Standing in front of the hotel all these years later I couldn't quite grasp it, why I remembered that time fondly. Details flooded back to me: abusing our lobby espresso machine privileges, getting unbelievably stoned on contraband weed tincture again and again, drinking cheap bottles of wine from the grocery store with our legs dangling over the canal, looking on in astonishment as people jumped in for a swim. We walked everywhere, wore down the final remnants of our sneakers. We ate terrifyingly unctuous hamburgers made too big and overstuffed with French cheese Our friend took us to a party on a rooftop but again we left early, my companion too anxious to hang. But mostly we were broke, we were tired, and we were sick of each other's shit. When we met up with our charming friend who grew up in Paris and happened to be in town her effortless, summery cheer sent a ripple of sadness thundering through us. We were spent of euros and spent of ease.

We had been through so much. We witnessed what felt like a nervous breakdown in the courtyard of a medieval village. We fell asleep to the sounds of the Vienna Prater clanging in the distance. We swam in the Riviera at the border, we swam in the blue crown of the Cylcades, we swam in the soupy splendor of the Adriatic. We saw packs of wild dogs creeping through the brutalist splendor of Tirana, heard the eerie creek of goat heads turning on a spit. We rode some very sketchy busses. I played shows in bars and museums and book stores and olive groves. We ran out of steam in Warsaw, really hit the wall. I was frequently miserable in some of the most beautiful places on Earth. Fields of sunflowers, every form of public transit. We argued all over, shouted in many nations - in Budapest I was bellowed into illness, in Prague I was howled out the room. But we also went to the grandest public baths I have ever seen. We slept in squalor, we slept in five star hotels. We burned through the money I made playing shows pretty quickly. Our eyes grew tired of history and devotional architecture. We drank and drank and drank - lambrusco and ouzo and a dozen beers in one sitting. A lot of it is gone, sanded down, defanged - for this I remain grateful.

By the time we arrived in Paris we wanted nothing more, I think, than to just go home. Our last stop on this insane and fraught crusade became a kind of purgatory. The thing I remember most vividly about the final leg of that trip was figuring out how to get Netflix to work on our hotel room's TV - we watched an entire season or two of Mr. Robot, whose knotty hacker plotline I utterly failed to understand. It didn't matter: it took place in New York City and featured bright American accents, it was a homesick balm for two weary boneheads, we could watch it and imagine a world where we could no longer be sewed together at the backpack. Finally arriving in Paris that summer meant that, somehow, we were going to make it out alive. At times living through this together - or at all - did not seem possible. But there was something like lightness, a clearing of the storm - Paris was the place we fought the least. I remember smiling in the back of the cab on the way to the airport. The leaving made me giddy - we would reach an ending, that the endings were reached is why I remember it fondly.

Nearly eight years later and under impossibly different circumstances I found myself back in the tenth arrondissement. A longer stay in Paris accompanying someone who has never once been cruel, her very supportive and generally game parents in tow. Plus, we had the bizarre inside track of being invited guests of fashion week - we were there with a purpose greater than simply waiting to catch a flight. Many implored us to go to this one particularly bakery and upon crossing its threshold a wave of recognition crashed over me: ah, I have been here before. But I couldn't map 2016's vexations onto it, it was too warped to line up, wouldn't click into place. I split off from the group, feeling like I needed to confront the discordance.

I walked in circles and eventually stood in front of the hotel, doing the work but appearing for all the world like another lost tourist blocking the sidewalk. I could almost hear the mending, like stone on stone. It felt intoxicating, the gulf of change and difference between then and now. For the first time in five years I considered reaching out, a text to say literally that "I am in the tenth" and to imply that I am still animate and about, despite efforts made otherwise. I snapped out of it and returned to the safer world of now, message unsent and map unbent. Although the last time we ran into each other they later sent me a really threatening follow up email saying they were watching me, so maybe message received. I am alive and sometimes experience joy, even in the right bank.

The world you live in is shaped by the company you keep and their kindness makes it bloom. Paris in the jagged shadow of someone else's vice and vitriol is another place entirely, and though I physically revisited Paris recently I have never been back to the snarled, deadened city I remember from all those years ago. I will never in my life go there again. This time I didn't want to leave. Other people can warp streets, close in the walls, change the shape of an entire experience, they can crumple neighborhoods and crush you. But other people can also make the most pedestrian thing in the world fun and beautiful - the right counterparts in life can make it sing, cross over the canal and join the choir.