I went to Paris this summer, and it still sounds a little unbelievable to say out loud.
I grew up in a remote village in Indonesia. I didn't travel outside it until high school, when I had to leave home just to get a better education. Nobody in that village was thinking about Paris. I certainly wasn't. At fifteen, I assumed I'd end up teaching math at the local school, the way most futures there were assumed rather than chosen.
So there I was this June, standing in a crowd to see Olivia Dean, and the fifteen-year-old version of me would not have believed a word of it.
I underestimated what twenty years could do. I think most of us do. We overestimate what a year or two can change, and we quietly underestimate what a decade will rearrange without asking permission.
None of this was intentional, exactly. It was never a five-year plan. It was seizing whatever opportunity showed up, then the next one, then the one after that, until one day you look up and you're introducing tropical skincare with a scientific backbone to people who have never heard of mangosteen.
When you come from nothing, you have very little to protect and everything left to try. I won't pretend that makes it easy. It mostly makes it survivable, and every so often, worth it.
This summer, I tried something different. Not the pursuit of happiness, but the pursuit of unbothered happy.
I made myself more social. I picked up fiction again, for the first time in years. I tried to actually be present in the places I was standing in, instead of already thinking about the next thing. Paris didn't get better than the last two times I'd been. I did.
Paris in late June was somewhere past hot, the kind of heat the French have their own word for, canicule, because ordinary heat doesn't quite cover it. I kept waiting to feel it on my skin the way I used to: the tightness by midafternoon, the shine that needed blotting every hour.
It never really came. My face just kept up with the day, lighter than I expected, like it had somewhere quietly working underneath it and didn't need to announce it. I finished the trip having packed one jar and nothing else.
Somewhere in all of it, I remembered something I'd forgotten: happiness was never really about the next big thing. It's the humming that shows up uninvited while you're washing dishes. The small, involuntary dance when the food is actually good. The giddiness of a cold drink on a hot day, for no reason other than it's cold and it's a hot day and you're there for it.
Give it enough time, enough chances taken, and you find your way back to it. Not happiness that needs an audience. Just the unbothered kind, the kind that was never performing for anyone, including you.
Essence + Echoes is a journal by Flonatix — written for the skin you're in and the story it carries. Jay writes as @mangosteenmachine and founded Flonatix. Read more at flonatix.com.
