It is as it always was: She is chaos. And she is peace. She is everywhere and nowhere really. In this case, she is at the breakfast table on the sunny side of her apartment, dipping croissants in her café au lait and chatting an hour away with me. But in her head, she’s done a million things today.  Right now, she’s mentally already left the room, only that she didn’t tell me.

So when she starts to rumble around the rooms, collecting things from here and there, and casually tells me we’ve got like five minutes to get ready, the race starts and I better join in.

Losing track with her in the first five minutes is not advisable at all. After eight minutes we leave the place and as soon as her foot touches ground, she steps out as if she had two meters more of legs than the rest of us. When we catch the first metro, I’m already panting quite a bit, but trying to keep my cool. By the time we jump through the closing doors of the second one, I’m gulping in air like a person saved from drowning while she – “yeah so” – continues our conversation as if it hadn’t been interrupted by a few hundred meters of sprint.

We reach St. Germain de Prés by the time she should already be in her lecture room – and so is the pace she navigates us through the busy street with. Without slowing down in the slightest, she turns around every few meters to shoot bits and pieces of information at me: “main street”, “Ralph Lauren”, “fur coats”, “famous café”, “Sartre”, “good baguettes”.

Somehow managing to bump into no one, she overtakes more and more people strolling around on the sunny day. I try not to lose sight of her hair dancing away in front of me in its new daring short cut, while it seems she hasn’t even really picked up speed yet.

We turn a corner and finally reach her building, she drowns me into a bear hug, not even slightly short of breath, kisses me on the cheek, “see you later” and climbs over a short fence to wriggle her way through passing cars and motorcycles. In the wink of an eye she disappears behind a huge gate. I shake my head while I gaze at the spot of thin air she just vanished into, take a few deep breaths, failing to catch my breath at all. For what feels like the millionth time, I have to wonder at the noncompromising energy with which she runs the race of her life every day and it drives a helpless laugh out of my mouth. Which of course grants me no looks whatsoever from the people passing by because this is Paris and everyone can do whatever the hell they want.