Hair tightly braided hanging down my back, because I just didn't want to get out of bed this morning, and the knots just don't come out without a hardy washing.
Hooray for curly hair.
Working like some sort of bezerk beast, knowing it will be over soon.
Colleagues voicing strange opinions of my leaving, I am trying not to listen.
Lunch out with Martine and Anne and Anna Maria, an entire bottle of Brouilly amongst three of us and mango-and-shrimp delicacies and spicy beef and ivory white noodles.
Martine's leaving for vacation tomorrow so today was the only goodbye I particularly felt like making.
She's fifty but she's like my big sister, full of a familiar mischief, filled with the same slightly off-kilter truths.
I had no idea she felt the same way. Her e-mail inviting me over to her house in la campagne for barbecues and a chance to box her twenty-something son about the ears was the sweetest thing.
I gave her my hippopotamus finger puppet that she'd crowed over, to talk to when she started aching for intelligent conversation.
Stepping out of her warm car far too late into the evening, and hopping down the steps into the metro, some man jumped me from behind in the turnstiles.
Arm about my kneck, hand delving into my bag.
A twist of the hips and a push with my elbow and he was on the ground shouting obscenities.
I don't think that I will miss the neighbourhood.
The fluidity of the twist and marching forward without a backward glance to see if I'd hurt him is weird. Just... weird.
I tell myself that I am not bothered as much by this time as last time because the implication was not so invasive, not because I have gone colder inside.
Mapie just called to tell me that I am an angel and that her life has become sunlight since I came into it.
Such words do not belong in the same plane as "Gila I need this document by Friday."
Such words are what make lives meaningful.
Such words are great gifts.