I have a new dress. Princess is going to love it. So are most of the straight men and gay women I know if I don't learn to stop bending over like that in it.
I wore my new dress to a dinner party, at Sophie's, she lives ten minutes march up Montmartres, and this is the first time I've been there.
Just me and Sophie and Seb passed out on the futon, Sophie and I sat and talked of all the little things, the first time we dealt with someone's heroin problem, someone's alcohol problem, the first time we found ourselves fifteen and afraid in streets that no longer seem quite so large and quite so imposing.
I'm prattling. I have half a bottle of wine in me, Steven's voice still buzzing in my ear, and I'm not terrified anymore, but I'm not in my right mind either.
You see, I'm good at a very lot of impossible things. Learn something? No problem. Feat of strength? Believe in the improbable, impossible, fey or otherwise? Insanity? Madness that often gets mistaken for courage?
Nooooo problem.
But ever since I learned to stop saying NO! while spitting scalding vitriol at anything bipedal...
I've had a hard time saying no at all.
And it's not jewish guilt. It's an entirely different sort of guilt.
It's an acknowledgement of how much pain I've seen, and how much of it I've caused, and never, ever, wanting to see it cloud a face in front of me again.
So today when the CEO burst into tears because they didn't want to lose me, when Roxanne suddenly looked like a lost little girl, having gone to impossible trouble to get me that Nantes offer, to make it something SO MUCH LESS SHIT than some of the jobs I've been on for these guys.. When she told me how Nicolas pulled ever three-bit-buzzword out of his considerable vocabulary just to get me the damned job...
When I saw how excited she was to be writing down the details for me in three different coloured pens...
And I looked at her with the eyes of someone who's already begun saying goodbye to the narrow cobbled streets of my life these past months...
Tomorrow I have to call her and tell her that despite her protests, her optimism, her support, her enthusiasm, despite all the work she's done and the trouble she's gone to...
I have to say no.
It doesn't suit my career path, for one, and I don't want to find myself unemployed over Christmas when nobody is hiring.
Trudging home, I was ready to start banging my head against sharp objects.
An hour on the phone with Mr. Pyke, poor guy obliged to listen the yearly event when a monstre loses it and does nothing but whine whine whine... And I was standing a little straighter.
Running out the door, late for dinner and good conversation and tears and laughter and surprisingly good wine from the back of my collection, and I came home and there was an email from Steven, the friend who's been through every single of my chaotic WHERE DO I GO NOW moments.
Another half hour on the phone, and that's it.
I can do this. Tomorrow I will put on my kindest voice and tell Roxanne how much I love her and then tell her NO and then ask to speak to Johanne who I already know is going to be very belligerent, and find out when I can book my plane ticket.
The hardest part is over. Everything that's left is just picking up my life, crying my goodbyes, remembering to transfer all my funds to all the right places, check off the eight billion bits of paper, meet with my lawyer to negotiate getting my appartment deposit back, liquidate anything too large or ungainly to ship
and hop a plane
for North America
and pledge, through the tears that I will be fortunate enough to be feeling
to never, ever, lose the lessons that I came here to learn.
I'm not a european, I'm not an american, I hug like a canadian and drink beer like a german, and most importantly
I will never, ever forget.
All that's left now is the easy stuff.
Goodbye lamp-post. Goodbye park. Goodbye bakery and Sunday market, goodbye Montmartres and Montparnasse, goodbye the ability to hop a train for fifty bucks for nearly any city, goodbye first family that I have ever respected, goodbye to the thousand things I haven't done yet but will find the way to do anyway, the people I haven't visited, the alps I haven't climbed, Africa so nearby, goodbye the perfect cave � vins and finding the perfect wine bottle, goodbye to the travellers and multilinguists and things that rang familiar which I needed so badly to believe in
Goodbye to a thousand pains and a thousand pure joys
and hail and well met new challenge.
At least with a challenge, I know what I'm facing.
And with a challenge, I know everyone's going to come out smiling, laughing, clutching their bellies and
I have a thousand doubts
but to me, that only means that I'm still alert enough to be questioning.
Lots and lots of questioning.
But that, I've always done and always will and while over-introspection seems to be a considered an unlawful thing in today's turn-a-blinde-eye global society,
it's gotten me here
and here is beautiful. Wherever I am.