“I wasn’t even at the scene of the attacks.I was sitting outside a restaurant in Saint Michel, celebrating my friend’s birthdays. It was when I noticed that I had had dozens of missed calls from my family, my sisters and my mother that I realized something had gone wrong. At first I thought it was something in the family, and then I realized they were worried about me. They asked me where I was and to get home as fast as I could. We didn’t have very much information. Mobile networks were saturated. We went on with our evening until the restaurant closed. They told us all to go home.
The problem was that the subways were closed, and there was no taxi, Uber, or Autolib. That’s when I realized that I should have gone home earlier. We began hearing rumors—that the shooters fled right next to us. I asked my friends to come with me and spend the night so that we wouldn’t get separated. Some of us lived near the rue Charonne. We grabbed one of the few metros that there were. It was completely deserted. We arrived at my house and, in the dark, turned on the television and saw the scene. My friend Romain was still out at the time. We spent the night in front of the TV and, it wasn’t until morning that he realized what was happening and called us in tears.
I couldn’t even explain why this hit me so hard, but today I wanted to come back here—come back to the Bataclan. It’s been six years since I went out in these neighborhoods, and it’s bizzarre to see restaurants riddled with bullets—to see all of these young people who were in the wrong place at the wrong time. It could have been us, one day before or one day after. »