Disclaimer: Props to my homies over at Sunrise. I honestly don't know what I have creative right to, so I'll have to say that I have none.
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La Défense rises augustly and powerfully from the barren Parisian hellscape I so acrimoniously called home. Like monoliths of modern society rising from a sea of illness from the old world, it gave even me refuge from my self-imposed European prison. Perhaps this city was better (in the sense of health and culture) than the motherland... I certainly hold no more affection for Petersburg than I do Paris. But to me, at that point in my life, (for a decade I lived there) all of Paris was St. Peter and St. Paul. Whenever he came, I met him at La Défense; partly because he no longer spoke a word of French and it would be imperative that I shield him from the stuffy citizenry of the city major, partly to keep him as far away from possible from my ill-kept, cheap apartment, and a job not comparable to his own.
And I still don't understand why, when he asked me to join him in Manchester, that I hesitated for three long years. I tend to think it was jealousy- decades of bitter rivalry unspoken- but to this day I can't place it. What I connais bien, however, is just how excellent my decision was to leave when I did, and how things could not possibly have played out as they did had I abandoned my self-respect and immediately crawled off to England at his illustrious heels.