It's a rollercoaster, as usual, only this time it's slightly wet and tilting not so subtly at all whenever an arm or a leg stops moving.
Telephone conversations are like HCl in a college chem lab, talking to my parents shows me how glad I am to be across an ocean, how glad I am to be so unarguably independent, how glad I am to be able to plan a life a year from now.
I left unfettered. I left with a suitcase of clothes and plans to return for a few techbooks and possibly a pair of mountain boots.
I left my furniture to other people, I left my car, and six years of accumulated stuff, years of books and papers and dishes and knicknacks and art and vases and a copper-bottomed wok.
That line of thought continues ad infinitum but wasn't my point.
Telephone conversations break me. They break the slowly building image in my head of who I am becoming. Talking to princess leaves an ache in my heart for her to hurry and join me, for us to start new lives together in a continent that still remembers the shape of the cobbles beneath the asphalt washed highways.
Talking to David, though... Reminds me that I don't feel like running forever. Reminds me that I want to stop, someday, and collect paintings for me walls.
Talking to David reminds me that along with the memory of the cobbles beneath the highway is two thousand years of fiefdoms and bloody wars and no matter how romantic the medieval princess image is... Kingdoms were not a great thing.
Talking to David makes me want to grit my teeth and hurry home, finish this project, learn what I have to learn, and find myself again somewhere where I don't have to constantly do internet searches if I want to find a certain bookstore, a bed, anything.
It's not fear so much as it is my tired bones speaking. I'm beginning to crave certain luxuries, the luxuries of not having to expend a certain amount of effort for things that simply aren't the focus of my life.
In Montreal, appartment hunting, bars, theatre, everything I enjoy is within such simple reach that it makes a difference, and I'm wondering if it's a worthwhile difference.
Sure, I can find everything here. I know it's here somewhere. Sure, I can even do it alone.
But I have half a decade left of my twenties, and so much else to do.
I came to Paris to learn beautiful things, to learn to be more beautiful in strength and in character and in the way I held myself. I came to Paris wondering if I could be like so many strong people who pursued lives outside of their home towns.
I came to Paris because I knew it would force me to make certain decisions that are all to easily put off with routine.
I am making them slowly, and opening up thousands of other questions in the process.
I have a year to answer them, perhaps only months, perhaps the remainder of this decade.
My answers will change, but because I want them to change, because I want to taste every seasoning.
And then I will do what everyone else does or perhaps I will do something different, but this will be an important memory, if nothing more.
And I can handle that.