Leaving Lyon

It’s a surreal feeling.

I’m sitting on a train, leaving behind this beloved city that I’ve spent the past 4 mad months in. After 23 years of constant travel, movement and change… I guess I should be used to this. Leaving again. Soaking in the last fragments of a city: a streetlight, a tree as it shudders in the wind, the pink graffiti on a storefront wall, the smile of a beautiful brown-skinned girl as she waves goodbye—I anxiously grab these monographs and file them away: Remember this. Feel this. Live this before it slips away. It’s desperate and tragic and fleeting but beautiful because I know this will never happen again.

It hasn’t quite sunk in yet…that I’m leaving Lyon, maybe forever.  I can’t really internalize these final moments as they’re happening…just struggling to take everything in: packing, rushing, farewelling, stressing, moving…and just when I understand what’s really going on, it’s too late…I’m already watching myself go—unable to slow things down or intervene, like being stuck in a dreamy, out-of-body experience. I’m leaving. My head spins and I have that familiar tingling in my body again that says: here we go again, the change, mindfuck, prepare for the paradigm shift.

Damn it. It shouldn’t be this hard. I should be a practiced leaver by now…a well-weathered global vagabond. After all of the places and people and girls that I’ve left behind…I should be an expert at moving on, at being a cold-hearted bastard that never looks back. But unfortunately…I’m not. I feel the irrevocable loss of leaving, and missing, and eventually forgetting (that’s the worst). I feel it a lot. Don’t forget this. Remember this. Remember her. But as hard as I try…eventually the street names, and nightclubs, and lectures, and faces begin to blur together…and I’m left with a broad impression of a place…a ghost of a memory…a few poignant details that really stick out…

In Lyon. I want to remember those sluggish Sundays…when the fridge was always empty and the shops were all closed, and we invariably had to eat ‘miche escalope’ or Subway for lunch…squeezing into the metro like a bunch of sweaty sardines at 7:30 am, panicking at the top of the Gorge de Loup stairs, and running after the #3 bus like a flock of awkward chickens…the way Rita—the cafeteria lady—always smiled and had my fix ready for me, even before I asked: “une café long s’il vous plait” (the only coffee at EMLyon that didn’t taste like chocolaty ass)…at lunch, sneaking in through the ‘Staff Only’ entrance at Ecole Centrale for our food—sickening meals, but comforting in their predictability…the city of Lyon, downtown, the narrow alleys and statues and white curvy architecture…the street music and candlelit magic of Vieux Lyon…our favorite watering holes: The Smoking Dog, St. James Pub, Citron, the charming little bars around Croix Rousse…those bastard bouncers at Q Boat who never let us in again…Docks 40, that phenomenally fun nightclub that we discovered way too late…the sunny picnics and football games at Parc Tete D’or in our early days…the epic parties at Eduardo’s ‘Brazilian villa,’ and that magnificent balcony view overlooking Lyon’s mini-Eiffel Tower, and the illuminated Cathédrale Saint-Jean-Baptiste…our extravagant  ’Suit-Up Sundays,’ feasting at the swankiest of Lyon’s restaurants…the good bread, Brie, Camembert and fromage de chévre, entrecote, escargot, steamed mussels, steak tartar and salade Lyonnais—incomparably delicious food that I was usually too broke to afford…dealing with French bureaucracy, and the strikes and snow that made public transportation a nightmare…the protests, burning cars, looting and riots that made Place Bellecour look like a warzone...listening to melancholic accordion music as I hurtled past metro stations…a little gypsy girl begging for change…communicating somehow in French-Spanish-English, whether trying to ask for directions or just chat up some French girls…the millions of people and ‘vin chaud’ and slippery dancing lights of Fête des Lumières…the frightening yelling and cursing of the crowd as Olympique Lyonnais scored another goal…the start of our natural progression of long-distance break-ups, messy hook-ups, and the first GEP couples…eating ‘Coca-Cola chicken’ and ‘hotpot’ with Chinese friends, picking up bits of gossip and Mandarin at crowded dinner parties…meeting the founders of BRAC and SEWA—social entrepreneurial rock stars—at the World Entrepreneurship Forum… overlooking the pink-sparkling Rhône—a flowing champagne river at dawn… the GEP boys’ passionate and school-kidish love affair with the Luxury Management girls…our revelry, celebrating birthdays and finishing exams, and all of the small triumphs, and quirks, and screw-ups of the classroom…moving without inhibitions on a bottle-studded dance floor, being free…   

    

It’s hard to bring it all back. To preserve my memories like so many moments in pickled jars…It’s even harder to put them all on display for the world to see. You can’t really communicate it through words: what a place has meant to you…what kind of mark its left imprinted on you forever... Even now at Christmas, surrounded by presents and family and close friends… I’m finding it difficult to explain what I’ve been through…what these past 4 months—this whirlwind of experiences and sensory overload—has felt like…I’ve changed somehow. I’m different. I can’t explain how GEP and Lyon will always be a part of me now…forever, even when they’re gone and I can’t see them anymore…like a lingering phantom limb.

Remember Lyon.

But I know that the street vignettes, and scents, and the smiling and frowning faces will someday fade… But somewhere in my subconscious, in that secret space deep inside the nomadic heart—where people get frozen, and time is always still…where only the special cities get buried alive…those places that keep affecting you, and changing you, and teaching you long after they’re gone and forgotten—there will always be the walls of this breathing, petrified city…an icy streetlamp, an autumn rose…a beautiful, brown skinned girl that’s waving goodbye…

 

Goodbye Lyon.

We’ve loved you deeply. We won’t forget our happy times together, we promise.

We’re part of each other now, forever. 

XOXO

GEP, Class of 2011

-Sebastian Martin