Hunger for Opulence

The craving never subsides but the object of the hunt will shift.

When I was 10, the community came together to fix my family’s house. Patched up holes in the walls, repainted, and shined silverware. When I was asked what I wanted my room to be decorated like I said Paris.

From a very young age, I had an obsession with opulence: the costumes in the 1956 film The King and I, the imaginary feast in Hook (1991), and, of course, the room transformation scene in A Little Princess (1995).

Feasts, shopping, gifts, anything tangible in excess, I wanted. I believe there are two types of children: those who accept their conditions as fate, and those who believe their body was grossly misplaced, while their minds are somewhere else, foreign and lavish, where they know, fervently, they were really meant to be. I was the latter.

Paris has always been a place where the parts of myself I wanted to be, and the parts I wanted to hide, were not only on display, but for sale as a ticketed attraction. Wealth colliding with poverty in the most violent way. Blood caked and dried into the golden walls of the Louvre, oxidized to a deep pomegranate color, a color so pure, one might even mistake it for an exotic paint. Cobblestones stacked by the very husbands of the women who trampled down them in a rage to Versailles.

When you're raised down a dirt driveway, no matter how many flights you take away from it, you always find its dust stamped into the sole of your shoe.

I wish I didn’t have to think about my childhood in everything I do. I wish I could look at a museum and admire the art without the searing, pulsing, jealous thought that everything I see was made by people who had the time to practice. And I wonder to myself how much art we’ll never see. Art that died in the calloused hands of people who simply weren’t born with the gift of time to nurture their talents.

I wonder, in places like Paris, if I will die as angry as I was born. I wonder, especially in places like Copenhagen, if I will ever live as peacefully as I now have the opportunity to.

Paris means so much to me. It reminds me of where I’ve been, and where I used to want to be. It's an organism, much like New York, that keeps me equally grounded in both the present and the past. As my body snakes and slithers through the arrondissements, I can't help but feel a sense of pride. I grow and travel and experience more of the world, and I am overwhelmed with the feeling of a prophecy fulfilled.

A full life. A wealthy life. A life where the kitchen cabinets at home are stacked with food. A life with my very own chess set I play with Nina after dinner. Books stacked on windowsills with my notes scribbled through, because these ones won’t be returned to the library. A life full of opulence though the definition, since I was a child, has changed.

My birthday was last week. And so far, it was the best one yet. As I grow up, my anger both softens and hardens all at once and I don’t think that’s a bad thing. I’ve gotten more comfortable in my guts. While there will always be that queasy feeling of fraudulence—the feeling that, at any moment, you all will piece together that my body truly has been grossly misplaced—there is also the confidence that I am exactly where I am meant to be.

So I return home from Paris with my new books, and I kiss my Nina hello I’ve missed you, and sit in my life. And I am full.