Here I am again, yes, with yet another Paris post. Inspiration here is endless, not just for my project but also for life itself. Paris has a clever way of reminding you that everything, even devotion, is alive. Maybe it’s the rhythm of the day, the bustle, the bells, or the way history here refuses to stay still. Every street feels like a tapestry of time, with layers of longing and discipline written over each other, never fully erased.

Lately, I’ve been feeling that tension, both on the page and in my own heart. The recurring question is simple and endless: Can love be both loyal and alive?

This morning, as I sip my café americano at Les Deux Magots, I think about the writers who sat here before me: Hemingway, Simone de Beauvoir, Sartre, and Stein. Their devotion was not just to their craft, but to each other’s growth. Their loyalty was intellectual, creative, and fiercely alive. They challenged, provoked, and expanded ideas that shaped generations, all born right here at these small marble tables amid ink stains, cigarettes, and espresso spoons.

And somehow, I find myself doing the same thing…tracing thoughts on love, loyalty, and becoming, letting the city remind me that creating is also staying awake to life itself.

We often see loyalty as stillness, something steady and unmoving, the quiet faithfulness that holds a life together. But here in Paris, I’m starting to see it differently. Loyalty isn’t the absence of change; it’s the promise to keep showing up, even as we evolve.

Yesterday, wandering through the Opera Garnier, I stopped before a marble bust marked: Maillard, Poète, 1699–1772. At first glance, the figure appears unmistakably feminine, the soft gaze, the delicate drape of marble folds. Only later did I learn that Maillard was a man, Paul Desforges-Maillard, who once wrote under a woman’s name, Mademoiselle Malcrais de La Vigne. His poems were adored for their “feminine sensibility” until the truth emerged. Standing before that statue, I couldn’t help but smile. Life imitating art, art imitating life …identity as devotion, transformation as truth. Maybe that’s what loyalty really is: not clinging to form but daring to inhabit all the selves love requires of us.

My husband arrives today, and we’re heading to spend the night at the Palace of Versailles, part research, part celebration. The place itself feels like the perfect metaphor for what I’m trying to understand. Versailles is a monument to grandeur and constancy, yet when you walk its mirrored halls at dusk, it feels anything but static. The air moves, the reflections shimmer, the gardens breathe. Even the stillness feels alive.

That’s how I want to love and write, letting trustworthiness and vitality coexist while staying grounded but never fixed in place.

In the project I’m working on, I’m exploring this idea through unnamed characters, representing unseen parallels of people navigating the delicate balance between duty and desire, memory and imagination, self and selfishness. Through my characters, I develop; they help me examine the consequences of choosing love over repeating familiar patterns that once seemed like safety. In their stories, I begin to see that true loyalty is not the absence of change but the courage to evolve while staying connected to what matters most, oneself first, then the person on the other end.

And maybe that’s what tonight at Versailles is about, too. We’re not escaping real life; we’re re-entering it from another angle. We’re walking through rooms built for kings and queens, knowing that the most genuine luxury isn’t marble or gold, it’s presence and choosing to see one another with new eyes, again and again.

Paris has shown me that aliveness isn’t something you pursue. It’s something you permit. It’s what happens when you stop playing the version of yourself that fits in and start becoming the one that feels genuine. And when you can share that journey…without fear, without pretense, that’s when loyalty becomes authentic and luminous.

So tonight, as we wander the gardens by candlelight and the fountains start to sing, I’ll be celebrating both the work in progress and the love that inspires it, the living, breathing, evolving kind because love doesn’t have to choose between depth and desire, devotion and discovery. It can be both loyal and alive.