I once spent an afternoon on a bus from Nice to Monaco, mesmerized by dips of coast blurring with the bold, white street paint. The journey began with a stubby woman named Martinne at a hostel located atop a Burberry store. Below, plaid raincoats were being sold, but upstairs my friends and I were being warned that French pastry shops close on Sundays.
“Go get a croissant today. Before it’s too late!” These are the only words I remember, her accent noticeably altering everyday sounds and making them altogether something new and exciting. It didn’t matter that her tone was unintentionally stern. At just under 5 feet, Martinne’s size and demeanor made it obvious: she couldn’t harm a fly.
As the bus crossed the border into Monaco, my friends and I each fell into sleep. The rolls of the Riveria still flashed beneath my eyelids. Small pastel roofs. Jagged crusts of rock. Ocean-blue seaside.
When I opened my eyes–when we all did–we weren’t in Monaco. We weren’t even in Nice. We were in a town called Menton, about 30 miles away from the riches of the Monte Carlo.
So, here we were. In Menton. Not Trenton. Not Mentos. Menton.
The scenery didn’t look too unusual. But the bus was taking a break, so we decided to walk over to a nearby fruit stand.
I bought an orange and a pear, the colors salient as the heat of that strange-weathered March afternoon.
“There is an orange festival here,” our bus driver told us when we returned, pointing across to a conglomerate of produce huts with banners waving down. We climbed back up into our seats, searching for something–a medium to reconcile where we were and where we wanted to be. We pulled out a map.
Menton looked the same, I thought, despite never having been. The same as Nice’s crooked lines of land and water. Martinne could be any woman staring up at our bus, and the huge ferris wheel in the city’s center plaza was more than a mirage as the orange festival took form.
Later in Nice, it was Carnivale.We danced in the streets with puppets and marionettes. We chanted “fuego, fuego!” and watched a waiter light a shot of vodka into flames. Like the streamers and silly string and confetti, we then faded down to the ground, exhaustion settling in with the coolness of night. We returned to Martinne, wondering if she had left the light on or if we’d have to feel our way through her dark makeshift hotel.
Falling asleep again, I thought about being lost, about being found, and everything in between. The way the familiar and unknown start to blur together during months of travel, months of searching for points of intersection and comfort. Or maybe that was just the vodka talking.
Orange spheres dotted my dreams that night. I tried to clutch them close like memories. I tried to juggle them like individual sparks of adventure and familiarity. Menton is–I now know–some place I’d like to return one winter, if only to peel back the layers of something perfectly organic.
