To be or not to be, to follow the instructions of the people promising a paycheck, to behave by rote and utter the words they've planned for me, and wear the ironed blouses they've laid out for me, to sneak my earrings back in at night so that the holes don't close, knowing full well that one day they might?
If I shut off my heart I will stay here and flourish, I will join the Judo club I found on the corner with my first paycheck, I will earn money and eat better and cook more often and read better books and memorize new cobblestones.
I will be admired and liked and I will find new music and new origami patterns, I will visit a family nominated for nobel prizes in thermodynamics and on the side I will secretly admire them for not eating meat and spending all their time climbing mountains.
It all sounds so perfect, just like I'd planned it, my two-year plan falling perfectly into place.
And I will not let my heart interfere. I didn't go to Waterloo, for love. I turned down the best offer I've ever had for education, for love.
And now, now I am looking for any hole, any problem, I am looking at the empty eyes of people who've gone blind living in a city too big for their tiny hearts, I am looking at the financial district that I will have to work in, I am looking at the company that I agreed to consult for, and I'm looking for holes.
Part of it is simple stress, two days not enough to have cut all my ties and steeled my girders with the leftovers.
Part of it is how every naked shoulder on the television that my roommate always has running, part of every romantic thought, moment, every photograph of lovers kissing on a streetcorner reminds me of him.
His lips, his arms, his perfect shoulders and perfectly satisfied smile, his voice more beautiful than any I've heard yet or since...
Maybe I'll be back in a year and we'll take up again, maybe his girls will forget me. Maybe, maybe, I've survived worse and back then when it was all about survival I would have told myself to accept the next offer I get on the way home from bored young men in the suburban streets and get myself laid.
Stop looking at his picture, stop looking at his inscription in your address book, stop thinking of the thundering in your heart when he discovered what it meant to appreciate poetry and thanked you, you for it.
Stop crying at your desk, you'll ruin the leather and you have work to do.
No, Paris isn't the quiet paysan France that you remembered and yearned to move back to, but you're here now, you have work to do, and vertebrae to beat into calcified diamonds.