The highlight of my life

So I left you last with a cliffhanger of sorts...what do I regret the most was the question du jour. I haven't really been able to pull myself back here to the keyboard to type out the answer to that. Mostly because it seems so...trivial...juvenile...and...outdated.

I guess I'll just be out with it then. But first, I think a section change would be appropriate right about now.

~How I feel About Paris Today~

I regret leaving Paris. I know, I should be zen and accepting of my life in the past 7 years. And I am...for the most part. I understand the monumental importance of coming back here to the states and more deeply planting my roots. Sometimes, however, I just can't help but wonder about the what-ifs. What if I had stayed and taken the job working for the American family in St. Germain...what if I had not gone off my au pair visa and moved on into a student visa and then graduated and become a grown-up in between? What if I didn't comeback and eventually end up driving around in my big red truck and I didn't own a slate cheese plate and have to order lavender products online because I went to the south of france in the summers and picked my lavender up there? What if??????

This is the regret cycle I find myself in the middle of. To answer my own question...If I had stayed, taken the job and the studio, moved on to the student visa and eventually a different job...maybe some guy...I wouldn't have the slate cheese plate or the big red truck or the moments I've spent with my father in south Georgia.

I wouldn't feel so close to my sisters and mothers. I wouldn't have Hugo or Harmony or Kate or Marian or Bianca or Branka or Fernando or all of the other names.

I wouldn't have been a bride's maid in Marie's wedding. I wouldn't have left Paco on the eve of Kate's wedding. I wouldn't have raised my dog into her old age or been present for the birth of Atlas or Riley.

I wouldn't have ventured to see Coleman in the hospital and Kate in that hospital gown. I wouldn't have planted the garden with my father and maybe never connected my love for produce back to him.

I wouldn't have eaten at Trois with my mother and probably we would have never done that Sunday brunch at the little pizzeria, drinking mimosa's in the Late February morning sun in Atlantic Beach.

Hugo would have never told me that he felt so lucky because out of all of the people in all of the world he got to choose exactly the right one to fall in love with. We would have never traveled to Mexico or Miami together and I might not have ever dragged anyone else to see that castle in the Alps or get stuck with me on standby in Frankfurt.

I wouldn't have zipped through a jungle in Costa Rica or cooked that one precious dinner of plantains and rice in Puerto Viejo with Cayla.

I wouldn't have been the one to take Chelsea to the airport to take leave of us all. I wouldn't have known what it felt like to come home to an empty apartment with only a note from my older sister waiting that read:"I stopped by and walked Shaka, you weren't here. Call me later, I love you."

So many things I would have never known or loved or done in my life. I do realize that there would be a million other, different ones in waiting for me. None of those imagined, regretfully lost, moments that were simply not to be my twenties in Paris, feel even half as good, not even in the imagining, as all of these ones I've lived here.

My regret in all of it's shades, is something I can handle...