Written 15 January 2010 at 11;35 am Montpellier Time

I am glad I waited till today to write a blog. I can tell my story as a detached outsider looking back in time at a pitiful, distraught, and pained young man without being him, without being the story, as a mediator with a keyboard writing to mend the incongruence of yesterday's passion and pain with today's more settled perspective and outlook. The melancholic mists of despair dissipated with the night's rest and the morning's coffee and rising sun; I can be my own judge today, can escape being the prey of my fears and loneliness.

The fatigue of overseas travel will be my scapegoat, for I choose not to think I can be as emotional as I was yesterday without a dose of extraordinary circumstance. Nonetheless, I felt as if my world had fallen apart. Lonely, pathetic, miserable, disheartened, I moped from flight to flight, train to train, hoping for an invisible hand of fate to come down from the skies, scoop me up and drop me back in my home with friends and family. Needless to say, the hand of my escape never heard my cry for help, either taking a day off or being too busy with others in more desperate situations, I arrived at my planned destination last night at 7:30. I couldn't and can't help how I felt. I tell myself to stop each time, to be a man, to stiffen the upper lip and take what is on my plate without grimace or reservation. Each time, I am swept away by the moment, by the loss of those I left and will not see for some time. I know the time is not long and the situation I go into is not horrible, but it is not home and it is not with the ones I love, therefore, I come kicking and screaming. The frenchmen and women I see along my way become the handlers and creators of my pain, I glare at them with spite and malice, asking myself why I would want to leave loved ones in favor of the company of such miscreants. I tell myself the feeling will pass, tomorrow and the next day will be better, but, in the moment, I seem to be stuck in a quick sand of sadness that will not leave until it has sucked every last ounce of life out of me. This is how I felt; I can't claim it as mature or reasonable, it is what it is and will be how it is as long as I have leave those I love.

I feel better today, a little less lonely, a little more occupied by what I want to accomplish here, and, overall, like the French. I grew and grow to hate the feeling of yesterday, the way I am each time I leave my home. I wish it was as I feel today as part of a new chapter, the inevitable turn of a page at the end of another that creates a more beautiful, full, and better story.