"Mademoiselle je conseille que vous recommencez � fumer, �a va vous baisser la tension arterielle."
No wonder ze french don't trust their doctors.
I'm a touch worried nonetheless that my carefully watched blood pressure has somehow skipped treacherously from the habitual oscillating between 120 and 130 all the way to 160 in four short, and I thought stable, months.
Four months in which I've stopped smoking, overeating (as much), have doubled my physical activity, dropped a healthy handful of kilos and more importantly tasted even more deeply of the value of my extended, adopted, awe-inspiring family. This has a great calming effect when you realize that to have so many cherished friends you must have done something right. Suddenly other looming failures are a lot less debilitating with the abject fear of admitting weakness.
My cholesterol's fine, no traces of gl-anything in my blood (diabetes from being way too fat running rampant in ma famille), the usual droplets of blood in my urine test and last time they told me it was cancer this time it's my kidneys that are failing.
There's always been traces of hemoglobin in my urine. C'est tout.
These are the sorts of details that made listening to my parents' hypochondriac fantasies into the carbonite reinforcements of my careful belief in my own indestructible nature, and the flashing red digits of a blood pressure result is enough to have me wondering.
I'm only twenty five. Has it begun? Is my body deteriorating? Just as I was getting it into the sort of shape I needed it to be for my strongest years and here some madman is telling me that pushing too hard too fast too hard too fast for the last decade is having the results I once masochistically hoped they would.
Not that it matters. The simplest way to catch my breath down from the jagged spikes it has ridden on all morning is
to get used to the idea that I'm going to have to learn to sound on-the-ball without a ten-espresso blood content
and to remember this weekend, with the drunken welcoming roar of my unsure high-heeled-ballgowned figure at the Christmas party on Friday evening, where Arn� turned out the perfect gentleman-escort-just-friend and ended up even more perfectly stunned by the sheer departure from "polite paris society" that is a handful of drunken k�b�kois.
I'd warned him that I was the epitome of a lady en comportement by comparison.
No one believes me when I say that... ;)
It felt oddly good to pull out the make-up brushes and silver eyepowder again, goth nights were once my escape into perfumes and powders and long filmy dresses.
And borrowed silver jewelry that clanged melodically against the other artillery in my ears.
Alright, I'm admitting it now.
Maybe I like it just a little bit, like the feel of grabbing my mane of yellow fury and twisting it up into a romantic sweeping mass that lenthens the shadows of my cheekbones.
Maybe I like the quiet gasps of people so accustomed to not-so-tattered anymore jeans hiding the curve of my waist.
Saturday morning begat the giggle marathon, resulting in a Sunday afternoon comment that "it just doesn't feel right until you hear her laugh" as immediately becoming another notch on the list of "compliments that matter".
Pierre, arriving from several hops about Paris on his weekend up from Marseilles, his maniac hair as gone as my purple-and-blue stripes of that summer and both our early-20s awkwardnesses.
But the heart is even more evident in him, pounding thunderous as the way he has always been more alive than life.
Talk of serious and not so serious things always punctuated by honest laughter, stalking Montmartres in a cloud of reminiscences, trailing into a hidden cornerside pub with frozen ears and a thirst for Chimay Bleu, overhearing the intellectualization of the definition of a masochist, by two men who've understood more from life than the bourgeois masses they've spent fifty years cleaning the radioactive dogshit-painted gutters for.
Promising myself to always remember the ambiance of the dinner we shared at my tiny caf� table, to always seek to recreate it the feel of my kitchen these last months, whichever city I keep my towel in.
The shy "are you going to hit me if I tell you that you have a wonderful kitchen because it's a gurl thing" compliments to the port and wine and salads and shrimp-and-ros�, hands slowly remembering the most efficient way to chop an onion turning a half hour's effort into a celebration, were a new thing to me.
The Roblochon I'd bundled home for eight francs at the march� on my wayward ramble earlier Friday evening went wonderfully with the wine, and introduced the home-made sherry with the grace of a ma�tre MC.
Heading out on the last past-midnight m�tro with all that alcohol in our blood to meet the rollerblading kids in a surfboy caf� near Les Halles may not have been the most intelligent thing ever, and the too-cheap litre of beer tuned the pitch of my giggles an octave higher than I am entirely comfortable with.
Sleeping in until noon was a new thing too, and waking up just a half hour before the illustrious guest and enough time to wander out to this boulangerie and that patisserie so that we could share a coffee-perfumed breakfast (I refuse to give up my coffee on Sundays) in a sunbeam.
Remembering complex-fold origami and seeing his bundled energy back off to the train station before Hannukah dinner with the family, where Michel told stories urged on by his 35-but-looks-20 year old daughter H�l�ne and corrected by his 90-something-year-old mother Jaja so often that the rest of us "kids" laughed as much at the production of telling as the moral itself with it's tiny kittens and tinier cakes.
Apparently today is my birthday on the Hebrew calendar. I can't even remember what date that is... What months is it now? Hav? Is that even the name of a month or is eleven years of jew school finally a schlerotic smear on my conscious mind?
The warmth of those three generations has my heart crying to experience such a thing as a tri-generation family dinner as an active contributor, and not a generously invited guest. This palpable desperation worries me.
The telephone rang a hundred times last night, from the moment I leaned my head against the cream and black of the sheets, and every jarring tug from my dreams was a loving embrace from so many of you.
I am working on fixing all of it.