I don't have enough words in any languages to describe the mountains, but I'm going to ramble until I've gotten enough of it down to send the pictures reeling through my head again.
From now on whenever someone tells me they snowboard, I will look at them a moment longer with a profound appreciation for their beginnings.
Strapping my second foot to that damned board-of-pain and my abductors were aching already, the too-wide-spread stance nothing at all like the skateboarding they'd compared it to.
My biceps hurt from trying to push myself up, my ass hurts from hitting the ground so hard, the back of my tender skull still swooning from the losing battle it fought with the ice whenever I fell too hard, too fast. My neck is stiffer than most stiff things (insert your own perverse imagery there), from the recoil and quite possibly from falling asleep in the car on the ride home.
I don't even have the strength to stand up on the damned thing, let alone manouever it anywhere.
But I tried. I might not try again in two weeks at Chamonix because my body just doesn't seem ready, but I'll try again one day and actually make it to the bottom of a bunny hill.
A bunny hill.
I have no idea where to start on the rest of it.
The apprehension at the thick quebecois accents as we met up at the gare, that turned into roaring laugther towards the end of the weekend when I started to understand their random spurts of hilarity, gods I miss random canadian humour; the way Pat would suddenly peer at anything and dissolve into a mess of giggles and turn that car or that skier or that particular mountain crest into a spectacular moment.
I have no strength to describe Tuan's behaviour, my naive belief that his friendliness was sincere, that his offer to loan me his wife's ski boots a generous thing. His insistence later on that I should be alllll into a one night stand, that I'm too young to be so faithful to David, so many words that left me shaking in my narrow hotel-bed.
The way he turned it all around on Sunday morning and announced that I was picking fights with him in the hotel room that night.
I have to admit, though, that sometimes luxury is something to be appreciated, that opening the blinds at seven in the morning to steal the thin air on a balcony two thousand meters up the side of a mountain...
Or wandering out the hotel doors to rent skis and step directly onto the mountain at the base of a chair lift...
I skied the alps.
Legs burning, never having exerted such a continuous effort on the lovely but tiny ski hills back home, we stopped often to drown in the sharp, shining peaks around us. Nearly an hour of gondola rides to the top, three thousand meters up, we skied down to the bottom, nearly two kilometers VERTICALLY, ending with an "expert run".
It took forever, glorious hours spent simply descending, lost amongst the hundreds of winding paths and forks and lifts and directions.
I can't believe I skied an expert run in the alps.
I can't believe that I laughed my way down the intermediate runs, that I remembered this or that glide technique, this or that way of blocking one knee behind the other to push my parallel on the "reds" - black diamonds back home but all the more intimidating surrounded by cliffs and valleys and perfect skiers.
The occasional turret peering out at us from hilltops on the ride there, the winding steep road that took us up, up the side of the mountain, the trees growing spindlier, the paysages dropping away into shades of the sunset.
This is such a beautiful country. Magnificent where the manicured lawns of pretentious paris give way to the rolling wilds, the way the stars shine so many kilometers up through the thin air, far from the light and smog of the streets I reluctantly returned to last night.
The way the world looks so brilliant from so high up, other peaks fading into the bright blue distance, villages a gathering of red-thatched rooftops, so friendly from so far away, the dirty pharmacy signs and cluttered stores invisible from great heights.
There is something in seasides, I will admit, something in the tang of the brine before dawn, the great blue expanse and wind stinging salt onto your cheeks.
But the mountains... THe mountains are glory. The mountains are where my heart soars with the heights, where my cheeks become ruddy with the life in my veins.
It is in the mountains, racing down the slopes or losing my breath on this or that outcropping, impossible peaks rising past me and dropping beneath my feet.
_____
Part of this weekend was in preparation for the six-hour descent in Chamonix on the 22nd-24th of this month.
There is a message on my phone saying "please come by to sign that contract for the Limoges position"...
The first two-day period of which is the 21st-22nd of March.
When everyone will be leaving on the ski trip that I've been waiting since January for.
Maybe I'll take the train up to meet them. Soon as my e-mail server is responding again, I'll try to organize that.
In the meantime, there is laundry to do, a dinner party to plan for tomorrow, people to call back and coordinate with...
And throughout it all, there are mountains dizzying in the back of my head, the sting of the cold air driving me to move.