Here’s what I didn’t think about when I was standing there at midnight in front of Notre Dame with a Polaroid camera: that I was taking a photograph of something that wouldn’t exist anymore. Not in two days. Not ever again, really. Not the way it was when I was there, then.
I’m just exhausted. Jet-lagged beyond all recognition of what time means anymore. I’ve come from Reunion Island, and Paris is just another stop before home. Before the Bay Area. Before I can finally stop moving. I’m wandering the streets and something makes me take this picture. Maybe it’s the light. Maybe it’s because Polaroids are stupid and romantic and completely impractical, which is exactly why they matter. I remember sitting on a ballard waiting for it to develop, the chemical smell, that slow reveal of shadows and stone and eight hundred years of human ambition made vertical barely illuminated by a nearby streetlight.
I probably didn’t look at it that hard. I was tired.
Next day, I fly home. When I finally get there, after circumnavigating the entire goddamn globe, I don’t unpack. I don’t check my phone. I don’t do anything except fall into bed like a building collapsing.
Then Lindsey wakes me up. And here’s the thing about being woken up from that kind of sleep, I’m not even in my body yet. I’m somewhere between continents, between time zones, between conscious thought and absolute nothing.
“Notre Dame is burning down.”
It’s too absurd. Too perfectly timed to my own small story to be real. But it’s real. I watch it on a screen. The whole world watching something die in real-time.
Somewhere in my bag, probably still unpacked, is that Polaroid. That stupid, beautiful, accidental document of a thing that was about to end.
That’s the thing about photographs, about memory, about standing in front of monuments at midnight when you should be sleeping: you think you’re just killing time. But sometimes you’re a witness. Sometimes you’re holding evidence of the world as it was, before.
The Polaroid didn’t save anything. Notre Dame still burned.
But I’ve got this piece of film that says: I was there. It stood.
We both existed at the same moment, under the same sky, before things changed.
But Paris was a very old city and we were young and nothing was simple there, not even poverty, nor sudden money, nor the moonlight, nor right and wrong nor the breathing of someone who lay beside you in the moonlight.
Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast