Your old apartment is now a Ralph Lauren store, and I think you would like that. You always did have expensive taste.

I think you would like my bravado in making my way upstairs, acting for all the world as if I have the money to be there, to the second-floor rooms overlooking the boulevard. These were yours, once. You wrote that you loved them for the high ceilings and tall windows, and the gutter outside that sang with all the harmonies of the Seine when it rained. Today it’s sunny, and they glitter. Everything turns to gold and diamond under the light of the sun and the chandelier. What happened to the chaise longue? To your heavy oak desk, to the fancy embroidered cushions, to the paintings on the walls that were given by the friends who created them? I turn to ask someone, but stop myself just in time and my body rocks silently with your laughter. We are so alike, you and I, despite being three generations apart. Always courting the raised eyebrow.

I think you would like the handbag that I hover beside. It’s red – the burnt ember red of the North African sun that you loved so much. (I always smile at your diary from Tangier. “Flies, more flies, seasick on a camel, but always the majesty of the sun…”). All around me, colour is evolving through time and space, fading to the black and white of the photographs you took here, but the bag is still red and I realise I am standing exactly where you must have stood to take her picture. If I reached, I could touch her smile.

A shadow is hovering, and I shake my head in anticipation of the question that my schoolgirl French won’t be up to answering. No, thank you, I don’t need help. The world pops again with colour. An echo of perfume lingers on my nose and the tip of my tongue, like salt from a far-off sea breeze, and I turn to leave. I can’t afford the bag anyway. My footsteps sound all the way down until they are lost on the street, but I find them again later in your local café. White wine, a small basket of warm popcorn, city dusk settling softly on my face.

I know you would like that. You left, eventually, but you always did long to come back.

Elodie Rose Barnes is an author and photographer. She can usually be found in Paris or the UK, daydreaming her way back to the 1920s, while her words live in places such as Burning House Press, Bold + Italic, and trampset. Current projects include chapbooks of poetry & photography inspired by Paris, and a novel based on the life of modernist writer Djuna Barnes. Find her online at elodierosebarnes.weebly.com and on Twitter @BarnesElodie.