All the way back from a long three month stint of posting on Instagram as much as a paid influencer, your favorite student who spent a semester abroad in France is back and better at correcting everybody’s pronunciation of “macaron” than ever. She left as Emily, and she came back as Amélie.
She spoke French in high school, being able to roleplay going to the grocery store with only having to refer to the laminated vocab sheet a humble average of three times. She clicked through the French entrance exam before starting freshman year and by some stroke of luck landed into the second to most basic course. She thought this sufficient grounds to set off to France for the semester — good enough.
While she was gone, you marveled at how she could course through the whole semester with merely, “Merci beaucoup” and how to conjugate verbs on the basis of her relation to whomever it was she was speaking to. Grammar would not go shirked when she procured her daily meal from le boulangerie — la baguette would not go misgendered.
Missing her like the dickens, you felt the warm fuzzies when she would post a picture of herself pretending to hold the Eiffel Tower through an oh-so-clever and original optical illusion. When she would post pictures of The Louvre with an Edith Piaf song overlaying it to really drive it all home, you knew that culture was treating your petite chou just fine.
You knew Amélie was steeped in the culture, but now that she’s back, she’s quite different. Even though you know she has Instagram always open so as to not lose any opportunity to capture anything, she only messages you through WhatsApp. Only having downloaded it so you could text your best friend in middle school after she was forced to delete Snapchat by her parents, you were shocked to see a notification from WhatsApp pop up on your screen.
She sent her message entirely in French, so even though you too could once whip out some Français as a party trick (“Le chat” is cat in French, did ya know?!), you had to suck down your pride, and with the utmost humiliation, insert it into Google Translate. From the garbled and distinctly impersonal elan of Google Translate’s signature style, you were able to parse out that she wanted to meet for coffee. Having sacrificed your pride enough for the day, you figured there was a 50/50 chance of having enough for at least an extra small black coffee with no frills in your bank account, and so, affirmed that, “Oui” you would meet up with your beloved amie.
Upon arrival, an aura emanated off of her: She wore a beret rakishly canted so that if she whipped her head around too quickly when they called her out her order, it would fly off like a frisbee. You could immediately spot that the book she was reading was Camus’ Myth of Sisyphus. The cover taunted you, the same as it had when you had tried reading it and abandoned it after 20 some pages — enough to imagine Sisyphus happy. On her plate to munch and crunch on as she awaited her coffee without any of that American flavored syrup — a croissant. She had the whole quintessential look down. You had to hand it to her … oh, and also your hand so she could kiss it and exclaim, “Echanté.”
“Tay-lah,” she called out for you. Your name is Taylor, but who needs the last letters anyway? As she gleefully regaled her experience in France, not yet allowing you to tell about all your earth shattering adventures in Madison, you thought to yourself: Maybe Amélie was always destined for this. She did seem much more herself, even though markedly different from when you last knew her. Perhaps this is the real her, and if so, then so be it.
Taking a nibble out of your very own croissant, flakes falling in a pile that probably equates to $1.00 of the cost of it, you feel happy for her and her sense of self-discovery. It seems after all that you can take the fille out Wisconsin, and also have the Wisconsin taken out of her. Even though you will continue to suffer the plight of being annoyed at her trying to correct your pronunciations and having to accommodate to her WhatsApp penchant, you figure it’s a small price to pay for a friend to find herself. Maybe you’ll even pick The Myth of Sisyphus back up, generating a fraction of that tractor beam of aura for yourself.
