Chapter Text
The Musée d'Orsay was a train station that had reinvented itself, transforming into a true sanctuary of art.
Minjeong had read that on the plane — that the building, constructed in 1900 as a railway terminal, had been repurposed decades later by someone who looked at those iron and glass vaults, at the high arches that seemed to embrace the sky, and decided it was a waste to leave all of that just for the locomotives. Back then, the information had intrigued her, but now, standing in the central nave with the ceiling opening above her in curves of golden metal and light, she understood viscerally what that person must have felt.
She stood still in the corridor for a moment, letting the flow of tourists pass around her. There was something strangely liberating about being motionless while everything else moved. People rushed with the urgency typical of those with an itinerary to follow — cameras hanging from their necks, crumpled maps in their hands, coats that cost more than her rent. On the walls, framed in gold, the painted figures watched this frantic dance in silence.
The brushstrokes in some paintings were broad and decisive, almost aggressive, as if the painter had been racing against time to capture a moment before it escaped. In others, the strokes were so delicate that Minjeong had to lean in to believe they were paint and not light projecting illusions onto the canvas. She didn't know much about the art world — the technical knowledge escaped her — but there was something in the figures that held her. Not the technique. It was simply the fact that someone had looked at a person, decided that soul was worth remembering, and devoted enough time to immortalize that instant.
But the truth was, she hadn't wanted to be there.
Or rather, she didn't know if she wanted to be. That distinction, she vaguely realized, might be the most honest thing she'd thought in weeks.
The truth was she hadn't "planned" this trip in the meticulous way she usually planned everything else. She hadn't spent hours researching hotels, hadn't created spreadsheets with schedules and budgets, hadn't consulted Hyunwoo about the best days to take time off.
The same Hyunwoo who had ceased to exist in her life two months ago.
The Hyunwoo who had received the ring back on a Tuesday in March, at nine in the evening, with an expression she couldn't decide was surprise or relief. In the taxi back to her parents' apartment, she had wondered what that expression said about their four years together. What it said about her.
She reached no satisfying conclusions. She rarely did.
It was midnight, and she was awake — as she had been every night since March — dealing with an insomnia that wasn't quite insomnia, but an inability to make her brain stop. She opened her phone without intention. An ad from a travel agency. A four-day package to Paris departing from Busan. A promotion. A button that read book now. Her credit card was within reach.
At 00:47 on a Thursday, Kim Minjeong had bought a trip to Paris.
The regret never came. Instead, something surfaced that took her a moment to recognize — she wasn't used to this feeling — a tiny spark of something. It wasn't exactly excitement, but it was something, and that, she discovered, was enough to press the button.
And so she arrived at the Musée d'Orsay on a May morning in Paris, bag across her shoulder and the camera she rarely used hanging from her neck, completely alone in a group of eight tourists from Busan she barely knew.
[...]
The group had scattered shortly after the entrance.
The tour guide, a woman named Ha-eun who wore a moss-green coat and spoke with the energy of someone who'd had too much coffee, had given the initial instructions with considerable enthusiasm.
"Meet back here in two hours at the first-floor café. Don't be late. If you get lost, my number is in the KakaoTalk group."
Minjeong had smiled politely and then walked in the opposite direction from everyone else. Not out of rebellion — she had never been especially rebellious. More out of that same primitive instinct, that tiny spark she felt in her chest. As if part of her knew she would feel numb in a group, that she'd return to the hotel with memories of people's backs in front of her rather than the paintings.
She wanted to see the famous paintings.
She didn't know exactly why. She had never been a museum person, historically. Hyunwoo definitely wasn't either, he got bored quickly anywhere without a television or food, and Minjeong had learned, over those four years, to calibrate her own desires to his. "It wasn't worth the fight." That was the phrase she repeated mentally with a frequency she had never stopped to examine too closely.
But Hyunwoo wasn't here. And Paris was Paris, and there were paintings, and she had two hours.
She walked through the first floor with the camera forgotten around her neck, reading the small plaques beside the works. Her French was basically nonexistent,she had downloaded an app the week before traveling and learned bonjour and merci and où sont les toilettes, which she had concluded was the essential vocabulary for her survival.
But there was something in the paintings that needed no translation.
She wouldn't have been able to explain it properly if she'd tried. There was a quality to the Impressionist paintings, she recognized the name of the movement because she'd spent forty minutes reading about the museum on the plane, which was exactly the kind of thing she did, that felt less like representation and more like sensation. As if the painter weren't trying to show what something looked like, but what something felt like.
Minjeong stopped in front of one painting long enough for other tourists to pass by and glance at her briefly, curious about her stillness.
It was by Gustave Caillebotte. Temps de pluie, read the plaque (Paris Street; Rainy Day), she had checked her phone to confirm.
Paris, 1877. A street intersection under a fine rain, people with dark umbrellas, wet cobblestones reflecting a sky that seemed made of lead and silver. In the center, a couple, a man in a top hat and a woman in a dark dress — sharing an umbrella, their faces turned slightly toward each other.
There was nothing dramatic about the painting. No grand landscape, no historical scene, no heroic gesture. Just rain and street and people going from one place to another.
And still she stood there looking at it for too long.
She was thinking about Hyunwoo, inevitably, as always, but in a different way than usual. She wasn't thinking about the breakup or the ring or the ambiguous expression on his face. She was thinking about all the rainy days they'd spent together that she couldn't remember. Four years. It must have rained hundreds of times. And she couldn't recover a single memory of rain with him that had depth — that carried the weight that makes something lodge itself in someone's memory.
Had they shared an umbrella? Certainly yes. Why couldn't she remember?
In the painting, the couple looked at each other.
She tried to remember the last time she had looked at Hyunwoo and felt like continuing to look at him. She was about to arrive at an uncomfortable conclusion when a husky voice beside her said:
"Did you know Caillebotte almost gave up painting after this one?"
Minjeong turned immediately. She had been pulled from her thoughts so abruptly that it took a second to remember where she was.
The girl beside her wasn't looking at her — she was looking at the painting, her head tilted slightly to one side. She had dark hair pulled up in a loose, messy bun, with a fringe that nearly reached her eyes, and she wore thin-framed glasses that made her face seem simultaneously serious and curious. She held a red notebook against her chest, and there was a small beauty mark near her mouth.
She also carried a backpack that looked like it had traveled a great deal. There was a small pin on the strap that Minjeong couldn't read from the distance. She was stunning — the kind of beautiful that makes you exhale without noticing.
"Almost gave up?" Minjeong heard herself ask, and then felt slightly surprised that she had responded.
The girl turned to her with a smile that closed her eyes into half-moons and pushed her cheeks upward in a way that seemed almost involuntary.
"He painted this in 1877 and submitted it to the Salon Officiel." She spoke in Korean with a Busan accent that was immediately familiar in a comforting way. "You know what the Salon was, right? It was basically the art event of the year in France. Where artists went to be judged by the Parisian artistic elite. And they rejected the painting."
Minjeong looked back at the canvas, frowning slightly. She brought her hand to the back of her neck and scratched slowly.
"They rejected this?" she said, pointing at the painting with a timid gesture, almost as if she were afraid of being wrong to question it.
"They rejected this." The girl spoke with a soft, enveloping voice, as if sharing a story she loved to tell. "They thought it was too banal. A wet street, people with umbrellas. Where's the grandeur? Academic art at the time believed a painting needed to depict something important — battles, historical figures, mythology. Everyday life wasn't considered worthy of being immortalized."
Minjeong looked at the wet cobblestones, the couple, the leaden sky. With her hands in her coat pockets, she stood thoughtful, absorbing the scene.
"But it's so beautiful," she said — and it was such a direct thought that it left her mouth without a filter, which wasn't especially characteristic of her.
"It is, isn't it?" The girl smiled again, and this time there was something different in the smile, something she couldn't quite name. She crossed her arms, looking at the floor before continuing. "Caillebotte was devastated. He came from a wealthy family, so he didn't need to sell art to survive, but he wanted to be recognized, you know? He wanted people to see what he saw, what he felt. And they told him what he saw didn't matter."
"What did he do?"
"He kept painting. He co-founded the Impressionist exhibition with Monet, Renoir, Degas. He basically helped create the movement that's now considered one of the most important in art history. And this painting right here—" she gestured slightly with her chin "—is in the d'Orsay. The Salon Officiel is a footnote."
Minjeong kept looking at the painting for a moment.
"That's—" she started, then paused, because she wasn't sure what she wanted to say.
"Poetic?" the girl offered, gently and sincerely.
"I was going to say a little unfair. But poetic works too."
The girl laughed — a brief and genuine laugh, as if it arose naturally, without effort.
"Kim Minjeong, right?"
Minjeong turned to her at once, caught off guard.
"How do you know my name?"
"I'm in the travel group." The girl extended her hand naturally. "Yu Jimin. Also from Busan. Also on the ridiculous five a.m. flight yesterday."
She shook the hand automatically, still slightly thrown.
"You were in the group?"
"I was in the row behind you on the plane. You slept the whole flight with your coat over your head."
Minjeong felt her face warm slightly.
"The plane was a little cold."
"It was." Jimin let go of her hand and looked back at the painting, and there was something in her profile at that moment — the calm curve of her nose, the way her eyes narrowed slightly looking at the canvas — that made Minjeong look at her for a second before catching herself and turning back to Caillebotte. "I was awake too. I can't sleep on planes. I get anxious I'll miss something."
"Like what? Turbulence?"
"The arrival, actually. I love when you fly over a city at night and see the lights. It feels like you're looking inside a living organism. Every light on represents someone awake somewhere, feeling something or doing something."
She didn't know how to respond immediately. It wasn't the kind of thing people usually said to her — not the kind of thing she usually heard at all. Her social circle in Busan tended toward conversations about work and apartments and which new restaurant had opened in the neighborhood.
"I hadn't thought of it that way," she said, honestly.
Jimin gave a small smile and moved away from the painting, walking toward the next corridor. She stopped after two steps and looked back.
"Come on — there are more things I want to show you."
Minjeong looked at the Caillebotte one last time. And ended up following a girl she had just met — well, back in Busan she never would have done that.
But she wasn't in Busan.
Jimin talked a great deal about Caillebotte. She told her he had died young, at forty-five, and that he had left his collection of Impressionist art to the French state — a collection the French government initially accepted only in part, because works by Monet and Renoir were considered too radical for a public museum. She told her that the word Impressionism had started as a joke: a critic had called one of Monet's paintings an impression in a derogatory way, and the artists had adopted the insult with delight.
"They turned the criticism into a name," she said, and there was something almost reverent in the way she said it. "I think that's the most courageous thing in the world. Someone tries to diminish you and you make their diminishment your identity."
"You seem to know a lot about that," Minjeong said — and realized, too late, that the sentence sounded like a question about her life rather than about art.
But Jimin only smiled with understanding.
"I've been to the d'Orsay three times. Every time I learn something different about the same painting. That's what I love about Paris."
"You've been here before?"
"Twice." She began walking slowly along the gallery, and Minjeong, without making a conscious decision, followed. "The first time I was twenty. I came alone, stayed a week, slept in a hotel that had a window overlooking the Seine and smelled like old wood and coffee. The second time was two years ago. I stayed about ten days."
"Are you here alone this time too?"
"Not exactly. I booked the same package as the group, but I already know the city. So I use the group more as a... starting point. I go off on my own and show up for the meetups." Jimin gave a small shrug, casual. "And you?"
"This is my first time in Paris." She hesitated, fidgeting with her fingers. "First time in Europe."
Her cheeks betrayed her before she could do anything about it.
Jimin stopped in front of a Monet — Les Meules, with its snow-covered haystacks. She turned to look at her with an expression that wasn't exactly astonishment, but something softer.
"And what do you think so far?"
So far, there had been the flight, the arrival at night with lights she'd observed but hadn't thought about the way Jimin described; the hotel, which was adequate but not special; the group breakfast with Ha-eun explaining the day's itinerary; and finally, the museum and Caillebotte's rain.
"I think I'm still processing," she said, honestly. It wasn't a particularly interesting or poetic answer. But it was honest.
Jimin nodded as if that were a perfectly adequate response.
They continued through the museum.
There was no explicit agreement that they would go together — it simply happened, the natural physics of two bodies moving through the same space who find it easier to move together than apart. Or at least that was how she rationalized it to herself. Jimin knew the museum well. She didn't use a guide, didn't check her phone to identify paintings, she simply walked, and when something caught her attention or when she noticed Minjeong had stopped, she spoke.
She told her about Édouard Manet and the scandal of Olympia — a nude woman who looked directly at the viewer, without the symbolic veil of a mythological figure, just a real woman with a defiant gaze, and Paris had been shocked not by the nudity but by the look, by the refusal to lower her eyes.
She told her about Vincent van Gogh, who had lived in Paris for two years, arrived tormented and left even more so, but carried in his luggage a palette of colors he never abandoned — the vibrant yellow and the deep blue. She told her about Rosa Bonheur, who had to ask official permission from Parisian authorities to wear trousers, because only men could wear trousers in nineteenth-century Paris, and she needed them to work with the animals she painted — and that she had received that permission and wore them for the rest of her life.
"Rosa Bonheur," Minjeong repeated, standing in front of the enormous Le marché aux chevaux — The Horse Fair — which occupied an entire wall. The horses seemed alive, radiating a vibrant energy, muscles in motion, dust swirling around them. "She painted this?"
"She spent a year and a half going to the Paris horse market every week to study the animals before painting this." Jimin stood to the side, looking at the canvas with her arms crossed over her chest. "A year and a half. Just to be ready."
"That's an insane level of dedication."
"It's love for art," Jimin said simply. "When you love something, the time it takes doesn't seem insane. It seems obvious and necessary."
Minjeong thought, without meaning to, about how many things she had done out of love in the past four years. Whether she had done any at all. Whether what existed between her and Hyunwoo had been, in some way, love — or something else. Comfort, maybe. Habit. The kind of inertia that happens when you've been with someone long enough that breaking it feels like more trouble than staying.
"Are you an artist?" she asked Jimin, curious.
"Depends on what you call an artist." She didn't seem offended by the question — just considered it. "I play guitar. I sing a little. I write things sometimes — I don't call it poetry because I'm embarrassed by the term, but it's probably poetry. I paint occasionally, but badly. I'd put Rosa Bonheur to shame."
"All of that?"
"Nothing very serious." Jimin shrugged, but there was something in the way she said it that Minjeong didn't entirely believe. "And you? What do you do?"
"I work at an architecture firm in Busan." The answer came out automatic — the sentence she'd said hundreds of times. "Administrative side. Budgets, schedules, client communication."
"Do you like what you do?"
Minjeong opened her mouth, then closed it. The automatic answer would have been yes, it's a good job — the answer she always gave to that question. But there was something in the way Jimin asked — direct, without any inflection suggesting which answer she expected — that made the automatic answer difficult.
"I don't know," she said, honest for the second time that morning.
Jimin nodded again, without judgment, without the rush to fill the silence with comfort or solutions. They stood in front of Rosa Bonheur's horses for a while longer.
Until Minjeong's phone buzzed in her pocket at 11:47.
Paris Group 🗼 — Ha-eun: guys don't forget café first floor 12pm!! then we go to Montmartre
Minjeong looked at the time and felt that particular surprise of time passing faster than you'd noticed. Nearly two hours had passed since she entered the museum. Nearly two hours she had spent with Jimin.
"Ha-eun," she said, showing her the phone.
"I saw." Jimin glanced at her own phone briefly. "Montmartre is beautiful. You're going to love it."
You're going to love it — as if the fact that she would love it were something she could predict with reasonable certainty. There was something curiously comforting about that.
"You're not going?" she asked, looking at her with some curiosity.
"I'll show up. But maybe not at the museum café." Jimin put her phone back in her bag. "There's a place I prefer for breakfast near here. A tiny bistro on the Rue de Bellechasse that has a croissant that will change your life. I think you'd enjoy it."
Minjeong looked at her. Looked at her phone, at Ha-eun's message. There was a voice in her head saying the group was waiting, the itinerary was planned, that separating from them was risky in imprecise ways.
And there was another voice — newer and less articulate, that said: a croissant that will change your life.
"I'd need to let the group know," she said, already typing.
"Of course. Take your time."
Minjeong opened the KakaoTalk group to message the guide.
Minjeong: Ha-eun-ssi, I'm going to grab breakfast on my own and I'll meet you in Montmartre. Ok?
The reply came in thirty seconds.
Ha-eun: yes yes! The meeting point address in Montmartre is in the group 😊 Enjoy your coffee!
She put her phone away.
"Okay," she said to Jimin. "Life-changing croissant — I'm curious."
"Then come with me." She was already walking toward the exit.
[...]
The Rue de Bellechasse was a narrow, quiet street that seemed to have escaped Parisian tourism, by luck, perhaps. Outside the museum, the light was different from what she'd expected. It was generous but soft, the kind of spring morning light that made even ordinary things look special. The surrounding buildings were Haussmann-style, in grayish-beige tones, with tall windows and wrought iron balconies. A few discreet flowers in window boxes suggested the residents here cared for their lives with intention.
"Are you always like this?" Minjeong asked as they walked down the narrow street.
"Like what?"
"Talking to strangers in museums about paintings."
Jimin considered the question genuinely.
"You didn't seem like a stranger. You seemed like someone who was really, truly looking at the painting."
"As opposed to?"
"As opposed to most people who spend two seconds in front of something and are already taking a photo to post online." There was no judgment in her voice — just a small observation. "You were standing there for a while before I came over. You looked like you were having an honest conversation with the painting. I found that fascinating."
Minjeong remembered what she had been thinking — the rains with Hyunwoo she couldn't recall, the shared umbrella, the couple looking at each other. She said nothing about any of it.
"I was thinking about some things."
"Good things?"
"I can't tell yet."
Jimin nodded in understanding, and they turned a corner, and then Minjeong saw the bistro. It was exactly what she had imagined when she heard the word — small, with tables on the sidewalk and wicker chairs, a chalkboard outside with the menu written in chalk, the name in faded gold letters above the door: Le Petit Matin. A man in a white apron was wiping down a table with a cloth, distracted, listening to something on the phone clipped to his apron. From inside came the smell of coffee and something baking.
"Bonjour, Jimin!" The man in the apron looked up and gestured enthusiastically.
"Bonjour, Marc!" She waved naturally, then said something in French that Minjeong couldn't follow, and Marc smiled and gestured toward the corner table.
It was a small round table with a cold marble top and two wicker chairs that creaked slightly with every movement. It sat at the edge of the sidewalk, separated from the street by a wooden planter full of lavender, purple and fragrant, swaying in the fresh morning breeze. On the table, only an empty ashtray and a metal napkin holder. Through the bistro window, Minjeong could see the dark wood counter, cups hanging from hooks, and an old mirror on the wall reflecting bottles. A French song played softly inside — instrumental, guitar and accordion — as if it had been composed specifically for a morning like this
They settled in.
"Do you know the owner?" she asked, her eyes moving from Marc to Jimin with curiosity. There was something interesting about how she seemed to fit in that place — as if Paris and everything in it already knew her somehow.
"I've come here the other times. Marc remembers all his regulars." Jimin took her bag off her shoulders and set it on the chair beside her. "It's the kind of quiet place I like to be."
Marc brought coffee without being asked — two café au laits in wide white cups with a discreet blue pattern along the rim. Then he set a tray of croissants on the table with a satisfied smile.
"Bon appétit!" — and went back inside.
Minjeong bit into the croissant. Jimin was watching her with a slightly hopeful expression, like someone who really wants a gift to be well received.
"Oh my God." Her eyes went wide before she could stop them. It was soft, deeply buttery, dissolving on the roof of her mouth before she even needed to chew. She had never eaten anything that came close to it.
Jimin laughed softly, eyes settling on her expression — the way her cheeks got rounder when she was surprised like that. There was something involuntarily endearing about that reaction that was hard not to notice.
"Best thing in Paris or best thing in Paris?"
"I have no frame of reference to compare, but it's the best thing I've ever eaten in my entire life."
"Frame of reference enough for me." She picked up her own croissant with the satisfaction of someone who already knew this was going to happen. "The dough is laminated in butter for forty-eight hours. Marc told me when I came the first time. He was genuinely offended when I suggested a regular bakery croissant was the same thing."
"He had every right to be offended."
They sat in silence for a moment, savoring the food and listening to the sounds of the street — the distant rumble of a motorcycle, the voices of a passing conversation, pigeons pecking at the cobblestones.
"Can I ask you something?" Jimin said, breaking the silence.
"Go ahead."
"Why Paris?"
Minjeong looked up slightly. Jimin was watching her with an expression of genuine curiosity — the expression of someone who actually wants to know.
And she, who had prepared a generic answer about always wanting to see Europe, about an opportunity that had come up, about a package that was on sale — all the answers that were technically true and at the same time were nothing — found herself saying something completely different.
"I woke up in the middle of the night and needed somewhere that wasn't Busan."
Silence for a moment.
"And did it work?" she asked.
Minjeong looked at the street, at the man with the apron, at the pigeons on the cobblestones, and at the light that made everything carefully enchanting.
"I think it's working."
Jimin smiled and said nothing more. She picked up her coffee and drank the rest, looking out at the street with an easy, unhurried expression.
Minjeong realized she hadn't touched her phone once since they sat down. With Hyunwoo, silence always needed filling — him on his phone, her on her phone, both of them staring at separate screens at a similar table. But now she was sitting with a stranger she'd known for less than two hours, in complete silence, with no desire to escape it.
It was a small discovery, but a significant one. She felt a spark in her chest — larger now, more defined — and without knowing quite what to do with it, it kept bringing up the face of a stranger with a small beauty mark near her mouth.
[...]
The Paris Métro had its own logic that she hadn't fully figured out yet. The colored lines crossed the map in a confusing tangle, while the station names she mispronounced in her head came out of Jimin's mouth with a naturalness that suggested practice. The turnstile system made her hesitate for three seconds too long before Jimin passed the ticket through for her.
"Thank you," she said, slightly embarrassed — feeling the urge to pull her coat over her head and never come out again.
"I did the same thing the first time." Jimin passed through the turnstile behind her. "I stood in front of it long enough for a Parisian woman to sigh in my direction. It was a little humiliating."
"Do Parisian women sigh a lot?"
"It's the national sport." Jimin headed down the stairs toward the platform with that easy, unhurried walk Minjeong had noticed since the museum. "But it's not malice. It's just that they have a very honest relationship with impatience."
The train arrived quickly, and they boarded a moderately full car — a woman with a small dog in her bag, two young people with enormous backpacks consulting the same phone, a man in a suit reading a neatly folded newspaper. Minjeong held the metal bar and looked out the dark window as the train moved, watching her reflection appear and disappear in the tunnels.
"Can I ask you something?"
"You asked that before and I said yes," Jimin said, a smile in her voice without turning to look.
"Do you always travel alone?"
She considered the question.
"Almost always. Sometimes with friends, when schedules align. But alone it's easier to go where I want when I want to go."
"Isn't it a little lonely?"
This time Jimin turned. There was something in her expression that wasn't defensive — it was genuinely thoughtful.
"Sometimes," she said, slowly. "But loneliness and solitude are different things, you know? Loneliness is when you want company and don't have it. Solitude is when you're alone and you're fine with that. Most of my trips are solitude. Today, for example, is neither."
Jimin had already turned back to the dark window of the metro, with that calm expression of someone who said what needed to be said and doesn't need to elaborate. Minjeong found herself watching her — she was incredibly intelligent and confident, there was something comforting about being near her. She was kind, patient, smiled a lot and made you feel completely at ease.
She felt a little envious.
The climb to Montmartre began on a long, steep staircase she faced with a mixture of determination and regret over how much croissant she'd eaten.
"There's an elevator," Jimin said beside her.
"I don't need an elevator."
"Alright then."
They climbed together. The staircase was flanked by low buildings and walls covered in ivy, and with every step Paris revealed itself a little more behind them — zinc rooftops, chimneys, the thin mist of morning. There were murals on the side walls, not graffiti tags but the kind that had clearly taken hours — faces, words in French and Arabic, and a language she couldn't identify.
"Montmartre was the neighborhood of the poor artists," she said, climbing without apparent effort while Minjeong felt her lungs quietly protesting. "Late nineteenth century, early twentieth. Picasso lived here. Modigliani. Van Gogh spent some time here. The rent was cheap because it was far from the center and the climb kept people away."
"The climb keeps people away to this day," Minjeong said, slightly breathless.
Jimin smiled, amused by her determination.
"The price per square meter doesn't, unfortunately. It's one of the most expensive neighborhoods in the city now. But there's still something in the air up here that the other neighborhoods don't have."
"What?"
She stopped for a second in the middle of the staircase, turned back, and Minjeong followed.
Paris was below them. Not the monumental Paris of the photographs — it was the everyday Paris, the one of rooftops and antennas and windows with laundry hung out to dry, the Paris that existed regardless of whether anyone was photographing it.
"This," she said simply, opening her arms.
Minjeong looked for a moment. There was something in that view that wasn't just beautiful — it was the kind of thing that makes you feel your own smallness, not in an anguishing way but in a relieving one. Like when you realize the world is too vast for your problems to be at the center of it.
She breathed deeply, gathering herself. The day had barely begun.
"Let's go," Jimin said, and they kept climbing.
The group was gathered in the Place du Tertre when they arrived. It was a small square that had been entirely taken over — artists with easels offering portraits, tourists in every direction, a band playing jazz in the corner with a small speaker. Ha-eun stood in the center with the expression of someone counting heads.
"Minjeong-ssi!" Ha-eun waved with the energy of someone whose breakfast coffee had been particularly strong. "And Jimin-ssi, so glad you made it! Okay, everyone, the Place du Tertre is historically where the Montmartre artists displayed their work — these days it's more touristy but there are still some genuine local artists—"
Minjeong listened with half her attention, because the other half was on the square itself — on the man painting with a speed that seemed impossible, on the portrait of a woman taking shape on his easel in real time, on the child weaving through adults' legs with total disregard for everything.
Jimin was beside her, slightly apart from the group, eyes moving across the square.
"The painter with the blue easel," she said quietly, just for Minjeong to hear. "Look at his technique."
Minjeong looked quickly. The man was using a palette knife instead of a brush, applying thick layers of paint that created actual texture on the canvas.
"It's very different."
"Impasto." Jimin said the word like she was familiar with it. "Van Gogh used it a lot. The paint leaves the plane and becomes sculpture. When you look at his paintings in photographs, you don't understand it. You have to stand in front of them to realize they have volume — that they actually project from the canvas. It's the kind of thing reproduction can't capture."
"Have you seen Van Gogh paintings in person?"
"In Amsterdam. At his museum. I stood in front of one for forty minutes. A security guard came over to ask if I was alright."
Minjeong could picture it perfectly — Jimin standing in front of a painting for forty minutes with that thoughtful expression — and felt something she couldn't immediately name.
"And were you?"
"Better than when I walked in." She turned to her with a charming smile. "Art does that sometimes. You walk in with one thing and walk out with another."
Ha-eun began guiding the group toward the Sacré-Cœur, and they followed, but there was a natural distance between them and the rest of the group.
The Sacré-Cœur was white in a way that seemed impossible. Not the white of something freshly painted — it was a white that emanated from the stone itself, a specific limestone called travertine. Jimin explained, as they climbed the last steps, that this stone had a curious chemical property: it became whiter with rain, rather than darkening over time.
"The rain cleans it," Minjeong said, with a tone of mild disbelief.
"The rain cleans it." Jimin stopped on the platform in front of the basilica and turned her face upward, looking at the domes stacking toward the sky. "There's a metaphor in there somewhere, but I'll let you find it yourself."
Minjeong looked at the impossible white of the stone, a brightness that seemed to reflect more than just sunlight. Coming to Paris had been, in some way, an attempt to clean herself — from bad memories, from the weight of the breakup she'd been carrying since March. And there was something about a stone that grew whiter with rain instead of darker that made that seem possible, somehow.
She didn't say any of that out loud. But she kept the thought with her.
The interior of the basilica was the opposite of its exterior — dark and golden, with an enormous mosaic on the altar ceiling depicting Christ with open arms, surrounded by golden figures against a deep blue background. The quiet here was different from the museum's. In the museum, the silence had been one of intellectual respect. Here it was something older, more palpable — as if the air inside the walls had its own density.
She stood still in the center of the nave for a moment. She wasn't particularly religious, but there was something about ancient places of faith — regardless of belief — that touched her in a way she couldn't explain. As if the weight of all the people who had stood there before, wishing, asking, giving thanks, had seeped into the walls.
Jimin was beside her, in silence. It was the first complete silence they'd shared all day.
Minjeong had expected it to feel uncomfortable. It didn't.
Meanwhile, Jimin was looking at the girl beside her with a quiet smile on her face and bright eyes. She didn't notice — absorbed in her own thoughts — but Jimin's gaze was the kind that could stop time. In that soft light, Minjeong looked like a Renaissance painting: an image of beauty and contemplation, surrounded by something that was difficult to put into words.
[...]
They lost the group somewhere after the Sacré-Cœur. The group had turned a corner toward a restaurant on the itinerary, while Jimin was looking at a side alley that descended in uneven cobblestones, flanked by walls covered in climbing plants. Minjeong, for her part, had been looking at Jimin. When she looked away, she realized the group had disappeared.
They descended through alleyways Minjeong would never have found alone — narrow staircases between houses pressed close together, pots of red geraniums in windows that seemed to hold secrets. Jimin walked ahead, pointing out details along the way, never slowing down.
Finally, the alley opened onto a wider street.
"Rue Lepic," she said, with a smile at the corner of her mouth.
And Minjeong discovered, in that moment, the kind of street that makes you understand why people choose Paris. Not a postcard street. A market street — cheese shops with open doors and smell spilling onto the sidewalk, bakeries with quiet queues of local residents who clearly did this every morning, a florist where the buckets of flowers overflowed onto the pavement.
"Van Gogh lived on this street," she said, stopping in front of a beige-fronted building with a small, discreet plaque. "Number 54. He and his brother Theo lived here for two years."
Minjeong looked at the building. An ordinary building — windows with white frames, a dark wooden door, a rusted mailbox. The kind of building you'd walk past thousands of times without noticing.
"Do you think he was happy here?"
"I don't know if Van Gogh was capable of happiness the way we understand it." Jimin spoke without sadness, with that direct honesty Minjeong was beginning to recognize as characteristic. "But Paris transformed him. He arrived with a very dark palette — Dutch influence — and left with the yellow and blue we associate with him. The light of Paris changed the way he saw color."
"The city changed what he saw."
"The city changed what he was able to see." She made the distinction lightly. "Sometimes you have to leave the place you're in to notice the colors that were always there — we're just too blind to see them in our day to day."
Minjeong stood looking at number 54 on the Rue Lepic. There was something in that sentence that landed in a way she wasn't at all prepared for.
They bought food from street vendors — a slice of quiche lorraine on a paper tray, cheese from a shop where the man behind the counter had the most impressive mustache Minjeong had ever seen in person, a baguette that Jimin broke in half with her hands without any ceremony — and sat on a staircase that descended between two houses with a partial view of the rooftops.
They ate in silence for a moment.
"Can I ask you something?" Jimin said.
There was a baguette crumb on her coat. A small quiche stain near her pocket. She seemed completely oblivious to this — or completely indifferent. Minjeong still couldn't determine which was more likely.
"Go ahead," she said — and then couldn't help herself, pointing at the mess. "You have cheese on your chin, Jimin."
She brought her hand to her face without any visible embarrassment and wiped it with her sleeve.
"Thank you, Kim Minjeong. Can I ask now?"
"You already asked before and I said yes," she replied — and heard the echo of her own words and felt slightly surprised at herself.
Jimin opened a slow, satisfied smile. "You're learning fast." She pushed her glasses up with her index finger — a small, distracted gesture, as if it were something she did without thinking.
Minjeong had noticed she did that sometimes — when she was about to say something, or when she was paying close attention. An almost imperceptible tic.
"You can ask."
"The ring." Jimin said the word simply, without preamble, but there was always gentleness in her tone. "You still have the mark of it on your finger."
She looked at her right hand. It was true — there was a slightly lighter line on the skin of her ring finger, the ghost impression of four years of a relationship. She had stopped noticing it. Or had stopped wanting to notice it.
"Two months," she said simply. "Sometimes it feels longer. Sometimes shorter."
"Were you the one who ended it?"
"Yes."
"But?"
"I don't know if but is the right word." She spoke slowly, choosing carefully what she wanted to say. "It was the right decision. I knew it was. It's just that knowing something is right doesn't mean it's easy, does it? It only means it's right."
Jimin went quiet — truly listening, not listening in order to respond with poetic words, but listening in order to understand what she was actually saying.
There was a difference. Minjeong felt it.
Then Jimin leaned slightly forward, picked up a crumpled paper napkin from between them on the step, and wiped the corner of Minjeong's mouth with a gentleness that took a second for her brain to process.
"You had quiche there," she said simply, tossing the napkin into the paper bag.
Minjeong felt her face heat from her neck to the roots of her hair. She was sure she was red in a way that couldn't be hidden, and the afternoon light in Montmartre wasn't helping.
"Thank you," she managed, in a voice slightly smaller than usual.
Jimin didn't make a joke. She just opened that slow smile again, adjusted her glasses, and looked back at the rooftops.
"Four years is a long time to stop being the center of someone's life," she said finally, gently. "I'm sorry."
"It was. Or maybe I was never the center. Maybe I was just part of the scenery of his life."
The sentence came out heavier than Minjeong had intended. She had thought it before, vaguely — but it was the first time she'd said it out loud to another person. Saying it made everything more real.
Jimin didn't say that's absurd or you deserve better — none of the things people usually say. Instead, she asked:
"Do you think that was true, or do you know it was?"
Minjeong sat with the question echoing in her mind.
"I know it was," she said, eventually.
Jimin nodded with understanding, picked up a piece of baguette, and said nothing more on the subject. Minjeong realized that was, in fact, exactly the right thing to do.
The Canal Saint-Martin was far enough from Montmartre that they took the metro again, and close enough to the heart of the city that it felt like they were heading somewhere the tourist itinerary hadn't anticipated.
"The group isn't coming here?" Minjeong asked on the train.
"The group is going to lunch near the Louvre." Jimin had the metro map memorized. "The Canal Saint-Martin isn't on the standard route. It belongs more to the Parisians than to the tourists."
"And you prefer that."
"I prefer places that exist because people need them, not because people come to see them." She looked out the dark train window. "Though both can be beautiful for different reasons."
The canal appeared when they came up from the station. A real canal, with dark green reflective water, flanked by tall plane trees whose branches met over the water forming a natural canopy. There were cast iron bridges painted green arching over the water at regular intervals, and the locks — those old sluices that controlled the water level — still operated, worked by men who seemed to have the most peaceful job in the world.
There were people along the banks. Couples sitting at the water's edge with their feet dangling, groups of friends with open wine bottles in the middle of the afternoon without ceremony, a woman reading with a dog asleep across her legs.
"This is Paris?" Minjeong said, without meaning to say it out loud.
She had been enchanted by those locks, had already taken several photos — the lock reflected in the dark green water, the plane tree branches meeting overhead, an abandoned wine bottle at the edge with the afternoon light passing through it. The camera that had been forgotten around her neck all through the museum now made complete sense to be there.
And at no point had she regretted following a stranger through Paris.
"This is the Paris the people who live here know." Jimin found a bench under a plane tree and sat, dropping her bag on the ground beside her. "Sit here."
Minjeong settled beside her. The canal water reflected the tree branches and the sky and the colorful building facades — green, orange, faded yellow — in a way that made everything seem doubled, as if there were an entire second city living upside down inside the water.
"Did you know this canal was built by Napoleon?" Jimin said, leaning back on the bench. "He wanted to solve Paris's drinking water problem. The Seine was completely polluted at the time — people threw everything into it, literally everything. So he had this canal built to bring clean water from the north."
"Napoleon built a drinking water canal."
"Among other less edifying things, yes. Paris has a lot of things that exist because someone with too much power wanted to leave a mark. Baron Haussmann demolished half the medieval city in the nineteenth century because Napoleon III wanted wide, symmetrical boulevards. He destroyed entire communities, neighborhoods that had existed for centuries. And today people come from all over the world to photograph those same boulevards."
"That's a little disturbing."
"It is. Beauty sometimes has a cost hidden behind it." She spoke without drama — just that usual honesty. "Paris is beautiful partly because someone decided that beauty was worth more than what already existed. I'm not sure I agree. But that's what it is."
A canal lock began operating further down — the water rising slowly on one side, a small boat waiting patiently to pass to the higher level. There was something hypnotic about the slow movement of the water, the simple and ancient mechanics of the lock.
"Do you think about that a lot?" Minjeong said, thoughtfully. "The cost of things."
She didn't quite know why she'd asked. Or she did, but didn't want to examine it too closely. She had been acting strangely all day — following a stranger through museums and bistros and Montmartre staircases, answering questions she would normally deflect, saying things out loud that she usually kept only to herself. There was something about that woman that made the filter difficult to maintain. As if her presence created a space where the truth was simply the easier option.
She felt an absurd connection with someone she barely knew. And strangely, she had no desire to question it. She just wanted to stay there, keep listening, keep learning.
Jimin was quiet for a moment.
"My mother died four years ago." She said it without preamble, without the emotional build-up people usually use for that kind of thing. "After that I started thinking a lot about what's worth it and what isn't. What stays and what passes. She traveled a lot — she was a nurse but she dreamed of going everywhere — and she kept putting it off, putting it off, and then there was no more time."
Minjeong looked at the canal, fidgeting with her camera. She had always been terrible at this. She never knew how to find the right words when they mattered most, and the feeling of owing something to a moment left her restless.
"I'm sorry, Jimin," she said finally, her voice slightly unsteady. "I'm not very good at this — but I'm truly sorry."
"Thank you." Jimin didn't seem bothered by her lack of words. "After her I quit the job I had and started going. Not for her — for me. But with her in my backpack, somehow."
"Would she have loved Paris?" Minjeong asked, hesitantly.
"She would have loved everything." A small pause. "She was the kind of person who loved everything."
Minjeong said nothing more. She sat in silence with Jimin for a moment, watching the boat pass slowly through the lock, the water rising patiently, the plane trees swaying gently above them.
Sometimes company doesn't need words to be real.
She was learning that.