Emily Brisse

We entered the Tube around 9:00 in the morning, a mass of noisy students and a few adults, taking up a section of platform. We had told the teens: "We'll start you on your journey, but you'll have to find your way back. Pay attention." The anxious ones stayed near us, the eager ones studied the green and red and blue and yellow lines on the wall map. "We'll need the Circle Line," one said, and after nodding, we passed the phrase among us like bread, or sweets, so when the train arrived, and the sliding doors opened, we all walked through them with enough nourishment and energy to know where we were going . Later, we stepped out of trams into the high Swiss landscape at Pfingstegg Station. After London, most of the kids didn't even look at the trail map. They just started up. One foot in front of the other, one sore-muscled groan after the other, a collection of revelations. We walked under rock ledges and over small streams.  We talked abo...

It has been ten years since I was first in Europe. A third of my life away. It was Paris then and it is London now. It was ingenue then and it is teacher now. It was a world and a lifetime ago, and I feel all those rotations of the earth in my body, in all the stories I have lived and told since then. Life moves quickly. Paris at twenty was a dusky sweep of January street lights, of bridge painters, long afternoon hours spent in cafes with glasses of wine and pages of my journal. I had arrived there among other students, but knowing no one. I cherished my solo walks down back streets, my eager and bumbling exchanges with shopkeepers in my best French, a language I knew only by the vocabulary post-it notes I had used to wallpaper my dorm room. I sat in the Luxembourg Gardens on mornings crisp enough to reveal one's breath, and I dipped a baguette into jam and watched the birds brave my presence for the crumbs. I read Gertude Stein and Eliot and Lowell and Hem. I thought, I know what...