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Il pleut à Paris aujourd’hui and my mind is sleepy with songs well-worn like the sock threads thinning at the palms of my feet. I will listen to rhetorical melodies for now: the strutting heels of girls in love or girls in the midst of scheming an escape, the scrape of bicycle wheels on pavement, the chaos of overlapping language that surrounds me like a breeze. Winter is mean and dark, rain is sinister when endless, unrelenting. I live in the same clothes, without too much complaint, and though my shoes are tearing open at the seams, the rooms and halls in which they tread are luminous and storied, the city streets narrow and unpredictable. I climb the carpeted stairs up to the sixth floor, breathless and alive, again without having counted the number of steps.