for a new life, to myself…