I can't find my screwdriver.
The one I use to pry open the lid on my head and do a core-dump of the contents on regular occasion.
Going on two in the morning I was desperate for any sharp-edged tool to make some room in the swirling masses, so much input from so many people, so much of it grandiose to the point of dwarfing each of Paris' opera houses even if they were piled atop each other.
Andy's presentation of soul theory, something I'd never atrributed brain space to before. Mr. Pyke's constant influx of... Well, I wouldn't know where to begin the list.
Seventeen e-mails from headhunters across the globe. No job offers per say, but the contact has begun.
And Colette. Colette who appeared in my inbox from Edmonton, having gotten my email address from a "friend" that I think I've had lunch with twice in two different cities for a grand total of the time we've spent together.
But she's a wanderer too. She flipped her lid in Edmonton and found herself in Montreal, then Paris, is crashing chez moi until Sunday, then off to Belgium then A'dam then possibly Brazil or some other place. She's lived in New Zealand and Malaysia and India.
At some point after helping me lug groceries, being very polite about eating the salmon-ros� sauce on gnocchi and wiping her plate clean with bread, the half-bottle of St-Emillion clutched at our brains and the millefeuilles and bitter coffee kept us from the Lapin Agile and talking well into the morning.
Talk of work, and consulting, and the fearlessness we see in each other, of sex and men we nearly shared across various cities.
Conversations I would have never expected to have in my life, connections that appeared in midair with an audible pop, and left me wondering when I became so similar to the person I could so easily admire sitting across from me.
When she turned to me and said she couldn't believe I'd done "all that", I was on the verge of rolling out the same words.
There was a quiet pleasuring of the ego in that.
Seb stopped by with that roll of film and to ask me to translate his e-mail (some people have been harassing him in english), pranced out after harassing both of us to go camping with the gang for the weekend, and then talk turned serious.
I presented geekslut's theory that wanderlust is genetic somehow, putting forth that I thought perhaps it can get to the point of being a disease, and how some part of me is desperate to find that warm glow of home somewhere and refine moving about the globe to an occasional exploration, not a career in running away.
"That's what I said when I was twenty five".
Five years later she's gallivanting about the globe again, running away from a fallen fiancialle, from a small town, playing marbles with the planet again.
But we agreed that this is different. That fucking off for a few months with a backpack isn't running away, it's just running. Running to feel the wind scream and the earth shudder, running so that when you stop you never lose the feeling of movement.
We agreed that her wanderlust is different from mine, that while she counts her time as a series of relationships, I count mine as a series of epiphanies.
We also agreed that maybe my current wanderlust was a growth spurt that I needed, that when we spoke of mayonnaise and english cream and salad dressing, and that I don't have any in my fridge, that I came here to pick up the habit of making them myself when I needed them.
When I left France in 1998, I left behind scrolls unread, that haunted my dreams until I returned, little things like learning to cook beyond pasta and pushing myself to a different brink of independence, to break patterns that I'd mistakenly woven when I moved out too early and too fast.
Now, feeling my soul's scream paling with every missing tree, I've read and instinctualized each one of those scrolls, and I'm ready to leave.
And I know that I am running, but I do not believe that I will be doing it forever. Always moving, always racing barefoot in the great plains of discovery, but perhaps, I have learned enough about how to learn and how to run and how to feel and love and scream without anger, to urge myself on without the crutch that is such drastic measures as fucking off for new towns and continents in order to create material challenges.
And perhaps I believe that today. It resounds properly, echoing between my eardrums like a pure note, and perhaps I believe that while I was a runaway a decade ago, that I have finally found the peace to stop running, and begin dancing.
I do believe that, and I did before today, and I did before the spring brought change and chaos and a new world order.
Yesterday, however, hearing her say "that's what I said when I was twenty five" frightened me enough for me to try to hash it out in my head, in words.
But I am unafraid. I've hashed this out enough times now.
I'm ready for another growth spurt, with or without extreme garnishings.