Take One

Slushy Stockholm streets, everything takes twice as long to reach and still you nearly fall on your way. The bar lies quiet, unusually quiet, but it matters little when it's your living room they're dancing in. Everything falls into its routine again. Your glasses are broken and you walk slowly through the apartment, blind.

We spoke so much of old times, and how different the days can appear in the light of someone else's eyes. They were the most miserable years of my existence, she says and you thought so long they were the peak of yours. You mourned their passing when life carried on and left you by the wayside. I always admired you and had no idea, such is youth. It seems too long ago now to right the wrongs but perhaps their appearance was always skewed to begin with. I'm sorry.

Time runs out, runs away from us, I have all the time in the world but I hesitate to wind the clock. February makes me want to lock the door, spring will make me want to run, I never know what to make of this life, nor you in it.

You are welcome, he says.
Your memories are not.

Disembark

We return from our travels never who we were when we left. The snow looks the same, the grey eyes in people's faces, the sounds. But you see something different around the street corner, in the conversation, on the horizon. The church has a strange glow as you climb the hill: the humbling beauty of a home to return to; the fading sense of having a home at all. You have always traveled, he says, you always will, and he is right, of course. But no longer is travel the terrified compulsion of a psyche in chains. It tickles me now, allures me, I long for its unimaginable awe and heavy sleep.

The apartment looks the same, the face in the mirror. My body falls quickly on familiar sheets, I am amazed at the life and the morning to come, the unexpected.

It occurs to me finally.
The trip is nothing like
over.

l'Enfer

We trudged the cold, wet boulevards past dead men and their glories, our fingers stiff with winter, to stand at the gates of hell in awe. Wretched souls, tormented through their deaths and wrangled out of the statue in agony, I stared for ages as giant snow flakes began falling in the Shadows above.

The first time I saw them, how floored, how devastated at the overwhelming pain in my chest. Now I wanted to run my hands over every detail, memorize them in my fingerprints.

I stood at the end of the subway platform today and stared into the black belly of the city. Those tunnels of Paris, tunnels of New York, I peer into the darkness and try to discover the secret of the metropolitan monster. Always at the edge, always too aware, too afraid to run carelessly into the dark void, to dare uncover what lies beyond. A great caterpillar of a train swerved down the rails toward the station. A hundred people shook to its rhythm.

Soon, me too.

The Quiet Man

Graves spread out in every direction, like a sea of lives passed around us. The walk there had been cold, we shivered at the entrance and looked at the names on the map. Here, underneath this stone slab, lies the body of someone who changed your life. Great monuments twist and turn towards the sky, angels frozen in perpetual mourning, ancient headstones crack and fall apart under the unstoppable forces of nature.

We came to the edge of the hill, where more graves yet stretched to the edge of the horizon, and the sun came out from beyond the dreary skies. And oh, how the world will change in sunlight. Our skin thawed, our steps lightened, we stood still staring at the miracle of the precipice of spring. At the edge of the parc, little yellow croci took their first trembling steps into the light and I laughed. This is what we came for. This is the magic unplanned.

Our French stumbled across the markets and bookstores, our bags filled with a life we pretended was ours. At the end of the night, we stepped lightly down wooden stairs and squeezed into a cramped corner of the bar, as five, ten, fifteen faces around us stirred the air into a frenzy with folk music. A simple beginning, fingers dancing across the instruments, I closed my eyes and let my heart leap in my chest. The air was warm when we returned to the apartment.

I am ready to believe,
again.

Hobo blues

Rain-soaked black cobblestone, narrow streets of one-way traffic and you freeze right to the bone, no matter. The song of their words, we stand on the subway train mimicking them with pursed lips, I paint the map in my head, again, again, filling them in with street names and corner bistros. At the pyramid, a face from so long ago; at the Bastille, a face from when the old town was new, dinner is all red wine and catching up, by the time we leave the restaurant the rain has stopped.

How life looks different when the land moves beneath you. How the skyline paints its contours across your to-do list and leaves it freer than before, liberated by possibility. You know this is the charm of the drug. You breathe in deeply.

Pretend you can quit if you want to.

Taste It

There's snow on the lake, the skies behind are dark, gray, ominous. It looks like a painting. The train gathers speed and we pass a school yard, where tweenie children play soccer and shove each other in the snow. Childhood is such a cruel scene. We roll through half-dead towns where people still make their lives, and the angst of the small town claws at my insides, how do they keep themselves from laying their heads in the oven?

She texts me from another train, says I'm almost there. Says tomorrow we are in Paris. The beauty of mad adventures caresses my eyelids, the straitjacket around my chest releases. Tomorrow the world will look different. Tomorrow we paint the sky with life.

In Flight

Six hours until I go to the airport, she writes, and I'm drunk in bed with a man next to me. We spend the day writing, as she finally gathers her things in a bag, locks up the apartment, and flies to the ends of the earth. She sends pictures of the airplane, describes the last fluttering heartbeats before boarding. I sit in my dark office, exhausted by the season and the sleet and the life, and I let my imagination walk me alongside her all day. The frantic scramble to pack even though it is much too late to do it properly, the rush to the airport, the overwhelming desire to sleep and then the inability once airborne. To always have a ticket in your back pocket. The scratching of the itch. She sends me a few last kisses before the plane takes off, my companion through the dreary nights, my soldier in the alienated mine fields of growing old, my cheerleader in choosing the crooked paths. The weeks will be long in silence.

I turn to the computer. Print a boarding pass. Go through my apartment looking at things that would sparkle in Parisian dust. And beneath the frozen tundra of my skin, beneath the dead leaves of fall and the apathy of the season, a tiny ember begins to glow, a fragile seed begins to grow. Somewhere in the darkest corner of my heart, I tremble.

The spring will catch up with you at last, the itch shudder across your veins. The madness will stir your sleeping senses and you will remember the hopeless wanderer within.

You will remember you love her.
You would not have it, any other way.