What would Julie Delpy do?

In a tiny, too-warm room of a hotel along Rue Breguet in the 11th arrondissement, my husband announces that his pouch is missing. The air conditioner is on but it’s blowing hot air, so we keep the window open, until it decides to swing itself back to semi-closed each time. Having it open also pulls in the chatter and pedestrian traffic and car horns from the street below, but that’s okay because there’s construction work going on above us that sometimes drowns it all out.

These are things we are trying to get to the bottom of.

The missing pouch contained various chargers and cables, ear plugs, earbuds, and a game console. Left in the seat pocket of the plane, most likely; or stolen from it, very likely. The plane which had brought us here and is now parked on a tarmac, that one. An hour away by Uber, 50 minutes or so by Métro. An ordeal that we had just survived. Grumbling and complaining to himself, Gio goes through the rounds with Air France’s customer service, a body of people that is nearly nonexistent, while I make a list of my own woes in the background. (“The towels smell funky and questionable.”) He is asked to file a claim online. (“This air conditioner is definitely not working. I’m turning it off.”) He needs to wait for an email that will be sent once and if his pouch is found. (“I’m hungry.”)

Patience is being seriously tried after a 9-hour flight on economy legroom. Front desk is not answering their phone to hear Gio’s strongly-worded complaints about the air conditioner (he isn’t the happiest when he’s too warm) and the noise and everything else. Here I am in the Paris of my dreams and selfishly I couldn’t empathize; selfishly all I could think about are the dozen boulangeries we’d passed on the way here and how I’m not in one of them, stuffing myself into a coma with pains au chocolat.

Gio is able to let the issue of his missing pouch rest long enough to realize that he, too, is hungry. We put our shoes back on and trudge outside, into the labyrinthine streets towards the direction of Le Marais for someplace to eat. We’re trying to find a certain crêperie but instead sidetracked en route by a different one that has a huge chalkboard sign on the sidewalk, advertising galettes. We go in and I am forced to speak the minimal French I know to order. My pronunciation, my articles’ genders — hanging from the flimsy thread of years-ago Duolingo — are all over the place, but thankfully our waiter seems very adept in deciphering abysmal French from pretentious tourists who butcher his native language on the daily.

With the hunger pangs satiated we go through more quaint Parisian streets and boutiques, but also through the not-so-quaint ones where it smells like piss (and one with a guy actually pissing on the corner) and there’s trash and graffiti everywhere. But still, Paris pulls us a little bit in. It gets our attention. We see a passageway with open doors and no barriers. We go in out of curiosity. Inside, we’re suckerpunched by the sudden appearance of a tranquil garden or an elaborate courtyard surrounded by architecture that belongs, seemingly, to another time, bathed in cinematic afternoon sunlight. I take a moment and I realize I’ve been walking on cobblestone streets since we got here, the very same cobblestones I’ve been dreaming of since I was sixteen and imagining Paris for the first time. Yes, perhaps there are too many tourists. Perhaps the Seine is just a little bit too brown, and that maybe Before Sunset had over-romanticized this city for every millennial and that it is not, in fact, tinted in honey-gold light.

But then there’s The Louvre, illuminated and piercing the blue dusk, the plaza void of people. The sidewalk cafés, probably the same ones that Joni Mitchell would write about, dappled in komorebi. The serendipitous moon hanging above the city as we exit the Métro, and my husband and I both think of and sing “Moonlight Over Paris.” And maybe the pouch is never to be found, and that the air conditioner is technically only a heater, but there are candlelit dinners in corner bistros, curtains billowing out of open Juliet balconies, the tapestry of the rooflines of the city.

It’s impossible not to over-romanticize this place. It’s literally begging me to.