Shaking the Disease: A Journey Towards Closure

A distant memory roaming in Paris

This year, I’m finally going to Paris.  For some, that may not seem like a big deal.  For me, it’s much more than a checkmark on a bucket list.  For a long time, I have had a weird relationship with Paris. Regardless of its beauty and appeal, it has never been on my itinerary despite my travels to neighboring countries.

In 2019, I was scheduled to go for the first time. My new boss offered me a trip to the company’s headquarters as a gesture of goodwill after my old team disowned me after a merger. My ticket was booked. My bag was packed. And yet hours before I was supposed to depart, an overwhelming feeling of anxiety made me call it off.

Apprehension caused by an apparition

I knew my apprehension was fueled by more than the thought of sitting in coach for eight hours, navigating a notoriously unfriendly foreign country alone without any grasp of the language, and being so new to the group that I would have nothing to contribute. I knew myself. I was certain that after the business part was over, I would spend any remaining time searching for a specific soul, hoping for a chance encounter.

There was a very good chance he was still there, based on what I had learned a couple of years earlier on my Facebook page, which I created to find closure. I could see myself meandering outside the Louvre or wandering around the Tuileries Garden, where I was told he would haunt.  Back in Boston, he used to frequent high-traffic locations like Copley Place, where we first met and crossed paths more than once.

Over the years, I’ve pieced together scraps about his life, filled in knowledge gaps, and exchanged a few messages with strangers who knew him as well.  Sometimes I wonder why I still carry a torch for someone who originally ghosted me. Is it a guilty pleasure, a weird hobby, a deeply-rooted psychological hold? I’ve spent years trying to understand why an 18-year-old girl was drawn to an older, manipulative man, twice her age, even when she knew he wasn’t good for her. Why was I still tethered to these memories?  Did letting go of him mean erasing part of myself?

An exercise in futility

Part of me was tired of wasting time and energy trying to close this chapter, which ended so abruptly. Even though no personal cost or outlay was incurred this time and the only outlay would be time, I still didn’t want to go.

What if this search were another futile attempt? Or what if I did find him? What would I say? What if he didn’t remember me? What if he didn’t want to talk to me? After all the time I had spent wondering, processing, and writing about him. It’s kind of like that saying, “Never meet your heroes.”  While he is far from my hero, there is nothing worse than building up your hopes and expectations only to have them dashed. I don’t need another reminder that I was a stepping stone, an option, a variable, in essence, “a simple prop to occupy his time.” That he meant far more to me than I ever meant to him.

No longer an Ex-Pat

And so I waited it out. I found out from another source from that same Facebook page that he left Paris during the pandemic and returned to his home state after decades of living off whoever could sustain him. Even though he was much closer now, and I had a general idea where he was. I didn’t make that trip either.  And I’m in no rush. I could have made that trek to find resolve. Not that I didn’t think about it. Maybe I was waiting until he is gone in a much more permanent way. And who knows, by now he may even be a real ghost.

Forging my own path to the City of Light

This time I’m not going alone. I know a few words and phrases, and I'm no longer afraid. I'm not the same girl I was so many years ago, but I have to admit there is still a lingering curiosity. Putting this story down on paper, a little therapy and self-reflection have helped me to exorcise this ghost. Either way, only his faint spirit remains in Paris. It’s safe now to wander freely without the possibility of crossing his path, just in case.