The Day I Reached My Breaking Point in Paris
The day I reached my breaking point started out like so many others since my husband had left four months earlier—wake up, get ready and leave my apartment as quickly as possible. Decently sized by Paris standards, the 463-square-foot apartment faced south, overlooking a shared courtyard, with double-door windows that spilled sunlight into the bedroom and living room. At the time, remnants of The Frenchman—let’s call him TFM for short—dotted the space like stains of a past meal on a rumpled tablecloth. Every morning a yellow mirror from his childhood bedroom reflected empty eyes and dark under-eye circles. A family heirloom chest purchased by his father now held all the documents that confirmed my existence as a legal resident of France. A mammoth bookshelf in the living room built by TFM our first weekend living together housed his books, intermingled with mine. His energy lingered in the space.
As I dressed—pulling on a black shirtdress, slipping my feet into caramel-colored sandals, dabbing pink blush on my cheeks and coloring my lips MAC Ruby Woo red—I had no reason to think that the day would be such a turning point for me. After he moved out, feelings of hopelessness and loss quickly became familiar friends, and I had turned to constant apéros, the French version of happy hour, to ensure that I didn’t have to find myself alone, and sober, in what used to be my marital apartment. A full social calendar and big smiles gave the impression that I was somewhat in control of the tornado that recently touched down in my life, but that couldn’t have been further from the truth.
I headed out in the early afternoon to meet my relatively new friend Tiffanie at the Jeu de Paume museum, a space dedicated to modern and postmodern media in the Jardin des Tuileries. Parisian by birth, Tiffanie and I met during my years working at one of the big four advertising agencies in Paris. We were both experiencing intense transitions—me from being married to newly single, and she was moving away from the advertising world to answer her true calling as a visual artist—but our methods of transitioning differed wildly. Tiffanie had a purpose, plan and goal, whereas I chose late nights, partying and denial. I refused to face how my pain was suffocating me.
After we wandered long enough through the morose photography exhibitions of Sabine Weiss and Josef Sudek we treated ourselves, with a bit of nudging on my part, to a bottle of rosé in the Jardin des Tuileries. As a good wannabe Parisian, I made sure to have the bottle on hand to enjoy after our day at the museum. That was simply what one did. It was a sunny Saturday, and I had no obligations; I was on a mission to profiter de la journée. We settled into the gardens’ iconic green chairs side by side, people-watching and sipping our wine, cackling with laughter, giving my spirit brief respite from my divorce, my shame, my feelings of worthlessness.
Eventually, we hopped on the metro heading north. The destination was Sunset, a New York-style cocktail bar in the Montmartre neighborhood of Jules Joffrin. Walking up the stairs out of the metro station, using our hands to shield our eyes from the still-beaming late-afternoon sun, I noticed a concerned expression on Tiffanie’s face.
“Is everything okay?” I asked.
Looking at me for confirmation, she responded, “We’re only going to have one bottle, right?”
I smiled, threw an arm around her shoulders. “Yes, one. I promise.”
At Sunset we were promptly seated in an ideal people-watching spot en terrasse. Unlike the typical Parisian rattan bistro chairs that line so many sidewalks, the seating at Sunset was a mix of long wooden tables and benches that forced you to sit next to strangers, where you couldn’t help but eavesdrop on their conversations. My status as a regular meant that I was treated like a local celebrity, and the staff knew what I liked.
“And for you ladies,” the young, wiry Senegalese waiter said, presenting us with a cold bottle of Côtes de Provence rosé, the condensation dripping off its sides, as soon as we sat down. Unbeknownst to Tiffanie, the wine fest was about to begin. A few hours and several empty bottles of wine later, most of which I drank, I was looking around to get the waiter’s attention to order another.
“The last one,” I said to Tiffanie, but we both knew that was another empty promise.
My eyes met the waiter’s, but before I could give him the universal signal for another round, Tiffanie yawned. Stretching out both her arms to their full length, she slurred, “J’en peux plus.”
She’d had enough, and I knew that her saying it in French meant that there was no convincing her to stay. The language of our friendship was English, so her switch to French signaled that she was too intoxicated to put any further effort into speaking my mother tongue. “I can’t anymore,” she repeated in English to make sure that I understood that there would, in fact, not be one last bottle. “I have to go home,” she said while gathering her belongings.
I had just caught my second wind and didn’t want to leave; the abundance of wine temporarily relieved the heaviness of my new reality. I wanted to bathe in it, stay forever, but I followed suit. We drunkenly kissed each other on the cheek and parted ways, beginning my crooked five-minute walk back home.
The cobbled street that led from Sunset to my apartment bustled during the day, lined with a butcher shop, a bakery, a greengrocer and a fishmonger’s shop. But it was deserted at 7 p.m. as I stumbled onto it, trying to keep my balance and not fall over. I had achieved my goal—I was completely off my face, and the next morning I would be so hungover, with a pounding head and body, feeling like a block of cement had been dropped on it the night before, that I wouldn’t be able to think, that I could bury any attempt at introspection while feeding my insatiable need to forget. A few minutes later I was in front of my limestone Haussmann apartment building, attempting to enter the correct digicode and failing at every try. Eventually, I managed to enter the correct sequence of numbers and pushed open the black wrought iron door that leads to a courtyard. I was relieved that I didn’t have to force small talk with any neighbors, especially the retired busybody of the building who tends to the makeshift flower garden in the courtyard when he’s not adorning the hallway with passive-aggressive notes that outline his latest grievance such as suggesting that hosting parties in a salle de fête would suit him better than in the comfort of ones own home or my personal favorite, when he complained about boisterous laughter permeating the buildings walls and reminded everyone that quiet hours begin at 10 p.m.. The makeshift flower garden was the only thing about the apartment building that continued to bring me joy; the memories that lay within its walls did opposite. After going through another door I began the climb up the navy blue spiral stairs to my front door. I opened the door, crossed the threshold into my apartment and, like clockwork, stripped myself naked and fell into what felt like a familiar alcohol-induced deep sleep. Removing all of my clothes upon entering my apartment was a recent habit, as if with each layer of clothing removed so, too, were reminders of the night’s sins.
When I woke up I felt abnormally parched and hungry. I rubbed my heavy eyes, reached for my glasses and pulled myself off the couch. With both hands holding my head, I stumbled naked into my tiny red-and-white-tiled kitchen. I swung open the refrigerator door and bypassed a bottle of wine before taking out a glass bottle of water and a bowl of moldy strawberries. After quenching my thirst, I looked at the strawberries with disgust. Even hungover I wasn’t going to eat those. Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed that the Parisian sky had a magical, cotton-candy, summer-evening glow. It wasn’t the usual fresh azure morning sky dotted with cumulus clouds that puts a new day in motion. Interesting, I thought.
“It’s probably going to rain,” I said aloud to no one. I opened the window to let in crisp morning air but was met with confusion. The smells circulating the courtyard were not the daybreak scents of coffee, toast and croissants. Instead, the aroma of tomatoes, onions and garlic wafted past my nose. I heard glasses clinking together. I was perplexed. I looked around, panicked and ran to the living room where I began frantically searching for my cell phone. I found it and looked at the time. It was only 9:30 p.m.. That was when the realization that it was only a few hours after I’d returned home and I wasn’t hungover but still very drunk, washed over me.
My body slowly sank into the hardwood floor of my living room, my back curved like a half-moon, my face buried in my palms. I started crying. The deep shame that had been bubbling beneath the surface finally erupted. I had an out-of-body moment and, as I saw myself sobbing on the floor, shaking, still naked, it was clear that I could no longer hide from myself. On the outside I looked like I was doing a good job of getting over my marriage. I went to work every day. I was sad, but not too sad. My conversations didn’t revolve around the demise of my marriage, and the random hookups signaled that I was moving on. But behind the fake smiles and the “I’m fine” lies, I was ashamed. I felt like an unlovable failure, and I was allowing that shame to destroy me.
Just three years earlier I was a newlywed living in my own romantic comedy. I was married to a Frenchman whom I met at a bar in New York City, and he made me quiver when he said my name. He opened up my world to another way of living—we took trips to far-flung locations like Egypt and Sri Lanka, we danced and we hosted dinner parties. There was that one time in Stockholm when we lay together side by side in our hotel room, eating junk food and watching terrible TV shows, and we couldn’t have been happier. We were a team; I was his and he was mine.
I was convinced that our love was ironclad. In my mind we defied the confines of race; mine Black, his white. The constraints of religion didn’t stand a chance; mine Christian, his Jewish. Our nationalities and cultures were a second thought; I an American-Jamaican woman from the Bronx and he a French-Jewish-Algerian man from Paris. We created a deep bond despite an ocean physically separating us and a six-hour time difference dictating how often we were able to speak to each other in real time; overcoming those obstacles strengthened and solidified our desire to build a life with each other. It was us against the world and we would move through life’s ups and downs with ease and grace, together.
On our wedding day in 2013, I was proud that we had survived a three-year long-distance relationship, and the grand prize was everlasting love. Until 2016, when almost three years after we said our “I dos” in the Mairie du 15e, the city hall of the fifteenth arrondissement, my picture-perfect Paris life crumbled to bits like a flaky croissant. As I lay naked and crying on the living room floor of our Montmartre apartment, I asked myself, How did this become my life?
The answer was that I was suffering from more than just a broken heart. A series of dangerously indulgent weekends led me to an all-time low. My spirit was crushed, and finding comfort in self-destructive behavior that I thought I had left behind in my graduate school days was clear evidence of a lack of love and concern for myself. The pain was all-encompassing—I couldn’t see past it and wasn’t sure if I ever would be able to.
What I didn’t know at the time was that the very aromas that had woken me up and brought on my lowest hour—of garlic, roasting tomatoes and searing onions, the smells of dinnertime in Paris—also promised to be my salvation. I replenished my spirit by making dinner for myself, and myself alone. The practice of cooking for one brought me so much good. I stopped punishing myself and replaced self-harm with kindness and compassion.
Making solo dinners gave me the courage to not succumb to my divorce, but to transform through it. From the darkness of divorce and a love lost came a deeper understanding of who I am and a love of myself that I didn’t know was missing, but I am forever grateful that I discovered and wholly embraced them.
Excerpted from Dinner for One by Sutanya Dacres, Copyright © 2022 by Sutanya Dacres. Published by Park Row Books.
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