We’ll Always Have Paris

Paris!  Could there be a more beautiful city in the world?  If there is, I am not aware of it and nor have I seen it.  Paris has always held a very special place in my heart.  It is the city that I rediscovered myself after a painful divorce and several years later it was the very city where I met my twin flame, Adi Bachan.  The city holds within its confines the tales of my fall from love and my triumphant return to loving.  One relationship was put to rest while another emerged to change my life in the most transformational way.  I met the woman who I have known several lifetimes—her Bonnie to my Clyde, my Ricky to her Lucy, her Bacall to my Bogart.

I have always had a very strong connection Paris.  I remember the very first time I landed in Paris and was deposited on the Left Bank of the city—it felt like home.  In fact, it was home.  It felt like I had lived in Paris before in another lifetime—several other lifetimes, in fact.  Every street seemed so familiar and on my first trip to the city I strolled around completely alone, drinking in every aspect of this romantic city.  I could feel my soul saying, “You’re back home again.” I felt lost emotionally on those hot August days following my divorce, yet I felt like I had found a part of myself that had been missing for so long. It made no logical sense to me why this city seemed so embedded in my DNA.  Although I didn’t speak the language it felt as if every word that I heard uttered in French was like music to my once deaf ears.  I found myself staring intently at each French citizen I encountered as if I was reuniting with an old friend. Cities, like people, imprint themselves on a person’s soul.  Cities can become a part of you in a way that can’t be described or explained, and Paris was and is that city for me.  The cafes, the elegant cobblestone streets, the majestic tree-lined parks, the museums, the wine—I could go on and on about Paris however mere words become just that—words.  Words can convey a certain sense of feeling, but they pale in comparison to the exhilaration of experience.  Experience stays with a person for a lifetime—an energetic diary that can be recalled in an instant—experience is the reason for living. And here is where I shall digress.  I have always believed that we live several lifetimes and that reincarnation is a reality that was expunged from our consciousness not only by the veil that is placed strategically in front of our memories before we incarnate, but also by religious institutions that didn’t feel it was a convenient control mechanism if people understood we come back to Earth to play every character in this play called “life.”  We get the opportunity to experience life as every character and every permutation so that we can understand and feel empathy for those around us.  If people understood that we have been or one day will be rich, poor, man, woman, murderer, murdered, king, pauper, healthy, infirm, etc.—then each of us would come to understand that we and our brothers are one.  We experience each part of this Earth realm in order to remember that we are all one—we are all One with God. With this as a backdrop, Paris reminds me of this each time I visit this city on the Seine.  This city calls to me and says, “You have lived here before.  This is your city.”  My memories are of being a writer in the mid to late 1700s.  I can feel the poverty that I was experiencing at the time.  I can feel the all consuming feeling of not having the means to live a life of luxury.  I can feel the cold draft of the room where I would sit each day trying to churn out a story that could miraculously change my fortunes from a poor man living in solitude to one of a man of wealth living in solitude.  There is little doubt in my heart that in that lifetime I lived in almost complete solitude. That lifetime is indelibly etched into my memory.  I have visions of ink stains on my fingers while I laboriously scratched out my latest work with a quill as I occasionally glanced out the window peering into the courtyard where I would spy two teenage girls playing.  The memory comes to me frequently.  When I recall this life, I sense the dread of my landlord (who is my mother in this lifetime) reminding me that my rent is once again overdue, and I can sense my desperate measures to do everything possible to avoid contact with her.  These feelings permeate my soul.  I can’t explain them in any rational way, some may call them the creative stirrings of an overactive imagination, but I know they are something far more than that. That life felt lonely.  That life felt empty.  The character I played seemed to be that of the tortured artist while this lifetime seemed the perfect chance to redeem that story from oh so long ago.

The first time I met Adi in Paris it was like we had been to the city before and we had spent years together living our lives there.  Within moments of seeing each other we grabbed each other’s hands and began walking hand-in-hand through the streets of Paris.  For me, Adi was one of the girls that I would watch in the courtyard from my life as a writer in the 1700s.  I remember her in a way that defies logic. Adi and I met in Paris after corresponding for a couple of weeks via text.  We met briefly at one of my comedy shows and made plans to get together soon.  In a stroke of magic, our first meeting took place in the most romantic city in the world—Paris, France.

We’ll Always Have Paris

When we first saw each other again after that first night when we briefly met, we kissed each other so quickly that we actually banged teeth as we kissed.  Normally this might go down as a failed first effort but when it happened, we both just looked at each other and laughed and then proceeded for attempt number two.  The second attempt was far more successful. After our kiss, we excitedly decided to take to the streets to explore the city together.  This was Adi’s very first time in Paris and her wide-eyed gaze as we wandered around the city gave her away as a tourist.  Even if her wonder didn’t give her immediately away, her pearl white jacket definitely betrayed the chance that she was a local because in Paris it seems all the locals wear black.  Black seems to be the national color of France. We were mere moments into our walk, holding hands, when we were about to encounter a street pole on the sidewalk and she said, “Don’t split the pole.”  I turned to her and asked what that means.  She told me that it important not to unclasp the hands while walking as lovers and traverse separately on opposite sides of a pole. She said, “It’s bad luck to split the pole.” “It is?” I responded. “Yes, didn’t you know that?” I told her I had never heard that before.  It wasn’t until months later that she told me she didn’t know why she said that.  She said she just blurted it out and had no idea where that came from.  She told me it just felt like something we had talked about before—in another lifetime!

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Most likely we had.  In another time and in another place we had most likely talked about “splitting the pole.”  It just so happens this time around I didn’t remember it.  Maybe it was some kind of code phrase we agreed to use to remind ourselves that we had done this before in another time and another place. This is the magic of Paris.  It’s the key to opening the door to past lives, at least to me this is what the city means. On our third day in Paris, Adi and I were walking around, having known each other only 72 hours, I impetuously said, “One day we will live on the Left Bank.” Adi stared back at me and said, “What will do you for a living?” (keep in mind I am and was a comedian doing live comedy shows in Texas)

“I’ll write,” I responded. “What will I do?” she asked. “Whatever makes you happy?” She told me she really wasn’t sure what would make her happy. “You’ll figure it out,” I told her. She stared back at me and neither of us said a word.  We just kind of accepted that this is what would happen.  We continued our stroll without saying another word about it. Our time in Paris was beyond magical (book worthy magic, coming soon!).  The time flew by and after our trip Adi and I returned to our lives however now we were sharing our lives together.  We took the magic of Paris home with us and we integrated it into our daily lives.  Now we live in our own city as if we are living in Paris. After dating for three years, Adi and I decided to move in together.  We were spending every waking hour together and it made no sense for us to have two places.  I was living in Fort Worth and she was living in Mansfield, Texas which is roughly a twenty-minute drive away.  I asked her if she would be willing to move to Fort Worth and she agreed.

We now live off the left side of Trinity River in Fort Worth in a three-bedroom loft called…The Left Bank! The Universe has a delightful sense of humor.  All this time I thought and waited, in fact, to live on the Left Bank of Paris when the Universe had other plans for us.  We live instead on the Left Bank in Fort Worth, Texas. As I write this now, I realize that I am, indeed, a writer.  Quite a content one at that.  I am currently working on the book about Adi’s and my love story that blossomed in Paris called We’ll Always Have Paris. Adi found her passion too. She now teaches Kundalini Yoga at three studios in the Fort Worth area and she travels around the world teaching and playing the gong.  And, we recently completed a new television show that we are co-hosting together on Amazon Prime Video called Yes, And Yoga!  We combine the tenets and philosophy of “Yes, And,” which is a technique used in improvisational comedy with yoga and meditation. “What am I going to do?” “Whatever makes you happy?” Ah, life can be so simple when we only trust.  The best part of the story—Adi and I are taking our three kids and my sister Patti back to Paris this November to show them our favorite city in the world, the place where we met and fell in love—Paris, France.  Maybe they will discover their past lives in the warm embrace of the city where Adi and I fell in love.