fear & fumbling in France

my french is a joke. my french is a joke and i freeze in fear and cannot even manage je ne sais pas. the grammar is in my head, the accent is apparently passable, but the words will not leave my lips. they stick to my tongue, in my throat, my brain goes static and white and i am all apologetic smiles, shifty eyes to the floor. so many nice french people, so many opportunities missed because i am, as always, mortally embarrassed.

sometimes i think i will die of embarrassment long before anything else i do to myself.

i stand on the train for two hours, hip to bum with beautiful tiny french women, swaying and pardon and excusez-moi and a thousand other words i do not know, pretending to sleep standing up because i am trying very hard to not be sick right there amongst them. i am repeating in my head je ne parle pas de francais ten thousand times a minute in case someone speaks to me and i can manage to mutter the words before my brain locks up. i just want to throw up. i want to throw up and throw up and throw up wildly, painfully, viciously. i do not even want to eat. i just want to throw up. 

this is not the first time i have made grandiose plans that i am not brave enough for. that i am intensely unprepared for. that i think will be all sunshine and roses until i am sorely and all-in-a-moment wholly and embarrassingly disillusioned regarding. but this is the first time that i have gathered others into the plans with no way to back out. i am like a cornered pig with a farmer coming at me with an axe. and i am sharing a hotel room with my parents and there is no possibility of throwing up. not one. and all i need to do is throw up.

i am living in a nightmare and the only way out is to thrash through till morning. all i can hope is that it gets better. i cannot say that it will but i am trying very hard not to not allow it not to. all i can hope for is a place to throw up and some sort of restraint about food. and fluency. and a miraculous lifting of the low-slung knit shawl of embarrassment that i wear everywhere, under which after all this time i am hunched and broken.