How We Got Here

CHAPTER ONE: WHERE IT ALL STARTED

Paris never announces itself the way people expect. There is no single moment where the city opens its arms and says, welcome, this is where your life begins. It arrives instead in fragments—cold mornings on crowded platforms, the smell of burnt coffee drifting out of cafés we could not afford, the way the sky sometimes looked bruised over the rooftops, as if it too had survived something.

That was how it began for us. Quietly. Without ceremony.

We arrived with suitcases that carried more hope than clothes, dragging wheels across pavements polished by centuries of footsteps. We told ourselves we were not running away; we were moving forward. That distinction mattered then. It helped us sleep at night. It made the struggle feel intentional, even noble.

France had been a word before it became a place. A promise. A story repeated by cousins, friends of friends, strangers on the internet—stories of opportunity, reinvention, dignity. We believed them not because they were true, but because we needed them to be.

In the beginning, we paid attention to everything. The language felt sharp and musical at the same time, syllables colliding in ways our mouths struggled to imitate. We learned quickly that silence could be misread as ignorance and confidence mistaken for arrogance. We learned when to speak and when to lower our eyes. These were lessons no one writes down, but everyone expects you to know.

Our first apartment was barely an apartment at all. A room, really. A narrow space tucked behind a building that had clearly seen better years. The radiator worked only when it felt like it. The window faced another wall. Still, we told ourselves it was temporary. Everything was temporary then. We lived on the future the way others live on savings.

We were not alone, though loneliness followed us closely. There were others like us—faces from different places, carrying similar exhaustion, speaking in accents that softened with time but never fully disappeared. We nodded at one another on staircases, shared cigarettes outside late at night, exchanged half-stories we didn’t know how to finish.

Work came in pieces. Shifts that began before sunrise. Jobs that asked for silence more than skill. We learned the value of invisibility, how useful it could be to blend into the background. We learned how pride could be folded and stored away, like a coat you only wear back home.

At night, we talked. About what we would become. About how this struggle would make sense one day. We spoke as though the future were listening, as though words alone could shape it. Sometimes we believed that. Sometimes belief was all we had.

France did not reject us outright. That would have been easier. Instead, it tested us slowly, patiently, as if waiting to see how serious we were. Doors opened halfway. Opportunities arrived with conditions. Acceptance came with a price we were still calculating.

There were moments—small, almost embarrassing moments—when we felt close to happiness. Sitting along the Seine with cheap bread and laughter that surprised us. Watching the city glow at dusk, pretending for a few minutes that we belonged. Those moments mattered more than we admitted. They kept us here.

But beneath everything was a quiet fear we rarely named: What if this is as far as we go?

What if this effort, this distance from home, this reshaping of ourselves leads nowhere?

We didn’t ask that question aloud. Not yet. We were still at the beginning, still protected by the illusion that beginnings are generous. We hadn’t learned that they can be cruel in subtle ways.

Looking back now, we understand that this was the moment everything started to form—the habits, the compromises, the versions of ourselves we would later struggle to recognize. We didn’t see it then. We were too busy surviving. Too busy believing.

This is how we got here.

Not in a single leap, but in small steps we barely noticed at the time.

And we were only just beginning