My friend Kam made me a poster for our year there, bits and pieces of things glued to the pink posterboard, “Dancing Queen” written in glitter across the top in honor of my indefatigability on the dance floor in our dorm parties and Paris clubs. Among other collage items meant to symbolize me, she had included lots of chocolate wrappers. I rolled the poster inside my beautiful seventeenth-century map of Paris and slid them both into the map tube along with posters from my favorite plays that year. I tucked all the memorabilia that so many people had brought back for me from their trips—little wooden shoes from Amsterdam, a tiny Italian flag, a Swiss coin—into a brown Maison du Chocolat box. I slipped dried flowers trimmed from each of Sébastien’s bouquets into a blue tin from the Marquise de Sévigné (the chocolate shop, not the person). I tucked a candle with a Chinese pictograph wishing me joy from my friend Kam into a mint-green tin from Ladurée. I tucked turrón from Adela into the pink tin from Fauchon, smiling at the memory of the day we got kicked out of there.

The blue tin from Marquise de Sévigné had held sweet ground chocolate. The shop on the Place de la Madeleine had been nearly empty the day I bought it, and the man behind the little coffee bar had responded to my query on their hot chocolate by showing me how to make it from start to finish. I’d forced Paris to put up with me in the end, I guess, like a clumsy, tongue-lolling, persistent puppy who finally gets petted. All the packing up of experiences attested to it.

There was a knock on the door, and I opened it to find Kam, Philippe, and Adela there. Kam was the friend from Rocamadour, the one who had taken a picture of me hugging a snail. From what had once been East Germany, she was small and freckled, with fine pale hair that wisped out all around her head. She grinned. “We’ve got a birthday surprise for you. It’s a few days late because you went to London.”

They took me to the Parc André Citroën, a park about as weird and techno as you could expect from something named after a car manufacturer. The only pretty part of it was the square with water shooting up all over and children running through the fountain screaming with laughter. Above it floated an orange and yellow hot air balloon. “Remember?” Kam, the organizer, gloated. “You said you always wanted to go up in a balloon. So when I heard one was here, we got together. And guess what I found.” She pulled out six cookies carefully wrapped in plastic film.

I gaped. “Oreos? You found Oreos?”