I had not seen him for over two years. I remember it well. Ladina and I had made a short trip to Paris, to see family, friends, and celebrate New Year’s Eve in the City of Light.

We made a call at his apartment one evening, the one he shared with Thomas at the time, another very good friend of mine: we all had known each other during classe préparatoire, that oh-so intensive two-year course aiming to make us enter the most prestigious schools of France. We had struggled together, endured together, stuffed our sleep-deprived brains with ludicrous amounts of knowledge, and had become close all the while. And we had left it, more disgusted by the pompous and arrogant elitism of it all, and by the dysfunctional educational and academic system of the Western world, than elevated to any prestige. But I had come out with the best friends I am to ever make, and for this I will never regret it.

Maël was there and as always, it felt like we had seen each other but the day before. Before I knew it, we were sitting on the floor watching Machete with a steak in our plates. He told me he was going to study a (third) Master degree in Berkeley, San Francisco Bay Area — or how he put it: “J’vais à SF” — and that was the last I saw of him.

He astonished me with a grown beard when he opened his door. I had always known him shaven. Always.

We were on Rincon Hill, a very central district of SF, two blocks from the waterfront, right under the Bay Bridge linking SF to Oakland. Maël lived in a beautiful, modern, clean and ultra secure apartment complex which definitely did not feel like the Maël I knew. To my relief, his apartment itself was chaotic, cluttered, and as welcomingly unfussy as it was during our student years, with a dying Christmas tree in a corner and a barely alive fish in another. The sole new point was the beard.

We spent a fabulous week catching up with each other’s lives, and he explained to us how, as an immigrant, he felt like he was living in a golden prison, working all day long doing mathematics in a start-up and earning a good living — while never being allowed to leave the country until he obtained his Green Card. He put words on our impressions, comparing the fierce competitive capitalism of the US with the French system, and describing the absurd amount of money both being handled in the corporations and markets, and sitting in the capital of the extremely rich. Of course, he did not forget to complain he was unable to find a real baguette. And he brought us to some of his favorite restaurants and bars in the city, where we spent long hours downing cold beers in good companionship.

 

I guess we all make our own ways. Having friends on all four corners of the globe, I quite understand how differently life can be viewed by people, and how different their day-to-day may be. Even Maël and I, coming from a seemingly similar background, ended up going entirely opposite ways. I have no idea how many years it will be before I see him, or many others, again.

I just wished I had more time in life to travel and see them all.