"Monstre, you would've been so proud of me."
Patrice spent yesterday in Paris, at a training session with the GIP-CPS.
Apparently they asked him to stop asking such difficult questions too.
We've got a lot in common, the maniac Limougeos and I, and on top of it all, by 9am we had all of his impossible questions answered from RFCs, and common sense.
Good thing the training was complimentary, eh. Apparently Patrice taught them more about their own PKI policies than they had to share.
"All that stuff you taught me? They didn't even know."
A thirty-something brilliant man that I look up to every day, speaking with little boy awe. To me.
Talk about ending this project on a point of pride.
Ahh, and we're back to endings.
TU sais quoi? I'm not a mourner. I don't have the strength to pine. Granted, I feel the loss as poignantly as anything else, more so in direct proportion to my appreciation of it while I had it in my hands.
But I mourn once. Violently, intensely, with all the images of what I had and will no longer have, reviewing each sweet moment and promise and sweet point of pleasure marathon-style, all the while keening my own banshee ululation as I let each piece go, and keep only the memories.
I mourn once. It takes a night. The evening of tears and fists hurled into walls, and then a heavy, restless, vivid dream-charged sleep as I file the memories into place, the way you would break the little tabs off a videotape that you don't plan to record anything else onto. The way you close a CD-R when you don't plan to write anymore to it. The way you lock the door of your hotel room for the last time before heading down the stairs to hand in your key.
I mourned last week for Limoges, properly, proudly, I exulted and exalted in every aspect, so that I could wander in peace this week and appreciate my last sweet fragments.
But I am still mourning. With every year, I learn to let things become more important to me, more meaningful, I learn to love with entire new sections of myself, and so increase the pain as well as the appreciationg.
Hockey discussions over lunch, surprising myself with my knowledge of games, players, tidbits, some of it from discussing with David, some of it memories that I had hidden behind various Linux discussions.
Hockey discussions and the kids kept right on picking at each other, on me, the flung barbs delightfully stinging.
When I got up to leave, fingers coated in the chocolate I picked up last night, I wandered up the stairs with my head hanging.
I am still mourning. I don't want to leave.
People keep coming by before they leave for the weekend, for one last bise. They leave with tears in their eyes. I am swiftly on the way to getting dehydrated.
I slept very little last night, and the nightmares hovered over me with their cold phalanges drilling wormholes into my grey matter.
They shouldn't have been there. It makes no sense for them to have been there. Yesterday, I left work before 7pm, and walked from Isle (Limoges city limits) with the afternoon sun warming my flu-ridden shoulders all the way to the Halles of Limoges.
I didn't even need a map anymore, I kept the spire of the cathedral slightly to my right and far-too-swiftly fell upon the cobbled square and a restaurant I had never gotten around to trying.
Alone on the terasse, rather than pull out my SF novel or my documentation, it was an empty notebook that I didst spread 'pon my knees.
And I wrote. Pen to paper, head bent, fingers spasming, consciousness vaguely flapping in the breeze wondering where my mind had gone.
Prosciutto and sweet melon, entrec�te and sauce aux c�pes, courgette gratin�e, plat de fromages, fondant glac� aux deux chocolats, and a very generous 25cl of Cahors.
So much of it went cold, in the shadow of a flying felt-tip pen.
Wandering into my hotel room, I was too drunk on cold medication and red wine to think anymore, I watched fifteen minutes of "Ring" until the room stopped spinning (a horror movie right before bed, brilliant idea), grabbed a shower, and sat down on the bed, willing myself not to play the pathetic "this is the last time I'm going to..." game.
Instead, I read over my scribbles.
And scared the hell out of myself.
The story is one that I promised to write going on eleven years ago. It'll be eleven years in December.
(so many things to remember in December)
The story is three pages long so far, and we haven't even encountered the star that I'd promised to write the story for.
Oh no. We're still lost in memories that I'd submerged rather successfully until last night.
And they came back.
The way he touched me. I was eleven years old.
I'd forgotten. Utterly forgotten. My mind so rife with more worthwhile things.
I'm still too terrified to put any more words into it now, and the pages glowing dully through my backpack lining directly into my mind's eye...
Are terrifying me too.
But only until I figure out why the hell I'm so scared. Why I had to remember that now.
Maybe it's the stress. Leaving Limoges, the headcold, and as David put it (and greatly bolstering my sanity) "it's almost like you're working two full time jobs".
Yesterday afternoon I was hating myself for beginning to feel worn out with the pressure. I was feeling like a failure. I was angry and violent inside my wee head, screaming with much my father's voice that I'll never be good enough, that I'll never be able to accomplish as much as a few of the people I've had the opportunity to work with and look up to.
I can be really stupid sometimes.
Thank you David.
As for my nightmares, perhaps it is simply time to heal those parts of my past too, maybe I've come far enough for that.
As for leaving Limoges, I am in mourning again and will shed tears in the train very unprofessionally, and very un-jetsetterlike, and I will revel in the opportunity to feel and care so deeply.
But first, I gotta wrap up this project.