Add boiling water; let seep for five minutes...

The sky is so beautiful tonight—royal, almost. Fiery blast of red, gold, and deep ambered honey shoots up from behind the ominous purple mountains. Summer in Seattle is idyllic—but that doesn’t stop me from thinking about Paris. The beauty of the sunset reminds me of the bits and pieces I saw and heard and found during my days as a Parisian flâneuse—the bits and pieces I wanted to save but could not—ephemeral. The blaze has subsided to a lukewarm glow, melting into the Northern sky.

The gorgeous, endless blue turned into a foreboding sky as clouds gathered toward the end of the afternoon. I heard the grumble of thunder as I sat, shades across the windows, blowing on my lemon ginger tea. Today was hot and slow. Lightning cut, diagonal and somewhat sinister, across the clouds. A break in the weight of the clouds reveals a light yellowish sky; lightning moves, again, across the blue.

The sun’s only a dull red glow on the horizon; Paris, too, glows on the horizons of memory. Vivid but distant, I’m beginning to think of “Paris” as one whole entity—a year’s worth of walks and coffees and songs and books and leaves, falling leaves, one after the other, they turn red and fall. I’ve just made another cup of tea—this is the herbal tea I always used to drink in Paris. I whiff its soft, flowery steam and remember that I have brought parts of Paris, parts of girl I was in Paris, with me.

A few days later…

My hair falls flat on my freckled shoulders; the day is hot, dry, and the sky is vacant. Everyone told me that I should expect a period of depression after leaving Paris. How could I not feel as though I’d lost something? I flew home, and flew into a whirlwind of friends and internships and swimming and the usual hodgepodge of summer activities; oddly, I didn’t feel sad.

But, as the gap between my last blog entry and this one illustrates, I stopped writing. I almost stopped reading. I felt as though I had nothing to say. But it wasn’t quite that: I just needed time to sit, time to seep—like the sun tea I’m brewing, slowly, in the heat of the afternoon. Sometimes you can’t produce until you have had time to let the events of your life seep into the fibers of memory. Your experiences are fresh and vivid, the restless thoughts float and swirl around your brain; let them become inundated and sink to the bottom. In return, they’ll color, flavor, scent your person as tea leaves color water; they’ll become your landscape.

It’s comforting to think of Paris as part of my landscape, even though I know that time spent elsewhere—Seattle and, soon, California—will erode that landscape as surely and as insidiously as water wears away at stone.

For now, however, I’m happy that I have found something to write down. My sun tea smells of lemon and ginger; I, too, will continue to seep.