Heavy Thoughts.

There was something not right with me yesterday. There was something so off balance that even my three year old students noticed it when they commented on how abnormally tranquille I was. I too was aware of it. I figured it was just a cocktail of mid-winter blues chased with day one of my monthly lady dues that was making me feel so drained, heavy and sad. This isn't my usual reaction for this time of the month, but these days I'm open to any changes as I'm growing into a new decade of my life.

Coming home, I made a pot of tea and flopped onto my bed to re-watch season two of Bored to Death, a show that oddly enough, I find comfort in. When Seb came home and saw me curled up with my childhood Little Mermaid blanket that still smells like my mom's house, and that is only pulled out from the top closet in cases of extreme emergencies, he grew concerned. I had no answers for him. I just felt that something was wrong, something was profoundly weighing on me. But since I couldn't detect its origins I just needed to let it pass. This was going way beyond needing to adjust to couples life...something was not right... This morning, after coming home from my morning run, before rinsing off in the shower I decided to check Facebook to see if Seb was on to let him know that we received our first RSVP to the wedding. Upon signing in I read that Ginger had her baby! This news after a four mile run immediately perked me up, and felt the blues from the night before melting away... And then I scrolled down further... ....and this is when I learned that my 55 year old uncle had passed away in the middle of the night. I experienced this sort of thing the morning my father passed away. Something felt terribly wrong the 24 hours before, but because it was my own father, I knew where my anguish was coming from. I had spent that morning working my 6 am shift at the Hollywood coffee shop waiting for the phone to ring, with instructions from my mom to come back home for the forth time that month. Facebook is hardly the place where anyone would want to discover such news (nor is a Hollywood diner), but this is one of the sacrifices of living away from your family. Important news gets passed on through e-mails and in this case, Facebook statuses.  Feeling completely disoriented, I needed to speak to someone at once. I turned my ancient Nokia phone on and desperately tried to access my phonebook to get in touch with Eric, my uncle's driver here in Paris whom I hadn't spoken to in over a year. I couldn't get to my phone book because notices that I had unread text messages waiting for me kept freezing my phone up. They were most likely from the parents of my students telling me one is sick or one will be picked up early for a weekend family trip. Every Friday I get flooded with instructions from them via text. I didn't care about the minutia details of my student's Switzerland weekend getaways at that very moment. I needed to speak to Eric; someone who over the years became a good friend to my uncle here in Paris. I finally got him on the phone and just broke down. From the tone of his voice I knew that I didn't have to say explain because he understood exactly why I was calling. Yes, my uncle was in a lot of pain and we knew that this was inevitable but that doesn't make it easier. It used to infuriate me to boiling levels when people would tell me that I shouldn't be too sad over the death of my father because I already knew he was sick. That doesn't make it easier. Having experienced both sudden and drawn out deaths, neither of them are "easier". When I got off the phone with Eric, I retrieved the naggy text messages from the parents...but they weren't from them. They were in fact texts sent earlier this morning from Eric (who doesn't have any connections with the other members of my family in the States). He too felt something was wrong and was checking in, because my uncle was on his mind. This truly happened and it tells me one thing: my uncle made a pit stop here in Paris before going...

It makes sense, he always loved this place.