“Bollocks to Brexit.” That’s what his t-shirt reads as he traipses through the sixteenth arrondissement in combat boots and a cloud of rage. The shirt is the first thing I notice about him. Not just because we’re in an area where people have a tendency to dress in a far more, let’s say, “hoity-toity” manner. But because I myself have become one of the fresh victims of Brexit’s ruinous policies for those who once enjoyed being able to live there as a European citizen. In fact, it’s the entire reason I’m back in Paris, though I swore to myself I never would be…at least not to live. London had become “my place.” My home. Or it was until December 31, 2020. That’s when it was officially time for me to get the fuck out and be on my way. Per Tory-helmed dictums. 

Three years later, I still can’t believe that the whole thing actually went through. That it was really and truly sanctioned by all the “top” people. Those who could never imagine how much they were sinking those on the bottom even farther down into the depths. Such pricks, the lot of them. Oh dear, I’m still speaking like a Brit. Their parlance flickers in and out every now and again, and I imagine it always will. Living in England was such a formative era for me. I moved there for the first time in 2005. I was eighteen years old, ready to make my way in the world and forge a path for myself away from France. Swapping French stodginess for the British kind instead. Honestly, the latter variety was easier to manage for me. Seemed somehow less condescending. Or maybe when you’re used to one type of snootiness all your life, you simply want to experience a different kind. The British brand of snootiness was, thus, something I found to be child’s play compared to what I had endured in France. Or even how I was capable of acting in France. 

I’d be lying, in fact, if I said that my training in French self-superiority didn’t arm me well for success in Britain. It was almost like a superpower that the Brits were defenseless against because their own hauteur wasn’t as inherently strong. Not when measured against my French version of it. I might be able to laugh about it now…if I didn’t feel like the Brits had somehow gotten their revenge against me by casting me out. Not just me, of course, but so many like me. Europeans who wanted to make their way in a more “cosmopolitan” city. And for anyone with a love of theater, obviously nothing else could ever hold a candle to London. Certainly not New York, which is the beta city in this regard (and all others, as far as I’m concerned). Some friends of mine had the gall to suggest I “just” move to New York “instead.” As though it were some sort of natural substitute for London. Ha! What bollocks indeed. And furthermore, they all seemed to be discounting the fact that the U.S. was even harder to gain “legitimate” entry into as a foreigner. And everyone (except “born and bred” white men) was a foreigner to the xenophobic U.S. No, I wouldn’t be caught dead there. And I probably would end up dead if I went. You’re bound to get shot sooner or later. I don’t know a single sensible European who believes otherwise. 

Of course, Brits and Europeans (since Brits do not classify themselves in this latter category) have their own unique iteration of public violence to deal with: the terrorist attack. I’d experienced brushes with such horror on both sides of the Channel. But the one I remember most happened just two months after I first moved to London. I’m referring, of course, to the July 7th bombings. One of which happened right near St. Pancras, in the London Borough of Camden (not to be confused with Camden Town-during-Amy-Winehouse’s-heyday…though it was only about ten minutes away from there by bus). A station I frequented every day.

If my family had lived anywhere other than Paris, they might have urged me to come home immediately to seek “safety.” But, being that London and Paris are both hotbeds for Islamic extremist “shenanigans,” they were more blasé about it than others might have been (my parents had lived through the 1985-86 Paris attacks, after all). Even those ever-paranoid, post-9/11 New Yorkers. 

It wasn’t the terrorism that got me to leave London the first time around, but the destitution I was feeling after just two years of living there. So I went back to Paris at the beginning of 2008, just before the financial crisis. Luckily, working in cafe and living with your parents is “recession-proof,” and I spent the next year saving up enough money (though “enough” is never really enough, is it?) to return at the beginning of 2009. It was probably too early to go back; maybe things would have been easier for me if I had waited just another year to save more money instead of going into gobs of debt (taking out loans and constantly “restructuring” them) to stay there. But then, that would have meant less time in London. And, with hindsight, I can see so clearly that I made the right choice, as though some part of me knew it would somehow come to an end. That it was too good to be true. To live in a city that I actually loved. I never thought I could experience something like that. Even though I was automatically expected to just because I was born in Paris (cue the Lily Collins types in their red berets swooning). Now that I was back, I had to tell myself that I loved it just as much as London. That I wasn’t a “traitor to my race” by being such an “Anglophile” rather than a Francophile. I considered myself neither, ultimately. My preference for England was just a matter of it housing the place where I felt the most like myself. The most free. 

It seems ironic now, as there are so few freedoms or joys to be had anymore in London. The few times I’ve gone to visit since being ejected from the country, I found the spark from before to be missing. I don’t know if that’s in my head, if I’m just telling myself such things to assuage the fate I’ve had to endure because of Brexit. Then again, were it not for Brexit, I might never have noticed this man walking down the street at all. This British man who would actually become my husband, ergo my salvation—because he was my ticket to citizenship. 

I didn’t know that yet as I found myself, as though guided by an invisible hand, following the “Bollocks to Brexit” man into the tabac he went into. It was called Tabac de la Muette, and it was right near the Italian Consulate. That’s where I was originally heading to meet a friend of mine who was trying to renew her passport, but was forced to reckon with how the Italian bureaucratic system kept finding new ways to drag it out for her. Sadly, she would be worse off trying to renew it in Italy, where Italians would likely be even less efficient than they were in Paris. We were meant to get a drink after her appointment was over, but I couldn’t concern myself with her anymore. I had to be near this man. To be near someone who was enraged enough to wear such a t-shirt even after Brexit had already happened. To be near someone who would sport his reasonable political beliefs so publicly even though any Tory he might have encountered would have scoffed. 

Our marriage might not have lasted (as so few do), but it got me where I needed to go. And it made me understand, once and for all, the importance of word tees that I had already long suspected. Which is precisely why I ended up landing my next British husband by wearing an “I Hate Paris” shirt that prompted him to chat me up on the street before offering to buy me a pint. So perhaps I am an Anglophile when you get right down to it.