A photographer walks into a bar
How to Fall in Love During a Global Pandemic
This is a transatlantic pandemic love story based on dozens of journal entries & thousands of text messages.
“It is also good to love: because love is difficult. For one human being to love another human being: that is perhaps the most difficult task that has been entrusted to us, the ultimate task, the final test and proof, the work for which all other work is merely preparation.”
Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
On February 29, 2020, a photographer from New Orleans walked into the Au Chat Noir bar in Paris, an 11th arrondissement watering hole where I’ve been writing and drinking for twelve years. The night before, after sixteen years of long-term relationships, short-term relationships, and many adventures, I’d written these words in my journal in the early days of my 32nd year: I know what I want now. I want love. I want real, deep intimacy. The kind that makes me forget about all the rest of it. The kind of love that I’ve been preparing for; the kind of love where I can’t hold myself back.
When the photographer walked into Au Chat Noir, I immediately noticed the book in her bag: a beat-up, annotated copy of Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, one of the most important novels in the history of literature. The story is about masculinity and love and youth and regret, but most simply it’s about Jake, an American expat living in France, who dreams of building a life with the captivating Lady Brett Ashley.
Me and the photographer connected immediately over the story, and in the next few days we walked around the Latin Quarter to visit a few Hemingway sites, had coffee Au Chat Noir, and met up for my band’s rehearsal to take photos before we went on tour. Our connection remained platonic, and when Augusta, the photographer, returned to the USA five days later, we wished each other the best and hoped to see each other again someday.
What follows is a narrative, based on text messages, of how Augusta and I fell in love during a global pandemic. The story begins with the first text messages we ever sent to each other. We waited five months to know what it meant to hold each other’s hand, and in August 2020, while most of the world’s borders were closed, we kissed for the first time … not in Paris, but at the curb-side pick-up of Newark International Airport. Over the next five weeks, we road-tripped across the Northeast. By the end of March, 2021 we were married and living in Paris.
March 1, 2020 (the first messages)
00:48 - Augusta : Lady Brett Ashley
01:28 - Samuél: Duly noted
01:29 - Augusta : Hah. For the record, I wasn’t the one to dub myself that. She’s a badass but she’s also a total pill
01:36 - Samuél : No you wanna go with Lady Duff Twysden. The real version of the fictional character was so much more of a badass
01:41 - Augusta : The name Lady Duff is definitely less interesting than Lady Brett, but I prefer Twysden to Ashley for sure
11:08 - Samuél : this photo of Hemingway in Spain documents what would become the backdrop for the The Sun Also Rises:
11:11 - Augusta: Wow. I’ve never seen a photo of her. The real lady Brett. So pretty - that’s why the story is so good, because it’s real. I can’t imagine anyone capable of writing that from nothing.
So very glad I walked into that bar, and that Hemingway wrote that book.
crying for real