I never notice that I've disappeared into myself until I venture out again.
Yesterday, I spent the afternoon at la Defense arguing money, and I didn't like it at all, but when I coughed up the courage to wander down the hall to Nicolas' office, his red eyes and trembling hands calmed me somehow, and the slight pang of guilt was assuaged quickly when I found out that those documents he'd been screaming for, had yelled at me for, and that I had consequently lost a fair amount of sleep and functionality over, hadn't made it out of his inbox yet.
So all tension is off until we talk about them on Friday.
Wandering home in the evening, pushing time to go to the grocery store and stock up on the most delicious lunch that I just wolfed down, I was interacting with the space around me again.
I scared the hell out of one guy, asking him for his panier that he'd just emptied, because there were no stacks of them left. I grinned at him and skipped up the stairs to the "preserved goods" floor powered by the grin I'd conjured back.
I knew all too well how it felt for him just then, to have sudden cause to snap out of a little grey bubble and be forced to smile.
Later, at the cash, there was a man behind me with nothing but a bottle of wine. I asked him if he wanted to go ahead of me rather than wait for my pile of vegetables to be weighed.
He couldn't stop grinning either, shocked somehow, filled with the strangest little compliments bursting out the edges of his straining cheeks.
Somehow, later on, discussing this with David, it was even greater to find out that this is a common occurrence back in Montreal, that my experiences there of being run over in checkout lines was misfortune rather than commonality.
I learned the habit here, in line at some other grocery store, on a terrible day, head filled with dark pounding things, and everyone seemed to go out of their way to help me with the apples I'd spilled all over the floor, or to let me ahead of them since I seem to pressed for time, and on and forth.
Head filled with that memory and the lesson I'd learned I was heading for the door of the grocery store.
It swung back and crashed into my own wine bottle, the man who'd left through it far too quickly hadn't seen me coming.
He was so apologetic, it seemed to snap him out of his unfortunate daze too, and we chatted as he insisted on helping me carry my load.
There was a fourth man on that list, who crossed paths with me on the street, his intense eyes seeming to jar him somehow as we crossed glances on our trundling way.
Normally, when you make eye contact here, you say bonjour. For some reason, neither of us broke that spell and we just kept walking, looking at each other.
Coming home on the last metro last night, we crossed paths again, he was in different clothing and in a different part of the quartier, but I recognized those eyes and we jumped again.
The most beautiful part was that I was awake and aware enough of the world to notice all these things.
My daze, momentarily, is over, I have the strength to call Sebastien again, and this afternoon, I'm heading to the bank to do take care of errands I haven't done in too long, then I'm going to this tiny park I discovered not far from there to read and sunburn my legs, and then I'm going to call Maja and see if we can play with the echo in the walls of the conservatory, and maybe head out after.
None of this is particularly exciting, but it feels alive again, and somehow I'd lost sight of that feeling. I'd been wandering with my head between my knees, and my back is creaking with the force of standing upright, but that creak is music.