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I could not have foretold that she would never again be the same as I first saw her. Because who would dare to predict that the very next evening – in the same shifting light – she would begin to burn? No one. No one predicted that. . . . It is Palm Sunday. The line to enter the Notre Dame is long, and I quietly usher my boyfriend to its end. “Are you sure you want to go inside today?” he asks. “I have to,” I say. I don’t have the capacity to utter more. I am staring her straight in the eyes, and I can’t look away. Two equally graceful and substantial towers split her down the middle and draw my attention to her uppermost point. She demands I look up. Her spire beckons. We pass the threshold, and I crane my neck to take it all in – intimidated by the sheer amount of detail. Candles flicker, incense swirls, and words I cannot perceive tiptoe through the air. The men who speak these words wear white. We cross the river behind her as golden hour strikes, and she is beauty personified – framed by pale pink blossoms and rapidly transforming puffs of cloud. There is a man on the bridge playing classical guitar, and I turn in circles – solidifying the memory. I make note to sketch her from here. Someday soon. Before we fly home. . . . Monday arrives in a jet-lagged fog, but he coerces me outside into the yellow light of morning. A fire truck parked ahead teams with life. Five or six men stand on top, fiddling with whatever firemen fiddle with – and my boyfriend says absentmindedly, “It looks like they’re preparing for something.” We keep moving in search of breakfast. . . . We walk and walk and walk, and as the sun starts its slow descent – we find ourselves hand-in-hand on the Promenade Plantee. We stop to smell actual roses. We pass through shrub archways, cross stone overpasses, and gaze at street-level pedestrians below. My phone buzzes: “The Notre Dame is on fire…” I pause. Someone gasps. And as I turn my head toward the desperation, my eyes are met with a dancing plume of smoke. It slithers mindlessly above the city, ever-growing – ever-rising. “Holy shit,” I whisper. “Holy shit,” he echoes. . . . The spire has fallen. The city is wailing. A single tear slides down my cheek. I hold his hand as I stare into the broken heart of the woman sitting across from us on the train. The car is silent but for the screeching of its brakes. . . . We penetrate the surface in an undulating sea of people – each struggling to get a better look. I sense chaos on the periphery, but I only notice the silence. This many people shouldn’t be this quiet. And then I see her. A small and mighty furnace spewing fear into the ink-black sky – peaking between and silhouetting the buildings near her. I hear her soul weeping. “Help.” She is not weak, but she is straining under the impossible weight of an ungodly force borne from deep within her. “Help,” she coughs. And they do. The five or six firemen we saw that morning, and hundreds more – they come racing forth in waves. Sirens fill the night. We listen as her bones creak, and into the dark we cry with her. . . . A week passes, and I awake early on Easter morning, giving thanks once again for the sun. We meander once more across the golden-hour bridge. Slowly, as the world has come forth to see what remains. Scaffolding from recent renovations still stands, and her trees still bloom. If I had been living under a rock the week before, I may not have noticed that she had been ravaged from the inside out. But I wasn’t living under a rock. And so it is with little time to spare, I sit down on the crowded bank of the Seine – remove my sandals – and pull out my pen – willing it to help me capture that which lies before me. It is a scene I did not expect to find, for she is no longer whole. She is tired, and she is wounded. Yet somehow, she is still alive.