I'll always have Paris

and other things perhaps one day I will fit in a memoir

In October 2023 I booked a trip to Paris for the very first time, opting, of course, for the “nonrefundable” hotel price, lest I waste an extra $200 — I was sure I was going on that trip.

Then I found out I had to have surgery on a softball-sized ovarian cyst I didn’t know I had. I learned about how in the interim it could burst or torse (cute medical word for twist and cut off the blood supply), both of which were emergency situations that would require hospitalization and/or surgery.

I asked my doctor if I could still take my trip. “Where are you going?” she asked. Paris. “Well, they have hospitals in Paris, so I suppose it’s fine!”

The likelihood of something drastic happening to the cyst I’d apparently had growing in my body for years was low, but as a self-aware hypochondriac, I didn’t feel like my first time eating a proper croissant should be spent worried I might keel over and pass out under the Eiffel Tower, especially since I didn’t know the French word for hospital. Per Google, it’s hôpital, so I probably would’ve gotten there, but nonetheless—

I had to cancel. The hotel refused to refund me, staying true to their word. I tried to argue in my best, most American way. First really nice, then really mean. I’d hate to miss out on this opportunity to stay at your lovely hotel sometime in the future, perhaps I could postpone my trip?/Shall I show you my hospital bill? It didn’t work, if you can believe it. I was out $650. I don’t remember much from high school econ, but I knew this much: It was a sunk cost.

In January I had my surgery, and there was more there, too— I’m now appendix-less, as the aforementioned organ was covered in endometriosis. I could write 300 pages about women’s health and how we’re not appropriately educated about what could be going on in our bodies to explain the pain we’re expected to just live with, but that’s not the point of this particular piece.

In the springtime I recovered from my surgery and my five (!!!) incisions. I tried again with the Paris hotel. Could I please come now, with what I already paid toward a room? Non, monsieur. We already told you. I’m a mademoiselle, I explained. Alex is a gender neutral name. Okay. Still non, though.

Then, in July 2024, something happened that to this day sounds made-up to me. I got invited to go to Paris — for the Olympics — for free. Hotel room covered. Tickets to the Opening Ceremonies, covered. All I had to pay for was my plane ticket. I had roughly 48 hours to decide. It took me a solid twelve seconds.

The details of how this happened will be sparse, but they aren’t really the point of the story either. What I can say is I had a friend who got invited to go, and she asked if she could bring a +1. Moi.

She did not get off the plane.

I was a swimmer for most of my adolescent and teen life, a fate which meant two things: 1) I had to wake up before 5 AM in high school, and 2) all to do a sport no one really cared about.

Except once, every four years.

I’m generally not a big sports fan. If you ask me in a given year who is playing in the Super Bowl, I’ll maybe know at least one of the teams and definitely the halftime show performer.

But the Olympics are everything to me. And not just because it’s the one time swimming is on in primetime, though that is certainly part of it.

As a kid swimmer, I believed I would go to the Olympics — as an Olympian, to be clear. I envisioned where on my body I would get my Olympic rings tattoo, despite my Jewishness — my parents promised that it would be okay to get it because they knew I wasn’t good enough to go to the Olympics, but who is going to crush the dreams of an 11-year-old? Not them.

Future non-Olympian.

But this piece isn’t about that either. I swam nine times a week through high school, I played water polo in college, I didn’t go to the Olympics, and life went on.

But I still loved the Olympics.

God, I love them so much. Maybe it’s because I know what it’s like to wake up while it’s still dark and drive five miles and jump in a freezing cold pool to train for something you can make no real money doing and in which you are mostly just competing against yourself. Maybe it’s because it’s historic and ancient and a triumph of the fucking human spirit. Maybe it’s because of the athletes from all over the world who have dedicated their entire lives to something for the chance to do it on the world stage for 37 seconds or so. Maybe it’s because of Simone Biles throwing her body through the air in a way no living or dead person has ever done before. Maybe it’s all of the above.

I’ll never forget what it felt like staying up late in 2008 and secretly watching Jason Lezak’s comeback on the guest bedroom television. I was supposed to be asleep because I had morning practice and then school the next day, but I was screaming too loudly and so my parents came upstairs to watch it with me. I still get anxious watching it in the year of our lord 2024, and I know how it ends!!!!

I’ve hosted Olympics watch parties and gotten into all the sports and learned the rules of gymnastics scoring and studied all the different vehicles you could hurtle down an ice track in. Yeah, I’m talking summer and winter. I don’t discriminate. Ask me about Misty May-Treanor and Kerri Walsh’s beach volleyball record or Shaun White’s snowboard medal count. Ask me which cities hosted all the modern Olympics and when. I dare you.

So when my friend asked me on the phone this past July if I wanted to go to the Olympics with her in the city that felt like it had chewed me up and spit me out (in a very chic way, of course) from 6,000 miles away the year before, I had one question: Is this real?

As it turned out, oui.

“The Olympics are like…your Olympics.” She told me. A best friend I had met on Twitter (yes, Twitter) four years prior just knew how much it meant to me, and asked me to come with her. I’ll never be able to thank her enough.

So what is my point, exactly? I think it’s about life, and karma, and friendship, and time, and saying yes, and the tides. They come in, and they go out, as my dad says.

It’s been a difficult year, personally and professionally, for myself and most of my friends. We’re struggling. We don’t know exactly what we’re looking for and where to find it and whether we even want that thing we were sure we wanted and what that says about us and if climate change is just going to send us all underwater, anyway. (Good thing I can swim.)

But sometimes, even amid all of that, amid surgery and uncertainty and unemployment and turning 30 (fine, 31)—

You’ll get to go to the Olympics in Paris.