A pug is sitting at my feet looking up at me with pitiful eyes, hoping for a crumb of my iced lemon pound cake. The coffee shop is painted a soft green.
A long cushioned bench upholstered in floral fabric lines the wall. The front window is framed by cascades of lilac and jasmine. In the back of the café is a flower shop. Two women chat in French as they strip leaves from stems under a ceiling of skylights. A sign on the wall above them says La Fleuriste. The espresso machine whirs. A demitasse spoon tinks in an espresso cup. A florist pours water into a pail and I hear it trickle like a faucet.

-June 11, 2025, Paris

Romantic is a soft, gauzy feeling. It is a blush, a glow. The ruffle of a petal or a skirt. It is the fall of light. It is the rush of love, the hope to create beauty, the glimmering of an ideal. Romantic cherishes what could be and softly, gently, attempts to make it real. In the attempt, it succeeds, if only for a moment.

I am prone to romanticizing. In my younger years, this romanticism could be painful. I wanted romance to last, whether the romance was that fluttery feeling of first being in love or the glowy feeling the golden glimmer of evening light gave. In my adult years, the ephemerality is part of its allure. Romance is special when it shows up.

When I was younger, I also could not square that romance could live alongside truths with harsher colors and harder lines — if the hard realities existed, and romance faded, then my romantic notions must be false. Boy was that a depressing thought. Now I know that life is made of both romance and the not so romantic, and that the hard elements make the romantic — which is just as real — that much more sublime.

I savor the romantic when I’m lucky enough to experience it: the moment will likely be fleeting. Our days in France were full of romantic moments, including these on my final day alone in Paris, from the fall of light in St. Sulpice cathedral, to the soft floral shelter of Cordelia’s Coffee Flower Shop, to the bright blue door of the apartment where Hemingway wrote words that made me want to visit Paris, to the masterful impressions of mood and light in paintings at the Musée d’Orsay.