Night One-Hundred and Seventeen

halfway

I flew back to France on the halfway day – night one-hundred and eleven (and a half), and spent the following week in a semi-conscious, time zone-shift-induced twilight. My body showed up in classrooms and bought itself 40-cent staff room cappuccinos and had conversations with people, but my brain remained hovering somewhere off the eastern seaboard. My heart, predictably, refused to let me jerk it around anymore and decided to stay behind.

But it’s Sunday now, the sun came out today, and my cells seem to have gathered themselves back together. It’s been unusually quiet here in on the quatrième étage this week. We are all trying to absorb, I think, the strange familiarity of this once exotic place, to take stock of the first half and hold it up against our prior expectations, to make a map of the second half that we hope will deliver us satisfactorily where we want to be when it’s all done.

Carmen and I went to Marseille yesterday to see the Van Gogh/Monticelli exhibit. Afterward, we sat at the Vieux Port and ate moules frites and drank too much, stumbled into a huge demonstration against Israel, got lost, got chased down the street by a kindly gas station attendant who had given us the wrong directions, finally made it back to the train station on the metro, fell asleep waiting and almost missed our bus back to Manosque, and dozed as we trundled back home, the city giving way to vineyards and villages. I keep forgetting to take pictures of that bus ride, but sometime in the next hundred and six nights, I promise, I’ll remember.