I’m walking along Avenue Kléber in Paris with Louis, my 11-year-old grandson. We turn left onto Rue Boissière on our way to Place Victor Hugo.

As Louis jumps over each of the metal posts along the sidewalk, I gaze around me at the city of my dreams.

Remembering the time when everything changed…

In my mid-20s, while working to support my then husband through graduate school and mothering our two children, I took classes toward an undergraduate degree in French. I was irresistibly drawn to the French language and culture. In ways that I didn’t yet fully comprehend, my connection to all things French made me feel alive.

As part of my education, my husband and I figured out a way for me to spend a month in Paris, studying at the Sorbonne.

Paris worked its way under my skin and into my soul. Even the cockroaches and rats in the shabby rented room I called home for a month didn’t curb my passionate embrace of the city and its magic.

Outside of my classes at the Sorbonne, I immersed myself in French live theater, which I could afford because of deeply discounted student theater passes. The great playwrights of 17th-century France, Molière, Corneille, and especially Racine, drew me into their tragic worlds. I fell in love with Phèdre, Racine’s protagonist in the dramatic tragedy of the same name. She is a passionate lover, aware of nothing except her own anguish and the means by which she can relieve it.

I wept through three different live performances of Phèdre during that month in Paris. And I stayed up late night after night reading the play numerous times from cover to cover. Phèdre stirred something deep within me that I had ignored for a long time. I longed to know what it would feel like to experience a love like hers, so intense it might be confused with hate. I yearned to feel something that fervently. To live that intensely. To open myself to a flood of passion that would nourish the dried up and withered cells of my soul and penetrate the veil of numbness that had surrounded me for so long.

My entire being began to vibrate with a newfound vitality. My mantra became “Someday I will live in Paris.”

But as the month in Paris drew to a close, that vibration began to feel more like raw fear. Who had I become?And what would I do with who I had become when once again at home in the Midwest with my husband and children?

I became painfully aware that over time, I’d learned to push aside the passions that used to burn within me. But during that month in Paris, I had started, little by little, to be more authentic with myself and to allow them back in.

And now, here I was, on what felt like the edge of a cliff.

I was terrified of what might happen if I allowed myself to follow my dreams. Would everything else, even my precious family, fall apart?

A part of me wanted to turn around and go back to life before Paris.

But I could no longer go back. Although I was not completely aware of it in this moment, I had reached a point of no return.

Now I watch my grandson sprinting ahead of me, spotting a Haagen-Dazs sign in front of us.

“Nani, can I have an ice cream?” he asks, turning around to wait for me to catch up.

I smile. Life after Paris has been painful, ecstatic, tumultuous…and more authentic with every year that passes.

My dream of living in Paris never came true. But I found myself during that month in Paris in a way that changed my life forever.