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My time in Paris was a time of reflection —  refraction, reaction; scarlet hues of a hungry visage smattered like shards of light superimposed onto the sprawling city. Battered and bruised and bled from my time in the states where the only feeling I could cling to was dissonance. I was hungry and the French fed me boeuf bourguignon, slippery duck skin between my teeth, and a cafe au lait. I was only one coffee away from feeling my blood rise for the first time in months. They sheltered me, offered me an umbrella in the rain, told me I was from a beautiful country, and tolerated my rounded vowels and dull consonants. I found comfort in the cosmopolitan landscape. I was no monster there, just a girl with a strange face in a strange place. I was tickled by locals greeting me in their native tongue, largely because I felt  it symbolized recognition. It dawned on me how lonely my life was in the states. Here, I was separated by the barrier of language, but it was the warmest reception I’d received in many moons. While gazing through the prism of American exceptionalism, I couldn’t help but wonder whether pledging my heart to the French countryside was an act of sedition. My walk was not unprecedented. The cobbled streets prompted me to retrace the paths of Douglass, Baldwin, Coates, and the various black intellectuals who, too, have been so easily seduced by foreign lands. To dismiss the colonial history of the European cluster would be to censure the fruit while watering its roots, and yet, I am attempting to tease out the idiosyncrasies of paternalism, or why I stand taller and feel freer in a country that is not my own. I often wondered what Marquis de Lafayette thought of the American experiment. If he could see what we would  become, would he have bought in so early with his guns and ships? Is there any real kinship between the Americans and the French? There is something pulsing beneath the streets of Paris that is disparate from New York. The Englishmen I encountered during my travels maintained an air of condescension reminiscent of the Loyalists, and when they look at me, they see the aborted face of discontent, a child gone rogue from being raised by a young, irrational parent who abandoned tradition in their infancy and never looked back. Perhaps, even a semblance of desire: of longing to remake the American black into a patrician fashioned in their own image. I suppose we cannot all be Idris Elba. I know this body isn’t safe across any boundary etched into the earth by a scepter. Only that ancestral womb between the legs of the Tigris and Euphrates could offer the black body refuge. Until then, I shall be a fugitive bonded to those floating seamlessly in the annals of time, seeking release from the orbit of our shared destruction.  Still, I did not feel like a ghost, as I often do. There was such little fear with each step, and with my growing confidence, a loss of connection to the tribalism that plagues the states reified in the ever present tension that our civil society may devolve into the same massacres that watered this cursed soil for centuries. Nothing can grow here in the Cain pit. Despite these revelations, I have succumbed to the immutable fact that I am an American, and in that settler tradition, I don’t feel anything when I am far from home. I don’t mourn for my people like my ancestors did in ship cargos among the dead and diseased. Their hunger stays with me, however, and their exhaustion. I can feel it deep in my bones: the exhaustion that comes from marching onward through the bitter night without the promise of daylight or reprieve. Just as my ligaments begin to tear away from the bone, I find a meadow to lay my head for the night. I look up at the stars, fixed in their place and begin to bawl. My tears make savory paste where my ears meet the earth, and I use the mud to draw a circle around myself. Is this home?