I once told my sister that I wanted to decorate my Paris apartment with something distinctly un-Parisian, just to spite my neighbors who insisted everything must be "authentique." That's how I ended up with a massive ceramic flower on my wall - the kind of thing you might find in the lair of a tasteful sea witch, if such a person existed. The ceramic art piece, which I've named "Maurice" (because all good wall decorations deserve proper names that sound vaguely like insurance salesmen), spreads across my wall like some kind of deep-sea polyp that grew tired of the ocean floor's real estate market. It's the kind of abstract artwork that makes marine biologists do a double-take, its dark blue tendrils reaching out as if trying to snatch passing plankton from my living room air. As wall art decor goes, Maurice has become something of a conversation starter, particularly among my French guests who peer at it with the same expression they reserve for understanding American healthcare. "C'est... très profond," they say, meaning both the color and the psychological weight they've decided to assign it. I've grown to love how it seems to absorb light rather than reflect it, like a piece of the midnight ocean decided to go rogue and pursue a career in interior design. At night, after too much wine, I sometimes catch myself wondering if it's slowly migrating across my wall, though I've yet to catch it in the act.