Informed by ten months of ethnographic fieldwork, including dozens of semi-structured interviews and hundreds of hours of participant observation amongst Parisians, primarily those who live and work in Montmartre, I document how people in this community construct and enact narratives during the current global health crisis, in particular the analogical and conceptual aspects of these narratives (i.e. comparisons with the AIDS epidemic). How are people constructing a mythology of COVID19 in real-time as the pandemic evolves? What does this mythology look like when talk becomes (re)action(s) and what does it say about the future? Using narrative analysis and conceptual metaphor theory, I examine how people employ metaphors (e.g. of illness, Sontag 1977), cultural scripts (e.g. of plague in Europe) and other linguistic world-building tools in their talk about their experiences and comprehensions of the virus. Following the arguments of Ochs (2012), I propose that talking about COVID19 is itself an experience of the virus, an experience that informs people’s understandings of their present circumstances and future possibilities.