As the World Watches Paris, Facebook Responses Allow No Time For Mourning

You can love an adopted city more than your own. I have been living in Paris for three years. This city has helped me more than I could possibly say. I left England because I couldn't find work after graduating; France gave me work, gave me friends, gave me the opportunity to do a masters degree, which would have been an impossibility in the UK because of the fees and living costs. This country has given me the future my own was unable to give me.

When I arrived in Paris, I couldn't speak the language. I didn't know anyone. Within three years, France has become more of a home to me than England. So the feeling of it being attacked, and so viciously, is more painful than I could have imagined.

One thing I've noticed since Friday's atrocities is how determined people have been to forge boldly onwards—to prove that a terror attack will not affect how they live their lives. And while that's an admirable choice, it's not one without its own set of consequences.

On Friday night, people in Paris are murdered in a series of coordinated attacks. On Saturday I buy flowers and place them in front of the statue of Marianne at the Place de la République. By 5 PM there are television crews everywhere. People chanting, "Vive la liberté! Vive la République!"

They step over generators and piles of cables. Children are hoisted onto shoulders. People are even drinking again, a beer in one hand and wild gesticulations as they sing with the other. The bank of candles and handwritten signs is stretching far outwards from the statue in the center. People can't move for the crowds.

And then: a mass panic. We still don't know where it started. A scream, then several, then the whole crowd starts leaping over the candles. They're all moving in one fluid, heaving mass. It happens at the site of one of the shootings, the restaurants Le Petit Cambodge and the bar Le Carillon. It happens in the Place de la République. It happens in Strasbourg Saint-Denis: Bars go into lockdown, people hide, people flee, screaming. It's happening two neighborhoods away, far south or north of where the attacks occurred; in the Marais, along the Seine, in Jaurès.

Some are saying someone let off a firecracker. Some are saying that a bulb exploded in a café on the Rue des Archives. No one really knows what caused this explosion of panic, but it makes one thing absolutely clear: while we might be back on the streets, raising our glasses to those gunned down, our hearts are still beating fast with fear.

The French reaction, for the most part, has been to look ahead. The slogans abound: Continuer est résister. Paris may be hit by waves, but it will not flounder. Même pas peur. We are not afraid.

But the point is, we are afraid. And we have the right to be afraid. What happened on Friday was different. There's a layer of tension over the city right now, and understandably so. I was walking along the rue Réaumur earlier today when a van ran over something, making a bang, and everyone around me leapt with fright.

I want us to slow down. The city needs time to mourn. On Saturday, Paris was reeling. We waited for more details to come out. On Sunday, mere hours after the attacks, Hollande was giving the go-ahead for fierce reprisals in Raqqa, and social media feeds were crawling with analyses and people were arguing over what caused it, whose fault it is, the fact that attacks in Beirut were ignored, the callous selective bias of the media, whether or not we should put the French flag on our Facebook picture. Already observers in other countries are saying they're getting sick of all the France coverage.

Is this what happens now? Is this how quickly it will go from now on? We've barely drawn a breath. Let this city and all of the people in it gather themselves up slowly before we argue about Facebook. We will go back to work and back to our schools—but we don't need to, just yet, if we don't want to. We need to grieve. And if that counts as a show of weakness, what does that matter? We are vulnerable. We were attacked in our bars and our meeting places, in our locals, right in our homes, because your arrondissement is an extension of your home. But we were vulnerable because we were carefree, and drinking to life and friends and Friday nights. We should not be ashamed of unconscious vulnerability. It is a mark of freedom and joy.

On the sign I left at the Place de la République, I wrote that we are not afraid. It's not true. We are. But we have the right to be afraid, and for some time yet.