Only 120 days are gone and yet it seems like in another life when I opened the door to that little studio in La Petite France and found a cute and messy room which belonged to a graphic artist. It was the 8th of July, the day I moved to Strasbourg. From the first glance I loved that studio and I loved the fact that it was a temporary place. I lived like a real vagabonde. I didn’t have to think about any housekeeping issue. I didn’t have a TV, so every evening I would come home, open a bottle of beer, or take a glass of white Alsacian wine, and start chatting with my friend in Chicago. She was heavily pregnant and bed-bound. No alcohol for her, but we were both happy to find each other and spend sometime chatting about all and anything. Everyday I would tell her about my lab stories, what new things I had learned, what I had discovered in the city, how my search for a new apartment was advancing and my ever present personal dilemmas.  In return, she would tell me about her visits to the doctor, about the state of the twins. She would show me the stuff she had bought for them, and she talked about her projects for the future. With her help, I chose my permanent apartment and I managed to smoothly go though my transition without feeling too lonely.

Since I have moved from the US I have been skyping with her and few other friends on regular basis. It sometimes feels that we are all still in Providence, gathered in my apartment for a dinner and we chat about our daily lives. I know how their new houses look, I know how their current haircuts are, how fat or thin they have become, etc. But more that that, remotely we have kept each other company in happy moments as well as sad ones. We have been connected as we would have been if we were in the same place, and I can not say how much I have appreciate their presence in my life in the past few months.

My summer Skype ritual with my pregnant friend continued until the twins arrived. She even skyped me from the hospital to give me the news. I thought she was crazy. Then all stopped as expected. From time to time, she would appear for few minutes to show me the babies and disappear again. In one latest mini-chat, when one of the babies was falling asleep and the other one about to wake up, she buzzed me.  “We have five minutes to talk”, she said. I asked her how she was holding up and how was the sleeping situation. The answers were marked on her face. Then it was her turn. She asked how I was doing and how my job was going. “All is well, more or less”, I answered. Then out of the blue she asked: “Do you still miss him?”.

I paused for few seconds. A banal question to which I knew the answer, and yet I was not prepared for it. I looked away from the little embeded camera on my MacBook. Dr. Lightman from Lie to me would diagnose “discomfort”. In these few seconds I realized that no one else asks me this question. “Yes, I do miss him, very much”, I replied finally by lowering my eyes and looking at my keyboard.

After this short Skype, I felt a gratitude, a profound connection which I didn’t know existed between us. There was no judgment, no prescription to what I should do. Just a simple question that showed her sensitivity to my current life. It meant a lot more, because her mindset is not at all like mine. She is the pragmatic reasonable person who closes a chapter and moves on. Probably for her, my stories past and present, are completely incomprehensible and a waste of time and nonetheless, she has her way of letting me be. She then smiles and says: “You are a teenager”, and I nod and reply that I know. I still even have kept my acnes.