Shaking off bad feelings

Usually when I get off the plane at Charles de Gaulle, there is a tremendous relief at being on my home continent, a chance to heal, but this time, I carried the heaviness with me despite the warm greeting of my friend and former neighbour where I was staying for a couple of days before finally heading home.

The evening was especially nice as we ate freshly prepared Syrian food and shared a conversation with two of her friends, one whom I had met before and whose family I have come to like from my Damascus visits. The conversation, as always with them, touched on politics, religion, medicine (I was the only non medical student), families, literature, history nourishing me a little.

When I collapsed into bed, the same feeling of having come back from a pummelling stayed with me, although I wouldn’t have traded the time with loved ones for anything.

Walking to the ATM and La Defense did nothing to lighten my mood. The same streets I usually strut with pleasure because I am in Paris and it is ordinary not a once in a lifetime experience to be there looked dreary.

I was the only one at the SNCF office and the clerk who waited on me was in a joking mood practising his English with a word or two among his French. He asked my nationality. I told him to guess. He didn’t. Only when I pulled out my Swiss identity card did he believe me. I did admit that I had grown up in the States and had started to learn French very late.

With my ticket for my nest safely in my hand, I walked back through the concourse and back to the flat. Even though it was raining, everything seemed alive again, I had left the depression back at the SNCF office. It has stayed there.