Today is our last full day in Tulle, and I’ve discovered a queer new feeling as we pack for the journey. This place I’ve called home for so many years has at once become as new to me, the details of our dear home stick out now like they never have. My door frame, the one I have walked under and slept behind all this time without a thought, has suddenly become a trove of memories. In the bottom corner opposite the hinges - the side that opens, that is - there is an indent from years of the ill-fitted door’s scraping along the wood, until it at last created a clear path for itself. I cannot recall when it succeeded in this quest, but I can remember, clear as the summer sky, the day the door was loosened. This story must stay between us, spirits, for my parents still have not found it out.

When I was a child of nine, my friend Pierre and I devised a new game, the name and mechanics of which are unimportant to this story. The point of importance here, as at the time, was that I had lost. Pierre was never a graceful victor, even for a child, and so my disappointment was only multiplied. When the time came to return to my room, alone, my anger was such that my entire body vibrated with it, causing an involuntary spasm of the fist as I entered my doorway. I didn’t know my own strength, still I am surprised by it. My strike at the side of the frame was so intense that I managed to loosen the top hinge of the door, whose bottom corner slammed violently into the frame, leaving an immediately obvious dent in the wood. My face flushed, my error becoming all too clear to me. I don’t know how this went unnoticed after so many years, but nonetheless it did. I squat now looking at it, my little secret. I wonder if Otto ever saw it. If he did he never showed it, though it wouldn’t have made much of a difference. I do hope you wouldn’t have thought any different of me, little one. I am not without fault. I am human, after all.

This isn’t the point I had set out to make when I started this entry. It is no news to my divine and spirited audiences, surely, that people are flawed. My point is that I will not soon forget this place, and should I return I will be a different man, necessarily I must be. I cannot hope to return to France until after my task is complete. I suspect I will not be writing on my journey to and on the ship, as mom and dad need my full attention in the weeks to come, now more than ever. With my next entry there will be some drastic world news, I’m sure, the content of which I’m afraid I can already imagine. Only time will tell.