Sebastian Michael's Blog: EDEN by FREI, page 40

{Threesomes}

The conundrum of the three bed room. Every standard business hotel seems to have them. I don’t get to stay in business hotels that often since I rarely ‘do business’ as such, but occasionally somebody needs me to be somewhere and they put me up in a hotel and while it’s normal for the room I stay in to just be an ordinary double bedroom with an ordinary king or queen size bed, every so often – probably because all the ordinary double bedrooms are booked – they put me in a three bed room and my mind fairly boggles. It’s usually not a very big double bed and a single bed.

Who stays in these rooms, I wonder, and how? What do they do there? I try to imagine the scenario, but it doesn’t stay salubrious for long, and then I take a step back and I try not to imagine the scenario, but instead the moment somebody says to themselves: well, there are three of us anyway, why don’t we share a room. Who are these three people? Are they parents and their one, lone and lonely child? That would make some sort of sense, if the child weren’t very small any more but not yet grown up enough to want to stay in a room of their own, but why stay in an ugly business hotel, why not go to a nice seaside or mountainside hotel or a charming B&B? Maybe they’re visiting the grandparents in this particular city, but the grandparents’ house isn’t big enough to put up all of them. But that surely can’t account for the number of these three bed bedrooms these standard business hotels have? Who else travels in threes? Probably not the managers, that would seem unlikely. The more lowly personnel who are expected to share rooms, like the sales people? But then how do they do this: do two of them share the double bed and one lonely creature has to sleep alone in the single bed, hugging a pillow? How do they choose who gets to sleep with whom? Do they rotate, if they’re there for more than one night? Are they there for more than one night? What are they there for? The staff conference? Some sales training? An illicit adventure? A chance to experiment with their respective gender and sexual identities? And how do they cope with the bathroom situation? The questions are virtually endless…

I keep my door ajar, habitually. Not when I’m staying at hotels, of course, business or otherwise, but when I’m at home or when I’m staying at a friend’s house. I like the idea of my bedroom not being closed. It’s not as if I expect anybody to come and join me in my bed, it’s just that I like the idea of the air circulating and my sleeping self not being entirely confined to a closed room. I also sleep with the window slightly open and the blinds or curtains open. I like seeing a bit of the night time sky as I’m falling asleep, especially if there’s a cool moon, and I like being woken up by the rays of the sun alighting on the tip of my nose. I may make an exception to all and any of these behaviours, as that is sometimes advisable. For example should one be having a threesome…

I like to read in the bath and in fact I almost exclusively read books in the bath, because I daren’t take my phone or my laptop to the bath lest I should drop them or they should get wet, and I hardly ever get around to reading books anywhere else, since by the time I usually go to bed I’m too tired to read and I just maybe post a picture of the day to Instagram or watch a video someone has posted to Facebook; and I don’t commute and when I do use the tube I like to play Jass on my app from Samschtig and when I’m on a train during the daytime I like to look out of the window and ponder the imponderables (such as the conundrum of the three bed bedroom), or if it is night time, I’m more likely to be doing some work on my laptop.

In the book I am reading in the bath at the moment, Becoming a Londoner, the diarist David Plante says “the unintended is truer than the intended.” He in one succinct sentence answers one of the most enduring questions I’ve had as a writer and as a human being: how is it that I so avoid the plan and favour the detour, that so I value serendipity over completion, that I so relish the random more than I delight in the foreseeable and foreseen? Because it’s true, truer at any rate than that which we think we control.

Abandon. (Gay or otherwise.) Non-sequiturs. This most pertinent of questions: why do you need a reason?

7 The Space Boy

He is a quietly spoken wonder, a boy who has never grown up; a spacealien of the loveliest nature, a Zebedee who has bounced off his Magic Roundabout and somehow found himself in a world full of people: I adore him.

Where Laniakea’s fibrous filaments’ ends disentangle from her neighbour’s, to float, as jellyfish through water, amid dark matter in slow, rhythmic pulses, The Space Boy has sought out a moment of respite for comfort and warmth and sat down with me in a Camden pub with a pint each of ale, autumn time.

I love him, Space Boy, in a way I love few. He’s about to get married. He doesn’t mean to marry; every signal his subconscious mind emits says he doesn’t want to and every action that his conscious mind commands says he must.

He doesn’t send out his invitations, he forgets arrangements, postpones, prevaricates. He talks, on the verge of getting drunk with me, about the revelation his sister-in-law-to-be gave him when she told him it was a continuum, not an either thing or an or, a this thing or that. Clearly he senses himself on that spectrum, somewhere towards the brighter colours, but, that light notwithstanding, he’s lost. Will no-one hie to his rescue?

I can’t. I once nearly did. We’d stood facing each other, our hands on each other’s arms; and our lips almost touched. Then his brother walked in and the moment had gone: the night was spent in separate corners of the universe; I in mine, he in his. With that moment gone, all moments like it were gone, but my affection for him hasn’t waxed or waned like the moon, nor shall it: steady as a star it remains even now that he doesn’t want to and knows he doesn’t want to but knows he is going to tie himself in a knot.

Laniakea drawing away from Perseus-Pisces. I have a feeling this isn’t slow. The more I look at The Space Boy and listen to him expound on the vibrations, on the music of the spheres, on how tuned we are into each other, the more I know that what to us seems imperceptibly slow and unfathomably deep and incomprehensibly vast and impenetrably dark is bursting with energy, is replete with substance, is contained in a thought, and is teeming, teeming with life, and with life comes death and with death comes disintegration and with disintegration comes decomposition and with decomposition come component particles and with component particles come clusters of mass that attract each other and with clusters of mass that attract each other come new constellations and with new constellations come configurations and with configurations come potentialities and with potentialities come energy fields and with energy fields comes communication and with communication comes connection and with connection comes communion and communion is love and love is energy and The Space Boy and I are that energy and our minds are a dance and dancing is joy and joy is the present and the present is now and now is forever and forever is what we want it to be…

The Space Boy and I are lying on our backs on the ground looking up at the sky. The sky is plastered with empty silvery foil sleeves into which he will pour his spirited being. ‘I never want to not hold you dear,’ I whisper and rest my head on his chest looking down into the endlessness that ends where another begins. We are at a synapse in god’s brain and god is our own idea of our meaning: no wonder we sense god’s grace when we feel the pulse of a heart and bathe in the brainwaves of our fellows, our friends.

The Space Boy leaves me to think myself humble and rich. Has not he travelled lightyears to be here, to share one thought with me only? I treasure this thought and keep it inside my head where I know it won’t be contained: once thought, a thought is already encompassed in our common conscious, and he knows and I know and they know and you; we all know:

We all are one.

. . .

The Space Boy was first published in LASSO 7 – The Cosmic Issue

The Snowflake Collector – 8: It Was, in Every Imaginable Sense, a Disaster

No matter how Yanosh tried, no matter where he looked and what he put in his search field, the world did not seem to possess for The Snowflake Collector an answer. Innumerable were the sites and video clips that explained how to preserve snowflakes on microscopic slides or small sheets of acetate, using either – as he had been doing – superglue or hairspray or an artist’s fixative; and they all arrived, going by the evidence Yanosh could find, at results similar to the ones that The Snowflake Collector so far had reached.

But this, Yanosh knew, for The Snowflake Collector had told him, would not do. He would need, The Snowflake Collector had said and determined to a degree that to him was now irrevocable, a way of collecting his snowflakes in the fullness of their dimensions. And while it may have been the case that in their majority these snowflakes seemed, at first glance, so flat as to fit neatly within a thin layer of superglue trapped between two small plates of glass, The Snowflake Collector knew that this was nothing but a deception. A deception and a crass simplification by the lazy mind. In reality, all these snowflakes – even the flattest among them, but most certainly those that came in the shape of short studs or even, as often they did, in a formation of nearly flat hexagonal structures enjoined with or indeed by short column shaped ones – were miniature crystals of infinitesimal complexity. To squeeze them between two glass plates and store them flat in a wooden case, no matter how carefully crafted, was, to The Snowflake Collector, as looking at the world and declaring it a disk off the edge of which one might fall…

The Snowflake Collector knew, then, that he would have to develop his own substance. He would have to acquire some knowledge and applying this knowledge he would, through a process of trial and error and elimination, have to come up with a liquid, a gel that would have just the right consistency, that would be clear as glass and that would dry, at habitable temperatures, with untarnished translucence and that would keep the shape and the intricacy and the character of the snowflake he would encase in it, in three dimensions, for the relative eternity he or any other human being could envisage; not an eternity, then, perhaps, but a lifespan of civilisations, the extent of a physically appreciative intelligent presence on this planet.

A deep crisis of confidence soon engulfed him. For Yanosh’s research online remained fruitless. The Snowflake Collector now even undertook his rare and adventurous journey two or three times, by yellow bus and little red train and larger green and white train along the lakes into the biggest of any of the cities in his country and to the enormous library of the university there, to study the properties of chemical solutions at different temperatures and their reaction to coming in contact with ice. But hours and days and nights and weeks and months of labour both in theory in the city and in practice back at home in his valley did not yield up to him any liquid or gel or substance of any kind that would catch a snowflake and leave it intact and absolutely unharmed, suspended in a glass cube in three dimensions, one inch by one inch by one.

The Snowflake Collector sensed the end of the season draw near and with it he felt the abyss of despair once more gaping up before him, calling him to fall, drawing him close to surrender, willing him to give in. He did not feel, The Snowflake Collector, that if in this undertaking, as in so many others before, he failed, he would find the strength, the courage, the spirit to pursue it again next winter. Or any other endeavour. He was now, he felt certain, exhausted, spent. He had given the universe his all and the universe had, once more, rejected his offering. Yet again, crushed by defeat and destroyed by his own, maybe lofty, ambition, he had exerted himself, but he had not excelled. It was, in every imaginable sense, a disaster.

The snow melted. The stream where he had a small plot of land on which he planted two young fir trees for each mature one he cut down had already swollen with the water from the fast disappearing masses of white that had covered the meadows and the sharp inclines of the mountainside, and The Snowflake Collector was no more. He had ceased to exist, his purpose evaporated like the miserable puddle of water left on the window sill from the erstwhile snow, with the warm morning sun. The devastation was drawn into the furrows of his troubled forehead, and when Yanosh now came to sit with him outside his hut, their silence was one of sadness and loss.

The stale stench of failure now clung about him, The Snowflake Collector sensed, and he felt despair not just for himself but also for Yanosh. This friend. This loyal lad, still growing up, still becoming a person. Had he not let him down terribly too. Had he not drawn him into his project and made him a part of it and did the ruins of it not now lie scattered before his innocent eyes, his young heart cut and bleeding; for what? For a delusion? A whim? A fantasy? A false and forever frustrated illusion that there could be such a thing as meaning, as purpose, as friendship, as love?

Tears ran down The Snowflake Collector’s face and fell on the cold folded hands in his lap and he felt he was already dead. Yanosh could not bear to look at him. But he sat still by his side and bore with him his pain. And thus they remained, awaiting in silence the dread bounce of spring.

0 Counsel

‘Enlightenment’ says Sedartis, with sad eyes turned into mine, ‘does not keep on its own, forever, sweet, like honey in a jar: it needs nurture, revival; the darkness around it is strong and forever encroaches. Without our care, the flame will go out: the flame of enlightenment requires our hearts and, indeed, our soul. You live in a soulless world where your science and your money have made you sceptical, cynical. You do not believe in a soul, because your science has not found a measure or word for it yet. Be not so blind, my friend’ – it is the first time Sedartis addresses me “friend” – ‘to things you can’t see, you can’t measure, you can’t understand in your mind: that would be arrogance supreme. Generations before you thought things impossible that to you now are commonplace, why would you assume that today you know everything? Make time your friend not your enemy and allow it to infuse you with humility and passion in equal measure. And feed with these, forever, the light, as, if you do not, it will go out; but if you do,’ his eyes now newly aflame, ‘light conquers darkness, always.’

6 Domesticity

Why would anyone not put their milk in the fridge? Is this a male thing, do men, as a rule, not put their milk back in the fridge, whence clearly it came from? It bothers me.

Maxl drinks green milk, semi-skimmed. I don’t see the point of anything semi, let alone -skimmed; the green cap is not for me. I abhor the idea of milk that is skimmed of its fat of its taste of its goodness of its milky nature, as I abhor decaffeinated coffee, artificial sweetener and non-alcoholic beer. They are, as far as I’m concerned, abominations. They are, if not abominations, man-made oxymora. They are the kind of contradiction in terms that I, at the risk of sounding judgmental, find wholly unnecessary. And necessarily unholy…

Maxl pours over his muesli green milk, it actually looks green, the colour is all wrong. It looks wrong it feels wrong it sounds wrong. The word ‘semi’ sounds wrong, as does the word ‘skimmed’.

Maxl pours green milk over his muesli and then leaves the milk out of the fridge for the rest of the day. Although it bothers me, I don’t strictly mind, as it’s his milk and being green it probably won’t go off as it’s basically waterlike cow juice that has nothing good about it. This milk is no cheese in the making. Also, I’m hardly someone who uses his kitchen in a sanctified way. I am no chef. Things lying or standing about in my kitchen are generally not in my way. I don’t mind, but it bothers me and I wonder what makes a man leave his milk out of the fridge, is it an innate desire, a need to mark your territory with some liquid, signalling your existence?

I’ve never known a woman to leave out her milk, women know how precious milk is, they don’t care for milk to turn yellow and rancid. Men don’t mind yellow and rancid, it’s part of their being.

Maxl leaves his milk out and sometimes, too, his salami. I read nothing into this, I just note it and wonder: what is it that makes men leave their milk out, and, occasionally, their salami. And that is all. That, and the fact that it bothers me. That fact bothers me, as I like to think of myself as the kind of person who would not be bothered by anything near so trivial. Does it mess with my sense of territory after all? Or with my sense of order? Or my sense of propriety? It may be the fact alone that it’s green, milk, not real milk that he leaves out of my fridge: I probably deep down feel that my kitchen is sullied by the presence of fake, pretend milk. Perhaps, even though rationally I know it has absolutely no meaning, it deep down offends me. The way it offends me, deep down, when I find in my fridge bottles of Coke, although they invariably turn out useful, as they make excellent liquid for clearing the drain.

I resolve to leave things be as they are and not trouble too much about matters as trivial as these. At least, I think, I don’t have to put up with this kind of behaviour for any length of time and I certainly don’t have to own it: we are not in a relationship, we are not cohabiters, we are not even flatmates: he is a guest and the law of hospitality stipulates that he can do with his milk – the a top a colour of his choosing – whatever he likes, for as long as he likes, just as long as he doesn’t expect me to endorse or approve it. Which clearly he doesn’t: he’s completely oblivious to absolutely any of it and he doesn’t even notice if I put his milk back where I think – inadequate, substandard and green though it be – it belongs: in the fridge.

29 Shakespearean Lunch No 3

The first three Shakespearean lunches take place at almost exactly monthly intervals in April, May and June. The first two more or less set the tone, but I’m still not entirely prepared for the third.

The first one happens at a beautiful Spanish Tapas place just by the entrance to Borough Market. It is – like all of the ones numbered one through three – scheduled for about an hour, maybe an hour and a half, starting at one, but I don’t remember leaving before four, maybe four thirty. Still, there is much to talk about – writing, crowdfunding, and, of course, Shakespeare – and so my stupendous Writer Friend and I take our time and order another bottle of wine, but eventually we decide to have done, mainly really because the place, beautiful as it is, isn’t entirely cheap and both of us are effectively skint.

For the second one, the tapas place is full up and it’s raining off and on, so we head a few doors into the market to a really nice fish place which is all covered in glass and lends a view onto Southwark Cathedral. Much as on the first occasion, we talk about writing, a little less about crowdfunding, a little more about adventures with agents, and about Shakespeare, a lot. I have another drink to go to that evening, so reluctantly, somewhat painfully, I drag myself away shortly after six.

For our third Shakespearean Lunch we are fortunate in that a little outside table is available back at the tapas place on the corner and my excellent Writer Friend is already parked there by the time I arrive. I have written a play about Shakespeare, and he is researching a story about Shakespeare’s brother Edmund, so our conversation obviously focuses very much on Shakespeare. Not having strictly learnt my lessons from our lunches one and two, I have once again somewhat brazenly booked another drink on the South Bank at seven, but with a friend who has stood me up so many times and has so frequently been so unreliable that I think not too much of it when, around about seven, we just really have nowhere near exhausted our topic and order another bottle of wine.

At around this time, our luncheon turns epic. There is a fine line between an ordinary writerly lunch, which can easily last five or six hours, and a lunch that turns into something memorable, noteworthy. This is approximately the point at which that happens, because at approximately this point we have, between the two of us, had between four and five bottles of wine and the topic of conversation is likely to have drifted off somewhat. I don’t remember onto what. I am pretty certain my formidable Writer Friend doesn’t either, though I haven’t asked him. I feel somewhat reluctant to ask him what he remembers of our Third Shakespearean Lunch, because I would not for one moment wish to embarrass him or make him feel uncomfortable. Not that there really is any reason for either of us to feel embarrassed or uncomfortable, save for the fact that we first pay our bill at five thirty but when we finally say goodnight to each other some time close to eleven another bill for wine has been clocked up and paid for and I have given up any attempt at catching up with my other friend, two or three increasingly incoherent text messages notwithstanding.

But there’s also a bottle of wine unaccounted for. At some point after the second bill we must have decided to have just one more and our brains at that late stage of our lunch are no longer capable of placing paying for it into the category ‘things to do before leaving’. It’s not as if we were doing a runner. When I phone the restaurant the next day, on my first attempt there is nobody there to take payment for the bottle, but they say they will phone me back. When they don’t phone me back I try again, and this time round a Maître’d who doesn’t seem in a particularly appreciative mood recalls: yes, you paid for the first ones and then you kept hugging the guy and then you were gone. He is still for some reason unable to take payment but promises to phone me back. For a second time, nobody phones me, so I accept that last bottle as a drink on the house and consider the matter dealt with: thank you, it was much appreciated.

When he says: ‘you were hugging the guy,’ he is, I think, being diplomatic. Or is the term euphemistic. I am fairly certain that by the time we finally staggered to our feet we were effectively snogging. This is slightly unusual and also unexpected behaviour from both of us because we’re just mates. Also, my affectionate Writer Friend as far as I know has never yet been gay. Then again, it doesn’t really matter whether or not anyone is and I don’t hold with the labels in the first place and so I really don’t have any concerns about this. Still, the image that I couldn’t have seen but that is now ingrained in my imagination cheers me: the two of us, men in our, erm, no longer quite forties, winding up our lunch at a Spanish Tapas place in Borough, cuddling and kissing with really, by that time, not a care in the world and still so much to talk about for, I would hope, many Shakespearean lunches to come, come spring again…

The Snowflake Collector – 7: Every Day Brought New Gifts Now

Every day brought new gifts now from the universe. There was Alison and Cassandra. Timothy, Lou and Lysander. There was tiny Frederick and the majestic Cassiopeia. It snowed for several days and each day The Snowflake Collector got up with a spring in his step and, before doing anything else of significance, went outside with three glass plates prepared, no fewer, no more, and welcomed the snowflakes into his world. Lavinia. Esteban. Roswitha.

He had no system, no method; he had a passion and a beating heart, he had no words to describe these snowflakes he so collected, but he gave them names. Balthasar. Emilio. Blossom. Alexander. He realised that it was easier to let them settle onto dry cold glass plates and then fix them with just one drop of superglue, than it was to catch them into a drop of glue that was already there on the glass before it dried out. He learnt he had best cool down the glue too. Once or twice he made a mistake and instead of a single snowflake ended up catching a cluster, and sometimes he damaged a snowflake he had caught as he was applying a dab of glue to it, but with nothing else occupying his mind and little else making demands on his time, he soon perfected his technique and sharpened his eye for the snowflakes that wanted to be part of his life now, did not reject his invitation.

He learnt to be at ease now with his calling and considered it an invitation he extended to these snowflakes, a welcome, and not a trap. Not a prison. And before long the first of the sturdy wooden cases he had made began to fill up, and when Yanosh came to visit him now, and nodded his wordless ‘hello’, to be answered by The Snowflake Collector in kind, he found on the table in The Snowflake Collector’s very small kitchen and on the window sill and on the short shelf these glass plates which had in them indescribable treasures: imprints of crystals, characters written by nature. And Yanosh brought along now not just his smartphone but also his camera for which he had bought a second-hand macro lens online with money he had been given by his mother Yolanda’s employer, the inn’s landlord, for a few hours work every day in the kitchen, and he took these glass plates and photographed them, finding new, better ways of taking his pictures each time.

When Yanosh showed The Snowflake Collector the pictures he took of his snowflakes on the display of his camera, The Snowflake Collector felt a well of love surge through his heart: a love for Ramira, Zahir and Kamala, but also for Yanosh for capturing them as they were once again in their utter perfection and for taking the time and for having the care and for witnessing what he was doing and for allowing him to share. He had not, in years, maybe decades, felt a love such as this, for another human being, a friend, or for the world and that which was in it and for the soul that infused his existence. And he was grateful. More grateful, more graceful, more humble, for it. More whole, he sensed, than he had ever been. Yes, he was able to say to himself now, looking at the pixels in which a snowflake he had captured was recaptured and re-rendered with such exquisite clarity and detail as his eye alone could never have seen or let alone shown, I am thus become The Snowflake Collector: it is so.

No sooner had this thought formed in his mind, this sensation expanded into his body, this certainty grown in his presence, than he also was sure that this wouldn’t do. He almost felt a rumble of anger thunder through him, but since anger was so alien to him an emotion, so futile, so unnecessary, he allowed it to disperse into simple dissatisfaction: it will not suffice to do this, he said to himself and to his unending surprise and the even greater surprise of Yanosh too, he said it out loud: ‘this will not suffice.’

‘These snowflakes: they deserve better. These glass plates that I have cut for them and this case I have built: they are inadequate. I cannot flatten these snowflakes! They are not created in two dimensions. I have to find a whole new solution.’

With this he went around his kitchen and he took each one of the glass plates he’d cut, into which he had already preserved all the snowflakes that made up his collection so far, and he looked at each one and apologised. Anna. Matthias. Rodrigo. Filomena. Lucas. One by one he held them up before his eyes and looked at them and bade their forgiveness. ‘You have all been wronged,’ he told them, as he put them away in the case he had built for them with wood from a fir that had grown on his land by the stream, and he breathed a sigh of deep sorrow and said to Yanosh: ‘I will have to start over again. I shall keep them, of course, they are now collected and to destroy them would be sacrilege, even though I have wronged them.’ And he took all the glass plates he hadn’t yet used and he sat down at his kitchen table while Yanosh was silently watching, and started to cut them up, twice each again, and assemble them into cubes.

After an hour or so The Snowflake Collector had made maybe a dozen simple, clean-edged glass cubes, one inch by one inch by one, fixed and closed on five sides, with the sixth side left open. ‘I will have to,’ he said to Yanosh ‘find a liquid, a gel. Something that will preserve these snowflakes just as they are, that won’t flatten them, won’t deprive them of a dimension.’ Yanosh nodded in quiet agreement and said, ‘I’ll look it up for you.’

7: Every Day Brought New Gifts Now

Every day brought new gifts now from the universe. There was Alison and Cassandra. Timothy, Lou and Lysander. There was tiny Frederick and the majestic Cassiopeia. It snowed for several days and each day The Snowflake Collector got up with a spring in his step and, before doing anything else of significance, went outside with three glass plates prepared, no fewer, no more, and welcomed the snowflakes into his world. Lavinia. Esteban. Roswitha.

He had no system, no method; he had a passion and a beating heart, he had no words to describe these snowflakes he so collected, but he gave them names. Balthasar. Emilio. Blossom. Alexander. Once or twice he made a mistake and instead of a single snowflake ended up catching a cluster, and once or twice it took too long for a snowflake to settle on his glass and the glue on it was already dry by the time it got there, but with nothing else occupying his mind and little else making demands on his time, he soon perfected his technique and sharpened his eye for the snowflakes that wanted to be part of his life now, did not reject his invitation.

He learnt to be at ease now with his calling and considered it an invitation he extended to these snowflakes, a welcome, and not a trap. Not a prison. And before long the first of the sturdy wooden cases he had made began to fill up, and when Yanosh came to visit him now, and nodded his wordless ‘hello’, to be answered by The Snowflake Collector in kind, he found on the table in The Snowflake Collector’s very small kitchen and on the window sill and on the short shelf these glass plates which had in them indescribable treasures: imprints of crystals, characters written by nature. And Yanosh brought along now not just his smartphone but also his camera for which he had bought a second-hand macro lens online with money he had been given by his mother Yolanda’s employer, the inn’s landlord, for a few hours work every day in the kitchen, and he took these glass plates and photographed them, finding new, better ways of taking his pictures each time.

When Yanosh showed The Snowflake Collector the pictures he took of his snowflakes on the display of his camera, The Snowflake Collector felt a well of love surge through his heart: a love for Ramira, Zahir and Kamala, but also for Yanosh for capturing them as they were once again in their utter perfection and for taking the time and for having the care and for witnessing what he was doing and for allowing him to share. He had not, in years, maybe decades, felt a love such as this, for another human being, a friend, or for the world and that which was in it and for the soul that infused his existence. And he was grateful. More grateful, more graceful, more humble, for it. More whole, he sensed, than he had ever been. Yes, he was able to say to himself now, looking at the pixels in which a snowflake he had captured was recaptured and re-rendered with such exquisite clarity and detail as his eye alone could never have seen or let alone shown, I am thus become The Snowflake Collector: it is so.

No sooner had this thought formed in his mind, this sensation expanded into his body, this certainty grown in his presence, than he also was sure that this wouldn’t do. He almost felt a rumble of anger thunder through him, but since anger was so alien to him an emotion, so futile, so unnecessary, he allowed it to disperse into simple dissatisfaction: it will not suffice to do this, he said to himself and to his unending surprise and the even greater surprise of Yanosh too, he said it out loud: ‘this will not suffice.’

‘These snowflakes: they deserve better. These glass plates that I have cut for them and this case I have built: they are inadequate. I cannot flatten these snowflakes! They are not created in two dimensions. I have to find a whole new solution.’

With this he went around his kitchen and he took each one of the glass plates he’d cut, into which he had already preserved all the snowflakes that made up his collection so far, and he looked at each one and apologised. Anna. Matthias. Rodrigo. Filomena. Lucas. One by one he held them up before his eyes and looked at them and bade their forgiveness. ‘You have all been wronged,’ he told them, as he put them away in the case he had built for them with wood from a fir that had grown on his land by the stream and breathed a sigh of deep sorrow and said to Yanosh: ‘I will have to start over again. I shall keep them, of course, they are now collected and to destroy them would be sacrilege, even though I have wronged them.’ And he took all the glass plates he hadn’t yet used and he sat down at his kitchen table while Yanosh was silently watching, and started to cut them up, twice each again, and assemble them into cubes.

After an hour or so The Snowflake Collector had made maybe a dozen simple, clean-edged glass cubes, one inch by one inch by one, fixed and closed on five sides, with the sixth side left open. ‘I will have to,’ he said to Yanosh ‘find a liquid, a gel. Something that will preserve these snowflakes just as they are, that won’t flatten them, won’t deprive them of a dimension.’ Yanosh nodded in quiet agreement and said, ‘I’ll look it up for you.’

5 Surrender

There are plenty of reasons to suppose that we should, and should be able to, learn. In every other sphere of life this seems to work just fine: you burn your hand on the hot handle of a pan on the hob, you know better next time. Maybe not next time, but the time after. You wobble on your bike a few yards as a boy with your older brother or your friends or your dad holding on to it and they shout ‘go!’ and ‘faster!’ and you go faster and they let go of the bike and you stay upright and you have the hang of it and you can now ride a bike. You may still fall off occasionally, but the principle is down and you can tick that off your list. You practice and practice and practice the piano and if you have a modicum of talent and a bit of a musicality in your ear you will become passably good at playing. If you have a lot of talent and a great deal of musicality and you love what you’re doing you may become exceptionally good and turn into a professional musician, a concert pianist: if you are God’s Gift to Steinway you may become Keith Jarrett. Languages. Mathematics. History. Even writing, people even teach writing, which suggests some people learn it. Chemistry. Not love though. Not the chemistry of love. Not the mystery of love. Not the vexation of love. Not the love of love.

Leonard [who’s not really called Leonard, I’m changing his name too, though I doubt he will read this] does to me what dozens of men before him have done, never deliberately, hardly ever even aware, most certainly not with any ill intentions: he infatuates me. In him. Is infatuate a transitive verb? In a passive sense? If I am now infatuated, that would suggest I have been infatuated and since I can hardly infatuate myself – unless I suffer a substantial streak in narcissism – the person who infatuates should, if logic had anything to do with it, be by definition the infatuator. With the person who’s infatuated the infatuatee. Logic has very little to with it. Leonard is a little taller than me and a little younger. I’ve always wanted to be a little taller than I am (though I am not, by averages, short) and while I spent the whole of my teens wanting to be older, and never really in that sense since have wanted to be younger than I actually am, I relate well to people who are a little younger, partly because part of my brain has not really caught up yet with my actual age and partly because another part of my brain has always been far ahead. Age doesn’t really matter to me. Or so I like to believe.

Leonard [and I like the name Leonard, not least because I now associate it with the man I have off the top of my head given it to], is German, though you wouldn’t immediately think so: his accent makes him sound more like a Dutchman who’s spent a lot of time in the States, or a Europeanised American. He and his girlfriend have joined the choir together and on the first evening of the new term he sits next to me and I feel like a schoolboy. I feel like the schoolboy precisely who fell in love with Michael when he joined our class, he aged 7, most of us then aged 8. This is ridiculous. I know it is ridiculous and my young brain infuriates at the idiocy of my heart while my old brain manages a smile that sits halfway between condescending and benign. Of course you are now infatuated, it says, my old brain, to heart. Worry not. Like all previous infatuations this one shall pass and you will laugh about it later. Soon, in fact, because I have so much experience now, so much insight, very nearly wisdom to give you now and to ease the imminent transition from infatuation to friendship with love of the friendship kind, love that is unentangled, appreciative, mutual, but free. You idiot, says my younger brain, you child, you pubescent teenager: you, at the age of fifty-one are allowing yourself a crush on somebody who has just introduced you to his girlfriend and who is absolutely certain to fancy you about as much as his grandfather’s drinking buddy Ralph. (I like the idea of Leonard having a grandfather with a drinking buddy called Ralph and feel slightly flattered that I should remind him of him. That’s how absurd I am in this moment…)

There is nothing to be done. When he misses a couple of rehearsals, I miss him. When he returns, my heart leaps. In the break, when he’s standing, chatting to his girlfriend, I join them. I make a point of talking to her as much as to him, so she doesn’t feel left out, but I really only have eyes for him. It is ridiculous, even pathetic, but thoroughly enjoyable too. Maybe that’s what this is about: maybe the reason the heart won’t learn is not just because it doesn’t really have to, and not so much because it can’t, but simply because it doesn’t actually want to: the pleasure of being a little in love, of being infatuated, of being just a tad drugged by endorphins is just too great to forego forever. And why should it: it’s not causing any harm. It’s not even causing pain, curiously. In the past it did. In the past, I would get over my infatuations through pain. That is no longer the case. Probably because while the heart steadfastly refuses to learn, the head is really quite capable now of putting it all in its place.

Also in the choir is another sweet man who is quite a bit younger and quite a bit shorter and maybe also a little bit rounder than I. And he’s roundly lovable too. I just want to hug him, every time I see him. He reminds me of Paddington Bear. How could you not cuddle Paddington Bear? And until not so long ago there was a young man who was just very beautiful. Or so I thought. I don’t think I ever spoke more than about three and half sentences with him. And of course there was Edward…

George looks at me puzzled. ‘I think you should go with the heart,’ he finally says in a calm measured tone, looking me straight in the eye. ‘Really?’ I mean: I agree with him, but isn’t he the one who too often has precisely not done that, and now he’s telling me?… ‘Yes.’ He speaks with a slight accent and a tone that makes him sound a little aloof and a little bemused and a little detached and a little curious, too. I remember being all of these very well, but I don’t remember sounding them. ‘The only times I’ve ever been unhappy was when I did not follow my heart. You know: “you regret the things you haven’t done, never the things you did…”’ Yes, but: you’re telling me? If I knew this then, and he’s probably right, I knew this then, then how come I still make exactly the same mistakes… hang on. Did I not just say they’re not, maybe, mistakes, at all, they’re maybe just: my modus operandi.

‘Assuming, George, you could find the ideal partner for yourself, who would that be?’

‘Oh I don’t think such a person exists.’ – He doesn’t even have to think about it.

‘Why do you think so?’ I’m beginning to feel a little inadequate, talking to myself, aged twenty-one.

‘Well, because there is no ideal person. For anyone. People just accommodate each other and get used to each other’s foibles and when they find somebody who they can bear more than they can bear being alone, they settle with them; for as long as that’s true, and sometimes quite a bit longer, mainly because they can’t be bothered going through the hassle of separation. Or because they’re just comfortable enough. Or because they’re afraid.’

‘Not because they need someone?’

‘Maybe that. But isn’t needing someone the same as being able to bear someone more than being able to bear being alone?’

‘If you put it that way. – And you?’

‘Oh, I can bear being alone.’

I thought as much, but:

‘And you’re not afraid?’

‘Afraid? Of what? I love being on my own. I love being with people and I love being on my own. I need people around me and I need a lot of time and a lot of space for myself. I function exceptionally well on my own.’

That is so true. That was true then, that is true now. Thank you, George: I function exceptionally well, on my own. But does that necessarily mean I couldn’t function even better with someone? Ah, here we go again…

18b Reprise

My encounter with him takes me right back. Back to when everything was different and new and a little bit daunting. But also, obviously, exciting. He is up for things, he’s up for seeing some art, he’s up for hearing Morcheeba, he’s even up for a book launch next Tuesday, though that is now unlikely to happen as he seems to have mistaken Thursday for Tuesday and realised he needs Tuesday to cram for a deadline Wednesday morning. Either that or what’s happened in-between has brought everything down to a fairly abrupt if hilarious (sort of) conclusion. At this point I’m unsure which, but I say to myself: if our friendship/connection/whateverthiscouldbecome survives what’s happened in-between then it will survive pretty much anything. When I say ‘whateverthiscouldbecome’, I should first of all quickly check back with the reality I am currently mostly familiar with.

We have arrived at the Shepherd’s Bush Empire and the place is as yet fairly empty, with only a couple of dozen people or so huddling near the very front, by the stage, so we are able to get ourselves a couple of drinks and leisurely hang about the part of the stalls that will soon fill up with  gig-goers, standing. I don’t remember what prompts the question, but it comes mid-conversation, as an aside, almost, or a sub-clause, certainly not a big deal, when he asks me how old I think he is. It’s a question in parentheses (a by-the-way-kind-of question that may or may not have slipped into another, much more pertinent topic of discussion) and I say, ‘well, putting together the information I have, I think you’re probably a bit younger than you look,’ – bearing in mind I originally thought he looked comfortable in his very early thirties – ‘so I’d say possibly mid- towards late twenties, about twenty-seven?’

‘Yes, I am twenty-two.’