Seven and a half hours ago the Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, France started to burn.  No cause has been determined yet and probably won’t be for some time.

Why do I mourn?

I mourn because I have never been there and now I will never get the opportunity to see it–not in all of it’s original glory.

I have wanted to visit Paris for years.  The desire to go there and try to absorb all of it has only deepened as me, the writer, gets busier.  As me, the romance author, wishes to visit the romance capital of the world!

The fact that I have purchased and read half a dozen novels based in Paris probably tells you something as well!  The DaVinci Code was not a help as it toured the city and some of the beautiful settings around.

I have also acquired a number of items with Paris including the wallet I carry every day.  I fell in love with Paris around the same time I fell in love with Phantom of the Opera and that was before I started writing.

When I saw the first Facebook news post I could only comment NOOOOOO!!!!

Then I watched the news and saw the live footage and it brought tears to my eyes.  I was at my parents’ so they wouldn’t have understood at all why I was crying over something like that unaware of my deepest desire.

Now I’m back home and I can shed tears freely and try to come to terms with the loss of not only a church that is six time zones away in a beautiful city that I’m dying to see but that I haven’t seen it.

It makes me so angry that my entire life revolves around working and that I might NEVER get there.  It frustrates me that everything I have spent my life doing feels so meaningless because I can’t seem to get anywhere!  As I said in a previous post, I have worked 30 years of my life and I’m tired.

One of the things I do that brings me great joy is writing and I want it to take me to all those places physically like I hope I take my readers through my stories.

When I wrote the scene in Changes in Time when they were transported to the Paris Opera House I could only imagine the reality of it based on Phantom and looking at photos and reading some of the history.

So tonight, and probably this week, I will mourn the loss of a great landmark along with how tied down I feel as my Passport ticks louder than biological clock used to!