i thought about separating this into multiple posts. and then i didn't.

you guys i. am. FREAKING.

i just got back from what was seriously THE most magical weekend of my life. like, i'm pretty sure that any minute now, the men in black are gonna kick down my door, flash me in the eyes, and erase all my memories of this trip because NOBODY should be allowed to be this happy, or this lucky, on this planet or any other one. seriously, this cannot be my life. i think what actually happened is that i'm legally dead, i've probably been dead for the past five or so days, and imessage is probably NOT WORKING so my ghost and my brain can't communicate to let each other know that it happened. if that's the case, can somebody please please PLEASE just make sure my mom doesn't bury me in my prom dress? thank you.

i'm not gonna bore you guys with the screencaps that i've posted 500 times (here, here, pretty much anywhere in my #holy fucking frijoles and god is real tags) but for anybody who doesn't know, the tl;dr is that gg was going to paris like three months ago, i jokingly tweeted for her to take me with her, and not only did she remember but she actually invited me to paris. you guys. you. guys.

so when we last left off on this adventure, i was curled up in the fetal position and crying because i'd just facetimed with the most gorgeous, talented, AMAZING person on the planet and she was kinda drunk but she told me in no uncertain terms that she wanted me to accompany her to the rock en seine festival in france. which, like, i wasn't sure why? i don't have a fan account or anything, we've met a few times and i tweet her pretty often but i'm not really one of the more visible people. also, i could have been a crazy person, and she just casually invited me to another continent BUT we'll address that later. so she's drunk and i'm crying and i guess i gotta pack for a trip to france that's like three days away. i don't know how i'm supposed to dress in france in august so i buy a bunch of stripes and nautical colors and basically pack taylor swift's wardrobe into my suitcase and hope it's appropriate.

my life is a joke.

gg and her tour manager/scary friend colin (shoutout to colin, who hates me) do their magic and book me a ticket out of pittsburgh. (she told me to bring a friend, but all my friends think she's weird and think i'm super weird for liking her. instead of telling her this, i blurted out "I DON'T HAVE ANY FRIENDS" and then kinda thought about shooting myself.) the flight to paris is almost 11 hours and i spend the whole thing listening to her discography and reading weird poetry and wondering how my life is real. also, i drink many vodka cranberries because this is a high stress situation. the flight attendant judges me. whatever, paula, i'm going to paris for the first time to hang out with my idol. judge away.

i get to paris and am suddenly crippled by anxiety because i'm walking through de gaulle BY MYSELF and i'm drunk and sleepy and also, you know, in paris. for the first time. to hang out with my idol. fuck you, paula. so i grab my luggage, go into the first bathroom i see and holy crap let me tell you, cabin air does my skin NO favors. i wash my face, cry for a few minutes, wash my face some more and then head out to find the exit. there is a grumpy man in a suit holding a sign with my name on it, and i realize that this is literally everybody's dream, but i also know that i've seen taken about a million times. i am in a strange country, walking through a sea of a million strangers, and i'm carrying a pillow. i'm probably gonna die before i even get to the hotel. i consider asking grumpy man if i can take his picture, but decide against it and instead decide to facetime with my mom. because if i'm gonna get kidnapped and sold into human trafficking, at least there will be a witness!

it's important (not really) to note that it's 7am (paris time) on friday when i get to france. grumpy man takes me to my hotel (it's called the burgundy and i want my ashes spread there when i die) and now that i'm (almost, i told you i've seen taken) completely free of the human sex trade, i realize i must look like a homeless person walking into this big, GORGEOUS HOTEL in sweatpants and carrying a giant pillow. luckily, before i can have another meltdown, i am saved by colin, who i guess is not a morning person. "took you long enough." my apologies, colin, for not driving the plane faster, and also the car. i should really do better. he tells me gg's not up yet, shows me to my room, and i'm gonna refrain from writing another 1,000 words about how fucking COOL the room was, but just know that it. was. awesome. like, i'll probably never stay in another place that nice in my life. i took the greatest bubble baths ever, you guys. you don't even know. i seriously considered stuffing the sheets into my bag when i left. but i digress.

this is the part where we finally breathe the same air, in case you decided to skip all of the above rambling.

after i take the first of my bubble baths, cry a little bit more, and try on every outfit i brought with me, i hear a knock on my door and assume it's housekeeping or something so i kind of awkwardly stand there for a minute while trying to decide exactly what language is appropriate to use here. and then there's another knock, and then some shuffling, and some soft talking, and then i hear colin say "jesus, geeg, i don't know, maybe she fell asleep or jumped out the window."

gg is outside my room. nothing is real.

so i check my reflection in every possible shiny surface and try to make the action of opening the door look as casual as possible. now i don't think i need to mention this? but colin has already given me the rundown on how to approach gg, blah blah blah, basically don't act like a raging psychopath and we'll be good to go. i have spent the whole morning finding my "chill" as some people say. like, i don't even have the urge to cry anymore. it's great, right? so i open the door, and literally before i can even say anything, there's a tiny blonde human hugging me like i'm literally her best friend in the world. i look at colin, thinking he's probably gonna chop my arms off and mail me back home in a body bag, but he's just kinda rolling his eyes like he knew this was gonna happen. so we're hugging, and this is the part where the crying feeling comes back, but i find my "chill" again and instead of sobbing like the big emotional baby i am, i just tell her she's amazing and thank her for inviting me and i can't believe blah blah blah blah blah.

so they come in and we all sit down, and colin keeps trying to say stuff that sounds important, like itinerary type stuff, but gg just kinda talks over him in the way that i hate, but i somehow don't mind it when she does it. and guys, i know people say she's like, moody? but she is seriously so sweet and funny and just like... honestly, almost overwhelming. she talks to me like we're catching up on ten years of lost time, and i'm mostly just staring, because it's either that or cry at this point. nothing is real.

she asks me if i'm hungry and of course i am STAAAARVING so she tells me we're gonna go to this awesome, super low key cafe for lunch and i naturally oblige, because what else can i do? sooooo we go. and in the car, she asks if she can try on my heart-shaped sunglasses, and then if she can have them. she trades me her ray-ban aviators. i repeat, i now own gg clement's sunglasses. she asks me about my life and stuff, and whether or not i've been to paris before, and a bunch of other shit. when i tell her no, i haven't, she insists we have to do EVERYTHING, starting immediately after lunch. so we do. we do some shopping, and she helps me pick out a pair of really nice earrings for my mom that i probably can't actually afford, but it's paris, right? also, we go to some weird designer boutique whose name i can't even pronounce and we try on matching dresses. i am basically living in an amy heckerling movie montage at this point.

we do some more shopping, some sightseeing, and have the best afternoon ever (i know you hate me if you've read this far because NOW is the time where i decide not to give every single detail, but if i told you absolutely everything, the trip wouldn't be as special, am i right?) and she asks if i've looked at the festival lineup. uh, i haven't, and apparently neither has she. but we head out to the festival grounds anyway, and we watch a couple of bands you might have maybe heard of, like BLONDIE. and THE HIVES. and GARY CLARK, JR. la bas closes the night and i don't know if you guys know this, but alfie hull is really damn cute in person. i almost asked gg for his number, but then i thought it might be weird for reasons, and also because he's alfie hull. so i didn't.

honestly, by the end of the night, i was pooped, but gg insisted that we should go out, and what was i gonna do, tell her no? so we go out and we end up at this weird, trendy club and all these french hipsters are glaring at us and then the dj plays a remix of one of her songs and we watch them all dance like idiots. we also dance like idiots. after about an hour or so and more drinks than we should have had, we're both pretty much over it. in the car on the way back to the hotel, while trying not to do the crying thing that i do when i'm too drunk (crying and alcoholism are the recurring themes in this story, for all my critical readers out there) i ask her why she invited me to paris. and do you wanna know why? are you ready for this?

it's because we have the same dogs.

she literally looked through my pictures on twitter and saw that our dogs look alike, and decided that was significant enough to invite me to paris. this is the most bizarre, yet adorable, thing i've ever heard. everything is perfect and nothing is real.

and then day 2 happens.

NOT THAT IT'S BAD just... everybody was hungover, yeah? i slept until after noon, and when i called colin, he told me gg wasn't feeling too hot. so he bought me lunch (brunch, really) and by the time i was done, she was insisting that we needed to see more sights, but she was... i dunno. i don't wanna call her moody. deflated, maybe. hungover, definitely. we kept running into these awkward pockets of silence where colin would kind of give her the stink eye and then make a weird snorty noise. i dunno what that was about, but i was in paris and way too busy updating my snapchat story with pictures of my surroundings. including colin's stink eye, yeah i caught that shit. we go to the eiffel tower, and we can't quite get to the top, but we take some pictures at the bottom and manage to hit the second floor and i am pleased. gg even takes some selfies with my phone, and insists on sending kissy snapchats to my mom and also raina, and guys, they might actually be in love. gg talks to her more than i talk... period. which is is saying a lot, CONSIDERING THE STATE OF THIS POST and if you're still reading this, seriously, go ahead and pat yourself on the back.

we do as much sightseeing as possible, and i really wanted to try to see the louvre but it was just too damn big. it wasn't happening. so we walk a little bit of the seine, we see notre dame and the arc de triomphe, we have an early dinner at an italian place, which i think is hysterical. italian food in france, right? right? the pasta was really good, too. colin thinks gg should "go get some rest" because she's gotta play the next night, but she really wants to go see portishead and it turns into another weird stink eye thing over the dinner table. i decide then and there that i'm really glad to not be a celebrity if this is what it's like. i've never even listened to portishead so i really don't have a horse in this race, but she insists that i'll have the time of my life, so we go back to st. cloud and we see portishead.

and i did, guys, i did have the time of my life. there were glowsticks, which i LOVE, and i now know what people mean when they say they hear portishead influences in some of her music. but also, the most important thing is that swinging and swaying to portishead really mellows us all out, i think, even colin, and suddenly all the stink eye moments don't even matter, and there's not even any weirdness in the car on the way back to the hotel. aw, yay. we play with glowsticks for a while in the bar and then i kinda start to pass out so it looks like it's bedtime for grandma.

DAY. 3.

colin wakes me up at the asscrack of dawn on sunday and tells me stuff i should have been listening to on day 1, probably, while gg was talking. she's got an early morning photoshoot, then a couple of radio stops, then she's planning to lay down some demo vocals at a weird concert space downtown that apparently has really good acoustics, and then she still has to rush to the festival grounds in order to make her call time. so basically, i can either see the louvre by myself and possibly get kidnapped into the human slave trade, or i can spend my day living her actual nonstop life.

i mean, i don't know about you guys, but i think my choice was obvious here.

so we go to this photoshoot and honestly, i'm not even sure what it was for. i just know there was a lot of yelling in french, and also pastels, which i thought was weird? because that's not usually her thing. like, people usually photograph her in either black or white, or maybe red, you know? but, you know, whatever. it takes them over an hour just to tease her hair to the right height, and then they spend five hours snapping photos in different dress/shoe/accessory combinations, all while portishead plays in the background, at gg's insistence. honestly, it's INSANE. at one point, i watch a team of three people assemble to get her into and out of a really elaborate dress, and it makes me really nervous because what the hell is going on in there that it takes three people? she lets me see most of the shots, and naturally i gush all over and tell her she's gorgeous, because i've pretty much been trying to keep my "chill" all weekend but this is our last day together and i'm losing my grip on the "ironically detached" thing. we do the radio stops, one of which she cuts short because the dj's being kind of passive aggressive about some show that she canceled, and then we don't have enough time to go to the theater before she's gotta be at the grounds and once again, SO glad i'm not a celebrity. also, it's important to note that day 3 was much closer to day 1 in that gg was smiling and making a lot of jokes, even when it took three people to undo her corset. everybody's entitled to a bad day, right? right.

we make it to the festival grounds and we catch some french bands i've never heard of. gg gets into weird bickering thing with la roux, and i'm pretty sure she actually threatened to rip la roux's throat out, but there's no way i'm getting in the middle of it so i just mind my business. we manage to catch some of janelle monae, but then gg has to get ready for her set and i have to do my job of... wandering behind her and colin and hoping we don't get separated because there's a lot of security and i don't want to have that awkward moment of explaining to some big scary french man that "i'm with the band." i probably don't have to explain to you guys that she was AWESOME, and if i cried during national anthem, that's nobody's business but mine. the way the crowd responds to her is just unreal, especially the people right in the front who you can tell came SPECIFICALLY for her. it was just bananas. she finishes her set and it's rush time again, though this time it's back to the hotel because we've both got red eyes to catch. she's got some appearance in new york and i am suddenly hit by the memory that i have a real life in erie. gg insists that i pack up quickly so that we can have a proper goodbye, so i gather all my shit (including my pillow; i resist the urge to steal their sheets) and head up to her room, which, again, not gonna write another 1,000 words about it, but just know that it was incredible. like mine, but times ten. that's all.

i go up to her room with my arms full of my shit like an idiot and she's already all packed because her flight leaves before mine, but she sits me down anyway and asks me if i had fun. she apologizes for day 2 and wishes me luck in school and tells me to snapchat her all the time, and seriously, i just can't believe this person in front of me. we take some more pictures and make some more jokes and we dance to portishead while colin does the final sweep of the room to make sure she hasn't forgotten anything. we all leave together, one big happy family (type thing) in an SUV headed for de gaulle, but halfway there, gg insists that we have to stop, and that's how we end up with the best goddamn midnight crepes i've ever tasted, picked up from a random street vendor who reminded me of my grandpa. thanks, grandpa street vendor.

i'm not gonna bore you guys with all the details of my journey home, but just know that there wasn't a single second of the ride that i wasn't smiling. final summation: i'm honestly all out of words. gg clement is the kind of person who can swallow you whole and spit you back out before you even notice. she is an overwhelming force to be reckoned with, like a torrential downpour but also the rainbow and the sun that come after. also, she's probably the sweetest, weirdest, coolest person i've ever met. if you were unsure before, i hope my recollection of this weekend made you fall just as much in love with her as i am. even if she doesn't ever remember me, this past weekend was hands down the best of my life, and i know i won't ever be able to forget it or her, and i'll be a big fan of her for the rest of my life.

it's so freaking weird that this all started on twitter.

xo

- @sweetsurrender // legendsandlions.tumblr.com