durand, jacques thomas

[jacques thomas durand]

jacques thomas durand,

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---------------- MAIN INFO ---------------

FULL NAME, Jacques Thomas Durand
NICKNAMES, Jac
AGE, Twenty Eight
HOMETOWN, Boulogne-Billancourt,France
JOB, Artist/ Professor at La Lumineuse Private Academy
SEXUALITY, Heterosexual
PLAY BY, Guillaume Canet

---------------- PERSONALITY ---------------

LIKES, Traveling, Art, Spontaneity, Old Movies, Oil based paints, Charcoal, His Son, The Rolling Stones, and Women.
DISLIKES, Anger, Hypocrites, His Father, Rap Music, Modern Art, Smoking, Obnoxious Tourists, Over Confidence, Ignorance, and Closed Mindedness.
FEARS, Disapointing Henri, Being alone.
PERSONALITY, Jac is a really friendly and would gladly stop and say hello to anyone who looks remotely interested in a conversation. He recently got a gig teaching art at a private academy and has settled into the job pretty easily. He gets to talk about his greatest passion next to his son, paint all he wants, and gets to talk about the places he’s been. He’s pretty much traveled his whole life and can talk about anything. He loves to laugh and have a good time and even when it comes to raising his six year old son he never takes himself too seriously. He doesn’t have much of a temper, he learned early on in life that there was no point in getting angry over things and he deals with a lot of it when it comes. He'll probably have a large group of friends, just basically drinking buddies and people who love to laugh. He's not good with the whole romance department, he's had the one great love of his life and he still has to remind himself to get out of bed some mornings and stop mourning her. He's a gentleman and loves to flirt and show people a good time, just make sure he remains an okay role model for his son when you return him.

---------------- HISTORY ---------------

FATHER, Thomas Fredrick Durand
MOTHER, Jocelyn Moira Durand
OTHER FAMILY, Grace Cassidy (Deceased),
Henri Cassidy Durand (son, 5)
HISTORY,

On ne voit bien qu'avec le Coeur.
"We see well only with the heart"

I left home when I was eighteen I just got the itch one day that I needed to get out of France and I went. I sold a bunch of my father’s first edition books and left him a note promising that I would repay him someday and I left. It didn’t matter where I was going I just needed to stand on ground that I had never been before. I wanted to plant myself into a culture I had never been a part of before and pick up enough words to survive for the time I stayed there. I wanted to feel hot sand beneath my feet and feel the sun rise on a tropical breeze. Or I wanted to see the ocean from a different side of the world and watch the rain dance on it. I didn’t want to live the life that my father expected me to take over from him once he died. The wealth never meant the same to me that it did to my brother or father. I didn’t need it like they did. I didn’t want to end up like the kids I went to school with, living in one town my whole life and being to ignorant to even look outside of it. I wanted to live and to explore and never regret my mistakes. I ended up in Greece; my first job was as a fish gutter on a fishing boat. I only stayed for a year before I got enough money to punch another stamp on my visa. I lived out of hostels or made friends and stayed with them. I learned enough of the language of wherever I was staying to be comfortable and then would get the itch telling me it was time to go again. It wasn’t until a year later that I met someone whose itch to relocated constantly was worse than mine. Her name was Grace. I met her in Russia, she was from America originally and had recently graduated from school and was taking some time off before she decided what she wanted to do. She said it was a vacation from life, she told her parents it was a self discovery mission and that she would be back in a month. For two years I followed her wherever she went and feel deeply and cataclysmically in love with her.

Il vaut mieux faire que dire.
"Doing is better than saying."

She had a habit much like my own of picking up in a blink and leaving. It was never anything discussed, she would just go. I would find her and meet up with her once again and we would stay and be happy for a few weeks before she pulled another Carmen San Diego. Where ever we went I found work, she had bought me a professional camera when we were in Madrid and I became pretty fond of taking pictures. I was good at it, so much so that I was able to make some money by selling pictures to local papers wherever I went. I didn’t do it often since I was always much more interesting in learning a craft but I took shot whenever there was one to take. I was positive that by the time I was twenty, I was in love with her and wanted to marry her. Marriage wasn’t something I had every thought about. The concept was some abstract thought that I had only heard of or seen examples of in my life. Commitment was what I really wanted, I wanted to know that no matter how far she ran that I would be the only one she was waiting for and I wanted her to know that no matter what came our way, no matter how hard—we’d be through it together. I saved up money for three months and worked tirelessly to buy her a ring. It wasn’t anything special but when I saw it at a flea market in Turkey I knew I had to get it for her. The stone was an emerald and it had specks of amber in it that could only be seen when you held it up to the sun. It was the same color that I saw in her eyes every time they lit up with her smile.

She took the ring and examined it, the way she stared down at the silver band made me feel as though she was summing up our time together and seeing how she could put it gently. It was a tight lipped smile and a soft kiss that she gave me before slipping the ring on her finger. That was the last time I saw her with it on. She left the next morning and left the ring in its box. She took the maps and her passport, left a little bit of the money and no note. I searched for her; I wore myself thin searching for her day after day. It was the game we played, she wasn’t leaving me, she wanted me to find her or at least that’s what I had convinced myself of. I would think back to a conversation we had in which she told me about growing up in America on the east coast and the kind of abuse she took from her three older brothers and the neglect from her parents. She talked about her fear of failing and not wanting to disappoint me. She was scared a lot of the time that I would turn on her, I would begin to resent her and treat her like the others did before. She made me promise to never let her go.

La vie est trop courte pour boire du mauvais vin.
“Life is too short to drink bad wine"

Chasing her became tiresome and I decided to settle down for a short period of time to earn some money before trekking out again. I worked in a small art gallery when I sold paintings of local artists and was approached to become a curator for a gallery in town. I got in touch with my mother who set up a bank account for me and began to put money into it without my father knowing. She said it was the money I would have had if I had stayed and so it belonged to me anyway. I didn’t touch it, I wouldn’t go back to that part of my life. It felt as though I was always so close to her though. I checked my e-mail everyday at the internet cafes in hopes that I would get something, an apology, coordinates, something that would let me know that she was alright. It was eight months before she sent me an e-mail to come and find her. She was back in America; the address she sent me was that of a hospital. She had told me that she had ran away from a lot back home but I had always assumed that it was just her family I had no idea the severity of it, especially when the doctor sat me down and discussed the neglect she had put herself through by not taking care of the disease. The disease that he had been talking about was Huntington’s disease, a disease that effects the muscle coordination and leads to cognitive decline and dementia. The symptoms were supposed to start later in life but by the time she turned eighteen it was clear that it was starting up early. By traveling, she got to live out her dreams and not have to deal with the thought that it might have all come crashing down around her one day. Meeting me had been a chance encounter and later on she told me that the ring just made it all too real for her. That if she were to put it on that would mean she would have to stay still and have to think about the future. I told her I wasn’t going anywhere, that I would take care of her and I reiterated my promise to her.

We moved into stateside when we were twenty three. So she put her finger down on the map and we ended up in New York City. We were happy for a long time. A real long time before she found out she was pregnant. It all dissipated from there. She didn’t want it, she was scared that she was going to pass on the disease to the baby and didn’t want to leave it up to that uncertainty. I got a job in Chicago, another art gallery gig of the local culture scene so we moved there a short time after. She fell into bouts of depression like I had never seen before and tried on a number of times to talk me into letting her have an abortion. I had never made plans for a family but the idea of creating something out of my love with Grace was overwhelming. It was the most selfless thing a person could do and a whole new adventure I wanted a part of. I wanted a part of it, she didn’t. Our son Henri Cassidy Durant was born on April 6th , Grace died of complications of giving birth eighteen hours after bringing Henri into the world. It was my fault, something I will live with everyday. I held Henri for just over an hour before signing papers over to give him up for adoption to my own parents. For just under an hour he looked up at me with the same eyes that I had been looking into for the past five or so years. As much as it broke me to do it I know that I couldn’t raise a child at that time on my own, especially without Grace. I had asked her to do something she didn’t want to do, I asked her on an adventure she was unwilling to go, I pushed her and pushed her to have the baby. And in the end I paid the price by losing the only thing I ever really cared for in my life. I was that sixteen year old kid again with an itch. An itch that couldn’t be ignored and so as I signed the papers and gave away the last piece I had of Grace there were five words that clouded every thought in my mind, every word that wanted to escape from my lips. On the outside I was sure I looked like someone on the verge of going mad, on the inside I felt like a little boy who wanted to run away. So that’s what I did. I’ll never let you go.

Comprendre, c'est pardoner.
“To understand is to forgive.”

It was always a reality I didn’t want to face but then again, it was more than that. He was more than just a responsibility or an idea of a life I could have had. He was tangible and real. He was a living and breathing little boy and no matter how much I tried to push his face from my mind I couldn’t help but see Grace’s eyes staring back at me, our son’s eyes staring into mine. I pictured a thousand different scenarios, a thousand different words to string together into pretty little stories that I could tell myself. He’d be better off in France with parents that could give him what I couldn’t. A stable job, a flat for one, take out dinner every night—sometimes no dinner at all. It wasn’t the life for a little boy, he deserved more. My parents raised him and gave him the life they tried to give me no doubt. I lost touch with them and never spoke to them after the day Grace passed. The offered me money and asked for me to visit and to allow them to tell Henri about me when he got older but I declined. Who knew how long my job would last before I felt the itch again that beckoned me across another ocean. Who knew how far I would go or how long I would be away for. A child needs to stick to their studies in order to learn about the world and be prepared for the life outside of the four walls of a school. He deserved a father who could take him by the hand through life and lead him on the right path. He deserved a mother. Thoughts like these would send me right back into the dark hole that I had been trying to climb out of since Grace’s death. But then there were days, days when all I would make a mistake at work, or lock myself out of the apartment, or forget to take an umbrella with me that morning. And in those moments following, I would think of how to explain it all to him, explain that through mistakes we learn and we continue to fail miserably until one day we don’t.

I would think of smaller things too, like how to teach him to ride a bike or how to work the coffee pot, or eve talk to girls. My parents moved to Paris to keep business flowing. He worked for the government for most of my life and the letter I received from him a few months back stated that he was no consulting for the private sector. He was in Paris, with Henri. I got an offer to move back home and to teach art, something I had never even thought of doing. The account that my mother once had set up for me with money in it became overloaded and I finally decided to start spending it. Not on myself though, I sent donations to museums I had worked at before and to public education centers that promoted the arts. New York was nice and the job there was well suited but I started feeling the itch again, the people the city itself was starting to get that feeling in my going. So went home and did the one thing that I never thought I would. I grew up. There was no reconciliation with my parents, I showed up for Henri and left.I guess the whole point of writing this all and telling you about my life was so you’d get an idea as to who I am and my reason for giving Henri up in the first place. I wasn’t that I didn’t want him; I wanted him more than anything for as long as he’s been out there. It just took me a little longer than it should have to realize that I could take care of him on my own and that I could be responsible for something so fragile. I know it’s not going to be easy but nothing is. I feel as though I can learn as much from him as he can from me—maybe even more. I knew that I would find a way to get him back and make everything right for us. I wanted those eyes back. I wanted a life, and someone to take care of. I wanted to be a father. I made a promise to myself that I would find her, and never let him go. We started life over in Paris with the promise that his grandmother could still visit him since he was still only so small and needed the maternal figure in his life. I started painting again and sold a few pieces and photos here and there before accepting the offer from La Lumineuse. Slowly but surely things are turning around and I know Grace would be happy that Henri and I are together. Everything right now is settling and is still fragile but at least we can say it's in repair.

---------------- ABOUT YOU ---------------

YOUR NAME, Jack
CONTACT, PM, Aim, Msn, Email, etc.
OTHER, Can't think of anything at the moment

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Templante made by Alba.

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