I remember the smoke, the cobblestones, and the loveliness. While I was studying abroad at Pembroke College at Cambridge, I opted to spend my four-day post-midterms weekend in Paris. I booked my tickets between St. Pancras and Gare du Nord and a cheap hostel on rue de Dunkerque right by Gare du Nord in the eleventh arrondissement. I remember breakfast with a good friend at a café on boulevard de Denain (chocolat chaud and a croissant).

On my second day, after exhausting myself by going to the Musée d’Orsay and the Louvre in a single day, I decided to walk from Gare du Nord to the Tour Eiffel. (I am not sure what I was thinking, doing that alone without a cellphone with functioning service.) I did not take the most direct route either. I walked along rue de Magenta, wandered around lost in the tenth arrondissement, eventually found my way when I hit the Seine, walked down the quai des Tuileries, crossed the Pont Alexandre III, walked around the Invalides, and eventually found my way onto the Champ de Mars after stopping by a Carrefours.

Most tourists spend all their time in the second arrondissement, the seventh arrondissement, and the fourth arrondissement. I would not fault them. The second arrondissement contains the Louvre, avenue des Champs-Élysées, and the Jardin des Tuileries. The seventh arrondissement contains the Invalides, Musée d’Orsay, the Champ de Mars, and the Tour Eiffel. The fourth arrondissement contains the Cathédrale Notre-Dame. There are other popular landmarks in other districts and beyond the heart of Paris (e.g. Château de Versailles), but those are the ones my parents visited due to their proximity. Beyond the throngs of tourists, Paris is clean and gorgeous. The sidewalks are clean, the trees and lawns are trimmed, and the people are well-heeled. The buildings look as if Haussmann had just finished constructing them yesterday.

This contrasts with the Paris I saw in the tenth arrondissement. The streets were dirtier and almost all the shopkeepers and residents I saw on my walk through were of African descent. While the tenth district is by no means solely working class (those would be the nineteenth and twentieth arrondissements at the edge of the city center), it is not the clean well-lighted place that Hemingway describes in his short story. Even for a stranger like me, who does not know Paris on the back of her hand, the difference was visible. However, it is a multicultural area, and primarily a residential neighborhood with falling property prices, as various Parisian real estate group websites like to inform me. This is not the #Paris Instagram users see. But it is Paris, nonetheless. It was therefore, horrifying to hear that these two arrondissements were the location of the attacks that shook the world a few days ago.

When the November 13 attacks happened, my first thought was “not again.” I am ashamed of it, and I am ashamed of myself that my first thought was “not again.” It was the worst attack on Parisian soil since the vicissitudes of the most destructive war in human history and less than a year after the Charlie Hebdo attacks, and my first thought was, “Not again, and why does this happen with such alarming regularity?” Studying terrorism and hearing about terrorist attacks are two different animals entirely. I have always known this intellectually, but I have never felt it so emotionally until now, after studying terrorism for almost a year.

It is so easy to dissect it analytically and to diagnose the problem with policy remedies, but to do that ignores the human suffering aspect. To say things like “Laïcité is the problem” and “The French ignore social and economic mobility” show a deep disregard for the fact that incredibly unreasonable and fundamentalist people who place their violent and hate-filled ideology above the lives and wellbeing of others just committed a deep atrocity in a city that values democracy and freedom.

So I am trying not to be a political scientist right now. I am not trying to be an intellectual right now. I am ignoring the calls to “close the borders to refugees” and the other calls to “remember that refugees are running away from Daesh” and the politicization of a tragedy. There will come a time in which we need to discuss that, but the time for doing that is not now. I am taking myself back to the time I walked through the tenth and eleventh arrondissements, the places where the attacks took place, and think about the blue zinc roofs, the cerulean sky, the many shades of the city, the verdant trees. I am trying to remember Paris. I am trying to remember the humanity in it all.