My heart just broke.
For a solid forty hours it was all I could do to keep it from soaring out of range, from the magical story of Elodie and our brief but mutual admiration society, to the comments from the peanut gallery about the "petite's" magical abilities, to said magical abilities, appearing to, as if by magic (wink), make things work that we never really even expected to, were just trying on a hunch.
But something was beginning to falter as the stagiaire they handed me looked up at me with eyes brimming with admiration, working with the d�esse she'd heard so much about.
I didn't have the heart to set her straight, to tell her I don't have all the answers, that I don't even have enough questions to complete the spidery map in my narrow head.
The train ride was a rollercoaster of ebbing caffeine, dissipating stress, rising disappointment with no name to be banished by.
My escorts weren't at the train station, having finally listened to my indignant cries that I can get home just fine alone, finally getting used to my being away just as I was getting used to wanting to come back.
But that's just multicoloured melodrama to paint over the blood of the walls with.
On the m�tro platform, was when my heart finally broke open, when the usual platform brawl between drugged teenagers went too far.
Their screams, so rife with some inner agony, so utterly unfathomable to the blank staring face of the crowd, rang with some ululation that bit too hard, too sharp, too deep.
I stepped closer, too close for safety, maybe, returned some man's attempt at a sympathetic "I think they're stupid too" glance with a glare that I wish I could muster when m�tro men send me that other kind of glance.
The cops showed, the kids barely noticed, went on wailing in their streetkid agony, and my embers with them.
I boarded my car and shivered the way home, trying to call up triumphs from the past two days and letting them drop again, not wanting to sully them with this sudden, wanton, irrational grief.
I would never wish it on anyone to understand that agony (though I once did with all my hidden hearts), and yet somehow I wish that they all did, that mysterious, faceless they that would stop lashing out the moment they learned what the sting of those lashes still feels like a decade later.
My words are no longer reflecting my images, I am momentarily lost in my bubble.
Tomorrow I will attempt to tell the story of Elodie, the repertoire theatre, and why I got back to my hotel at midnight after a remarkably long chinese food dinner in Limoges.
For the moment, I am looking down the nose of several hundred e-mails, and seeing David's name amongst them, almost as many instances as onceuponatime when we were happiest, is sluicing through the gel of this nameless tremor with diamond teeth.
David, you are making my heart sing, my skin reverberate, almost as though you knew how much I needed to come home to it.
Thank you.
And to the receding ululation, I promise (myself, I guess) I will not forget, and I promise I will not spread it either, and to the rest of the world, thank you for not letting the sky fall while my shoulders were too bowed to catch it.
Demain, I will pluck the words back and piece them together.