Sebastian Michael's Blog: EDEN by FREI, page 41

{Contentment}

If everything were perfect, as it is, how much would we crave disturbance? The variants that made matter congeal. The idiom that expresses just what needs to be said. The waves within waveforms that ripple through time. There are connections that never make sense but they make me feel that I am a part of something. No-one knows what. The friend of my nephew’s who is so gentle, so unassuming and yet so lovely. His exquisite taste. His mild and agreeable manner. His beautiful face. His warm and unfussy friendship. His ease that isn’t untroubled but that knows how to hold on to the core. His generous smile. His diligent gestures as he cooks us a meal that tastes like a dish for the gods. The faintly-haired legs that end in two so shapely feet. I could be here. This presence is one I could glow in forever. I’m sure. Will ever I be able to find this and know that I have found it? 

4 Maxl (Still Here)

I wake up to a horrible dream. It’s so horrible I don’t want to think about it, it could well be the second most horrible dream I’ve ever had, and I take issue with horribleness, so I go back to sleep once again and I don’t continue to dream, which I’m glad on.

Maxl knocks on the door and wakes me up; I’m already half awake but that means I’m also half asleep and I’m hugging a cushion for comfort. He asks if I’m all right; I am puzzled: he’s never been this concerned about me before. He says he’s concerned about me.

Maybe I made horrible noises in my horrible dream, it’s possible. I blink at him and say ‘yes’ and I’m about to go back to sleep once again; he says ‘it’s nearly half two’, which in German means half one but means nothing to me at the moment because they’ve put the clocks forward last night and I don’t do mornings at the best of times.

Maxl rustles about in my room while I drift back off to sleep. He keeps much of his stuff in my room, so it’s a bit like having a live-in partner, without the partner, it’s a bit like a lose-lose situation: the worst of both worlds. The good thing I suppose: we don’t argue. Though he moans at me.

Maxl moans at me about England.

Every day he comes back from college or from the bank or from the tube or from the post office or from the supermarket or from the park or from the cafe or from the pub or from the pavement, moaning at me. Every day.

He is German so he’s used to hyper-efficiency; he also lives in Berlin when he’s not here, so he’s used to an agreeable level of anarchic socialism. Objectively, I agree with most of what he complains about but the complaining itself bugs me, every day, about everything.

That and the fact that he moans at me in German: he makes it sound as if I were responsible. Maybe I am responsible. Maybe my quiet acquiescence to all things British, to all things English, to all things London, has made me complicit in bringing about a college that charges an arm and a leg but that has embarrassingly poor facilities and a bunch of students who, instead of standing up for their ideas and their rights and their freedoms, do everything they’re told, as they’re told, and for a bank that charges an arm and a leg in fees and makes opening a bank account as much of a deal as if you were asking the Emperor of China for a slice of Tibet, and a tube that charges you an arm and a leg but shuts down for weekends at a time and that runs late because one of their drivers has a bout of the sniffles and that goes on strike at the whiff of a comma in a staff manual being changed and that stops running at midnight when half the population is still about town enjoying themselves, and for a post office that I can’t think of what they might be doing wrong off the top of my head but I can easily imagine that in Germany they run their post offices in a way that is altogether more, well, German, and for a supermarket that installs machines that talk at you instead of employing people who serve you, and for a park that is actually pretty much perfect if you ask me but that if you’re German you’ll probably nevertheless find something to moan about, and for the café that I can’t I’m losing my will to live…

The pubs close too early I know and the trains are a nightmare, get over it, it’s London, this, innit.

I can’t be doing with this much moaning and I realise that much as I love him, if Maxl were my husband I would have to ask him for a divorce now. That would be terrible. Fortunately he’s only a very good friend and I can love him even though he moans at me because I know I don’t have to own any of this beyond the level to which I just have to own my share of this culture that so irks him. Better still, much as I love Berlin – and I love Berlin, and I always, always still keep a metaphorical suitcase there – I don’t have to move to Berlin with him just because he doesn’t like London. I actually think he quite likes London, which makes me also think that maybe he moans about Berlin! At his girlfriend! (Phew!) I don’t know and I don’t want to speculate because I’m troubled by my horrible dream which I don’t want to think about and I also don’t want to seem ungrateful or ungracious or ungenerous. I don’t want to seem or to feel un-anyhing. I love Maxl [I’ve changed his name here, by the way, because I don’t want to get him into trouble nor do I want him to think that I don’t love him just because he moaned at me] and I am grateful to him for being a good, loyal friend, and I graciously accept the gift of insight that even someone you love can get on your nerves to the point where you are quite prepared to wrestle them to the ground and slap them with a very wet fish, and I want to retain and hold on to the generosity of spirit that says live and let live, love and let love, be and let be. And I realise I am actually moaning about somebody moaning at me. Which is a little ironic. And I like little ironies. Though I still don’t like moaning. Which I suppose makes it doubly ironic… And the whole experience reminds me acutely why I so much enjoy being single. 

I feel tempted to tell George about this, but obviously I don’t because I don’t want to prejudice him against Maxl or against me. And I certainly don’t want to tell him about the horrible dream, which he’d be bound to want to know more about.

The Snowflake Collector – 6: A Snowflake Not Unlike Him

Some of the snowflakes came down in clusters, others in twirling jumbles, and others still in flighty twists, but he knew he needed a steady snowflake that was on its own, a lone snowflake disentangled, unburdened, unencumbered, free: a snowflake not unlike him, a snowflake that had been gently descending along its unspectacular way through the world and was now ready to leave its most particular, most individual mark. Such a snowflake soon caught his eye, as it approached, a little slower than some of the clumpier ones around it and a little faster than some of the ones that didn’t seem quite formed yet, and he held out his bare hand with the glass plate on it, and as if a little curious, as if attracted, as if called by this strip of translucence in its path, it settled and lo: it stayed. Like a bed made for it, like a throne on which now to sit, like a home that was primed now and ready for it there to live, it delivered its presence onto the plate, its intricate shape, its form, its identity, kissed into the fast drying liquid upon the glass.

The Snowflake Collector looked at his treasure in sheer wonder. My dear good friend, I can’t presume to know you, but may I name you Ferdinand. The snowflake did not object to being so named and The Snowflake Collector solemnly took him inside, looked at him closely, as closely as he could with his bare eyes, under the light, and he dabbed one more drop of superglue over him to fix him and then lay another glass plate on top of Ferdinand, to protect him. Also, he realised, to encase him: his bed, his throne, was also his tomb.

A deep pain and anguish drove through The Snowflake Collector’s heart at this moment: am I committing a crime, am I stealing Ferdinand’s soul? Should he not have been allowed to ease himself onto the ground or the bench or the table, among his companions, and then melt away with the sun, seep into the ground, dissolve into his watery molecules and find his way back into the rhythm of the universe? Is my keeping him captive here now for as long as these glass plates will last not depriving his spirit from turning into something else, something different, but equally wondrous? Is somewhere in the cycle of nature something missing now, because I have named this snowflake Ferdinand and declared him mine own?

This so deeply troubled The Snowflake Collector that he spent many hours sitting at his table in his very small kitchen, not eating anything, not even Bündnerfleisch and barely touching his Chrüterschnapps, wondering how, if ever, he could atone for this act of appropriation. Who am I, he thought, to claim such a beautiful thing? How dare I deprive it of its link to its past and its future? Is it not insufferably arrogant and presumptuous of me to make me his ‘master’?

He felt the abyss of despair open up its gaping void before him and the urge to throw his third, his successful case for the snowflakes into the fire overcame him, but he felt no power to let go of Ferdinand. Could it be, he wondered, in passionate silence, that I am already in love with him? Has making him mine already made me his just as much, am I already, only hours after capturing him, entirely under his spell? And this is only one, my first one, how will I bear adding to him? Will he and the power he has over me not become so overwhelming as to be meaningless? Will he and his fellows, his peers entirely take over? Will I succumb to their unbearably potent magic?

The Snowflake Collector did not go to bed that night. Slumped over the table by the flickering flames in the stove he sat there, clasping the glass plates between which he had immortalised – by, he felt, killing! – his snowflake friend Ferdinand, and when he woke up in the morning, the blood from his hand where the sharp edge of the glass had cut into his flesh had encrusted his hand and the table and also the glass, and a drop or two of his blood had seeped in between the two glass plates, and so together with his first snowflake there was now preserved there also a drop of his blood and he said to himself: so be it.

I shall surrender to the will of the universe, and if it is not the will of the universe it is the frivolity of my imagination I shall follow. Ferdinand will forgive me. Or maybe he can’t. But I shall make his agony worthwhile: I shall share him with the world. And that way, maybe, he too, not just I, can have a purpose beyond our mere existence.

He put Ferdinand in his pocket and, still not having eaten anything, made his way down to the inn on the edge of the hamlet, an hour or so from his hut, and there introduced him – holding out his still unwashed, bloodied hand – to Yanosh. ‘Look,’ he said, as Yanosh took the plate from his hand and held it up against the light and his eyes lit up with equal awe. And Yanosh, after a minute or two of examining him took out his smartphone and photographed him with the light shining through him, and handed him back and asked: ‘what name did you choose?’

‘Ferdinand.’

‘I like Ferdinand,’ Yanosh said. ‘I’ll have to get hold of a macro lens for my camera, so I can take better pictures of him.’

589 The Sedartis Effect

Sedartis is full of little insights which are borderline annoying. They are annoying, because they are obvious and it’s possible only to be borderline annoyed with them, because they are obviously true. They are the kind of insights that make you wonder: why has nobody pointed this out to me, in, say, year eleven. (Before then it would have maybe seemed a little abstract.)

Since joining me – unbidden, uninvited – and taking up quasi-permanent residence by my side, he has been doing this at irregular intervals, which at least has the advantage that there is still a mild element of surprise.

‘The reason time passes faster as you get older, relentlessly, irreversibly, is very simple,’ he tells me. I did not ask him about this, I was just looking out of the window of yet another moving train, this time to Dorset, via Crewkerne, Somerset.

‘I imagine it is,’ I say, having for some time felt I had my own plausible theory about this, but not found opportunity or reason to formulate it. ‘At the age of one, one year is a hundred percent of your lifetime. That makes it really long. So long that you can’t fathom it.

By the age of ten, that same year is now only a tenth of your lifetime. In absolute terms, it may be as long as any other year, but you don’t experience life in absolute terms: you experience life in relative terms, always; relative in its entirety to you, in parts also to others. Your year now makes up just ten percent of the body of your experience thus far.

At the age of fifty, one year has shrunk to a fiftieth of your lifetime: if somebody offered you a fiftieth part of a pie you’d barely think it worth eating. But it’s still a year, and it’s still a part of the pie of your life. And you never know, you may just find a cherry in it.

And aged a hundred, your year now hardly registers. You may well lose track and forget how old you are: was it a hundred and two or a hundred and three years ago now that you were born? Does it matter?’

‘That all makes perfect sense to me,’ I say to Sedartis, who I think is in danger of seeming smug. ‘Why are you telling me this? Now?’

‘Because you’re obviously at that moment in your life when your perception of time reaches a tipping point: your life expectancy today isn’t quite but may soon be a hundred; so around now, as you’re halfway through this, your sense that you’re losing your grip on time will accelerate; and because you’re now primarily no longer moving away from your birth, which is fixed and lies finite in the past, but towards your death, which is undetermined and reaches into an indefinite future, you will find this more and more disconcerting.’

‘What, more disconcerting than I find it already?’

‘Of course: it is, in a not entirely obvious way, not entirely unlike the Doppler Effect: the sound waves coming towards you are compressed so they appear to your ears higher than once the source of the sound has passed: now the waves are getting stretched out and so the pitch for you seems to drop. Of course, time is not a wave and the comparison is unscientific at best and clumsy at worst, but if nothing else it’s a fine example of how our reality is shaped mostly by our own experience of it.’

‘Quite.’

‘But think not for one moment that you’d be happier if you lived longer.’

‘I don’t think so, generally.’

‘Because: if we were to get to the point, say, where we habitually had an active consciousness span of ten thousand years, it would not feel that much longer than our consciousness span feels to us today: as we’d get towards the last millennium, each year would only constitute between a nine and a ten thousandth of our lifetime. That is about the same as three days are to us today. We would simply think of a year then as we think of a weekend now and stretch our living out over a period a hundred times longer. And nor should this surprise us: when our life expectancy was thirty years or so, people did not think to themselves, our lives are way too short; they simply did all their living inside those thirty years at their disposal. No-one could argue that Alexander the Great, for example, or Mozart, didn’t really get enough living done in the thirty-odd years of their experience as human beings.’

‘No,’ I say, more than a tad wistfully thinking of Tom Lehrer, ‘that, I’m sure, no-one could argue.’

3 Chaos

This makes me wonder what, in a multiverse of all possible universes, my life is like right now in the world where Benjamin and I are together.

So often have I tried to find him in others – repeatedly have I attempted to find him himself – that I’ve lost all concept of what the reality would be of us actually having done what other people do. Do other people do this? It’s certainly the impression I get: other people I know meet someone, fall in love, have some ups and downs, decide to give it a go, give it a go, stick together, or sometimes not, and if they don’t then most likely they have a  break and then either give it another go or do so with somebody else. I have good examples at close range of things working out well between people, all around me. My family, especially, are exemplary. So it shouldn’t be difficult.

Still, it mystifies me.

Benjamin has fallen out with his father, this much I know. I know this much because the last number I find in my old address book for him is his old home number, and at one point, while I’m in the country, I phone that number and I get his dad on the phone who tells me that he doesn’t know where his son is. Nor how to contact him. He says this quite categorically and I’m surprised, of course, and a bit stunned and about to end the conversation, but before I do I ask whether anybody else might know how to contact him, and he says, yes, his mother might know. Ah, I say, and would he happen to still have a number for his mother. I sense I need to tread carefully as I don’t want to upset or offend him, and I feel sorry that they’re no longer together, but at least that offers a plausible explanation as to why his father does not know where he is or how to contact him: his parents must have separated many years ago, maybe on bad terms. But: ‘this number here,’ he says; ‘she’ll be back later, she’s at work now.’

This makes me sad, more than it puzzles me, and it puzzles me a lot: clearly Benjamin’s mother and father are still together, still living in the same house where I once or twice came to see him, where I met both of them, once or twice; where in fact I interviewed his dad for my final school project, which I wrote on racism; but while his mother ‘may know’ how to get in touch with him, the father not only doesn’t know, he obviously doesn’t want to know either. His son is dead to him. Which fills me with a well of abject sadness. He is, has always been, so alive to me.

Should it surprise that your first love is your strongest, your most intensely felt, most devastating and also most exulted? To this day I remember getting drunk on coffee with him on the sofa. That seems surreal now, but we drank so much coffee over so many hours all through the night until it was getting light outside, I started feeling high. Caffeine and adrenalin and serotonin. And that other thing. Is there that other thing, that indescribable thing, that thing we sing songs about and write poems over and feel we could die for?

I phoned up again a day or two later (or maybe it was later that day) and spoke to the mother who remembered me and may have remembered me fondly, she certainly sounded warm and kind and she said, yes, if I were to write him a letter she would forward it onto him, that might work.

I wrote him a letter and she forwarded it onto him and nothing happened for a very long time and I remembered, as I spoke to his mother and before I wrote the letter, the birthday for which I had sent him a flower. He lived outside Zürich, I outside Basel, his birthday was and still is six days before mine, and because I couldn’t see him on his birthday, I went out and bought him a flower – I can’t be sure now what kind of flower it was but I like to think and am fairly certain it was a yellow rose – and I asked the florist for one of these small vials that would keep the flower fresh for a while, and I sealed this around the stem of the flower and wrapped it in tissues in case it should leak and sealed that in foil, I believe, and then put the flower into a long box and I must have used some padding, and then I posted it to him, with my birthday wishes. I didn’t wonder then but I wondered now what his mother made of that at the time.

I wrote him a letter and sent it to his mother and she forwarded it to him and nothing happened for a very long time until one Sunday the phone rang and it was Benjamin. Out of the blue, except for the letter of course. He’d received it and now he was living in Guggisberg. He’d moved to Guggisberg because of the song, did I know it? I didn’t but I do now.

We talked for maybe four or five hours. I don’t remember what we talked about, but then that was that kind of connection: where you can talk for four or five hours and not remember what you talked about, nor really care. For those four or five hours it was as if he were there. 

And all of a sudden I can feel it ease, the pain of not knowing what had become of him. He’s not had an easy ride. ‘I have a son,’ he says. ‘I have a tooth missing.’ He’s been through the addiction and the rehab and back and other things. He lives with his partner, who isn’t the mother of his son. ‘You’ve done a good thing here, he says, meaning my writing to him, and after the afternoon had passed with us talking, he said, ‘and now I’m going to get drunk.’ We were a bit drunk already, again, both of us, this time on the beers we each started to open, he in Guggisberg, I in Earl’s Court. ‘And I’m going to hear Jane Birkin in concert,’ I said, and it was true. He wasn’t online but he would write back to me now, he said; but I didn’t think he would, and he didn’t.

After a few months or so, maybe a year, I thought I’d just write to him one more time although I was myself no longer sure of the wisdom of that, and I sent another letter, this time directly to him, at the address he’d given me, on the Guggisberg. It came back as not delivered: the addressee had moved away. But now I don’t mind. My heart is light and free. I hope before either of us dies I’ll see him again, maybe when we’re quite old. Maybe when we’re quite old we can sit together on a bench or in a lakeside café and spend a whole day, talking, and getting drunk. On whatever.

I look at George looking at me and remember I’m not alone. I’ve never been alone, I’ve always had George, but George has been very much on his own at times, he has chosen a lone path, and I can’t blame him for that. ‘Tell me about Benjamin,’ I want to say, but I know everything I need to know now about him, and I know that George knows much less now than I.

I walk into a room full of people. It’s the Christmas Bazar at the Steiner School in Zürich. I’ve gone there with a friend from Basel, to visit a couple of people we’d met at a Whitsun Camp earlier in the year and stayed in touch with. I don’t remember anything else about the day, not how we arranged to meet or who else was there. Most likely we’d just arrived and most likely we’d said: in the café, around then. The café is just a class room, converted for the day; or maybe it’s a hall. The room is busy, there is a table with five or six people at it, in conversation. Two or three of them we already know. We introduce ourselves. One of them turns around: “ich bi dr Benjamin.” My world has never been the same again.

‘Tell me, George,’ the Mojito giving me licence to talk, ‘what do you make of the heart?’

{Vignette}

At the Servant Jazz Quarters jazz bar, the bar lady dressed in a dress striped with wide white and black stripes fixes me with eyes not unkind but commanding attention from beneath a lighthouse tower of hair:

‘Do you think,’ she asks me, her eyebrows arching like raven’s wings flying high above the cliffs of her teeth: ‘that people are afraid to love?’

‘Yes,’ I say, without hesitation, for I know I am.

‘Why?’ she shoots at me as if I had made it so.

‘I don’t know.’ And it’s true: I don’t know; but I think that maybe it’s because it makes us feel vulnerable, and I say so: ‘Maybe because it makes them feel vulnerable.’ (I change the pronoun, hoping that she won’t notice.)

‘And is that a bad thing?’ she demands, probably having noticed, and I say it isn’t, but that it’s what makes us afraid.

I feel that I’ve closed the loop and maybe she feels so too and she places a cocktail of her recommendation in front of me; in a gesture of reconciliation, more, I think, with the way that it is than with me, for we have no cavil with one another, and her cliffs give over to a white Dover smile.

The Snowflake Collector – 5: He Had Abandoned the Notion of ‘Hurry’

With daylight hours gradually usurped by darkness now, and cooler, longer nights now spreading their still presence over the valley, The Snowflake Collector set about his endeavour.

After the early snowfall towards the end of October, which had soon ceased and given way to one more spell of golden autumn with spice in the air, winter had now been sending more heralds, tentatively, at first, but unmistakably nonetheless, and welcome. While he knew now how to collect snowflakes and knew what things he needed to obtain and what things to make before he could do so, The Snowflake Collector was in no hurry. It had been many years since he had last allowed the world to impose on him any ‘hurry’, and it had revealed itself to him so futile then, so unnecessary and unnecessarily restless, that he had abandoned the notion of ‘hurry’ altogether, never to seek it out again, or permit it to return.

It would suffice completely, he knew, to collect one, maybe two snowflakes to begin with. Better, he thought to himself, do this and do this well than to rush into constructing a shed – indispensable as it would undoubtedly be – or building the sturdy boxes for the delicately crafted cases. No, he would build a case, yes, from wood he had already stored under the roof by the side of his hut, and he would cut some plates from glass he knew where to buy, and he would use some of the superglue that had been kicking around in his tool box for years, but which had never been opened, and he would collect one or two, or maybe three snowflakes and see how that felt, how at home they would be in the case he would build.

So when Yanosh next wandered up the narrow path towards the end of the valley to sit outside The Snowflake Collector’s hut and maybe nod ‘hello’ at him, maybe not, he found him there in the late autumn sunshine sawing pieces of wood. He was not a master carpenter, The Snowflake Collector, but he had for many years now been living on his own in his hut; and soon after moving here he had purchased a small plot of land by the stream for very little money, where there were already some firs, and where he now planted, for every old one he cut down, two young trees, and so he had, over time, gained enough experience making things out of wood to make them confidently, and well. Yanosh nodded what may have been a ‘hello’ to The Snowflake Collector, and The Snowflake Collector understood it as such and nodded back what to most people might have been barely noticeable, but to Yanosh, with similar certainty, signalled ‘hello’.

It would often be the case now that Yanosh would find The Snowflake Collector thus or otherwise engaged in preparing his snowflake collection. He never explained what he was doing and Yanosh never asked, because to both it was obvious, but Yanosh enjoyed watching The Snowflake Collector at work, because there was a calm determination and purpose to what he was doing, and The Snowflake Collector was at ease in these tasks, for the very same reason. Sometimes Yanosh would hold up a long plank of wood or pass a tool or pick up a piece of glass that had fallen to the ground, but mostly he would just sit there and watch as The Snowflake Collector went about his new business.

Having never collected snowflakes, or anything else for that matter, before, it did not surprise The Snowflake Collector, and nor did it surprise Yanosh, that not everything did go smoothly. The first case he built, although beautiful and smooth, with clean but not sharp edges and a convenient handle at the narrow top, turned out to be useless as it was simply too large. It had looked, in The Snowflake Collector’s imagination, and in his rudimentary drawings which were not quite to scale, exactly right, but it came out not so. Once he had filled it with glass plates, each three inches long and one inch wide, it was too heavy for him to lift easily off his work bench and so he started over again. He also realised only now that he would not, after all, need to build sturdy boxes for these cases. He would simply have to build the cases themselves sturdy enough, and for the cases he would have to construct a formidable shed in which he would need to fit strong shelves evenly spaced, but here was no need, in reality, for another, intermediate layer of housing for his snowflakes, just as long as the cases were sound.

It was not until the second week of December that The Snowflake Collector was ready to collect his first snowflake. By then he had made and destroyed a first case for snowflakes that had turned out to be unwieldy and large, and he had made and dismantled a second case, which had been the right size and shape, but in which the glass plates that were to hold the snowflakes did not sit snugly enough, but rattled when he closed the lid and lifted the case off the bench, and this, The Snowflake Collector was certain, would not do. Having dismantled the case, he then saw that there was no easy way to fix the inadequacy, say by adjusting the slot width for the glass plates which had too much give, and so he discarded this second case too and made a third, better one. This, he found, when he slid all the glass plates he had by now cut from large sheets of plain glass – cutting himself several times in the process and once very painfully so – to be if not perfect then sufficiently solid and sturdy and strong.

By now there had been snowfall on several more occasions. But The Snowflake Collector was glad that circumstances had conspired, and maybe he and his subconscious mind had conspired with them, to make him wait until now, until very nearly the beginning of Winter, before he commenced his immense undertaking. He was not a stickler for rules and it would have disquieted, even appalled, him to know himself one who awaited the ‘official’ date for the start of the season, or anything else, but if there was one thing The Snowflake Collector believed to be true then it was that to every thing there is a season, and while he had not given it any elaborate or conscious thought, he felt instinctively that the time for collecting snowflakes had not come, until now.

Now, towards the end of the second week of December, with the feast of St Nicholas already gone and the days in the valley short now and sombre when the sun wasn’t shining, and crisp and cold and still very short when it was, The Snowflake Collector woke up one morning from a night of fitful sleep with no dream that he could recall, and as he opened his eyes and glanced from his narrow hard bed to the small cross hatched window, which in all the years he had lived here had never been curtained, he saw that there was snow on the sill and there were big heavy snowflakes tumbling again from the sky, as there had been on that day when he had resolved to become The Snowflake Collector, which now seemed eternities in the past, but which was only in fact some six weeks ago, at barely the end of October.

His heart leapt at the sight, because he knew that this was the day, that the hour had come, that the convergence of all things leading up to now had finally made this Now possible, and real. With calm, serene joy, he rose from his bed, lit the fire in the stove, performed his rudimentary and no more than essential ablutions, dressed warmly and went to the kitchen where, in a small freezer compartment of his small refrigerator he had chilled a small stack of glass plates, much as Yanosh had instructed him to.

With three of them he went outside, picking up from the kitchen drawer a small tube of superglue he had placed there in preparation, and in front of his hut he put everything down on his bench. There he carefully dabbed a drop of glue on a frozen glass plate and, holding the plate in his hand, raised his eyes to the sky.

{Petals}

I think I can count on one hand (plus maybe one finger, perhaps even two, three at a stretch) the number of people I have actually fallen in love with. This surprises me, because I think not all the hairs I now have on my head and in my beard combined would suffice to account for the number of people I think I have fallen in love with. There is, as always, a margin of error, but it is nowhere near as wide as one might imagine:

Benjamin (First and Most Deeply). Stefan. Janey (Somewhat, and More Than Seems Likely). The Man Whose Name I Can’t Remember Who Stage Managed One of the Tours I Was on (Though I’m Not Sure How That Even Happened Because The Moment I Fell Out of Love With Him I Wondered What Did I Ever See in Him and Wrote a Song to That Effect). Willow (Of Course, and Still Am a Bit and He Knows it). Probably JayJay. Certainly Dominic. A Little Bit Edward. And Indeed Moritz. Actually that brings me up to nine. But already I’d need to qualify. Was I really in love with Stefan? Or was I just blown away by how beautiful, charming and unimaginably cute he was?

There are many, many more I have at some point been a little in love with and still am, to a level where it nearly registers, sometimes a bit more, then back to a bit less. And there are many, many whom I simply love. Roundly, completely, for who they are. And there are borderline cases. Michael, at school. Was I in love with him, or did I ‘just’ love him, as I most certainly did. And before him the English boy who came to our school in Basel on some exchange programme. He is almost certainly the first person I ever had a genuine crush on. I was maybe eleven or twelve and he’d arrived into one year below or above, I believe, and I was so smitten that I bought him an ice cream. That was all: on our way to school there was a kiosk where everybody bought their sweets and although he wasn’t in my year and we hadn’t been introduced and I didn’t know his name, I felt simply compelled to let him know that I liked him and so I bought him an ice cream. I gave it to him and he smiled and said thank you, and I don’t remember ever saying another word to him, but to this day it makes me happy to remember the moment he smiled at me, a little surprised, but friendly and gracious in a way I had never seen anybody smile before and have rarely seen anyone since: the smile of innocence and recognition.

I realise this is something I should ask myself. Something that maybe could help me today. I could learn maybe something from George. That makes sense. Much more, in fact, than the idea that he could learn anything from me. I could perhaps learn from him how he did that. How he set up a pattern that to this day I haven’t got out of: he’s much closer to it, he’s in the process of doing it now: what is going on in his head, what, more to the point, in his heart? Obviously I can’t phrase my question that way, I obviously have to go about it smidgeonwise more dextrously.

But if I played this one right I might actually gain some insight…

2 Memories of the Present: Hangover

There is a connection; the connection may well be the pattern. I did this back then, I do this right now, I will be doing this in two years’ time, most likely in ten, maybe even in twenty. I understand it, I can put reason to it, but I can’t make any sense of it, because reason doesn’t really come into it.

I have to sometimes save myself from myself but more often than not the universe protects me from what I want. If the universe and my subconscious are in tune with each other, then that will explain a lot, even if my conscious still struggles. And it still struggles. I think. And I think sometimes I am my own worst enemy because I think matters through, I most likely overthink them. My sitting here now may well be a case in point: I should probably just get drunk with myself on cocktails and not care one labradoodle why I am here now reminding myself of my incapacity to fruitfully fall in love.

Even the idea of fruitfully falling in love sounds like a great misunderstanding. Of myself, by myself. And of other people. Namely the people I somehow find myself falling ‘in love’ with. I wouldn’t know the first thing of what ‘being in love’ beyond my expenditure of in all cases unilaterally excessive emotion upon a moving target would actually entail. But I know more or less what it wouldn’t.

I’m reminded of something that is happening simultaneously, even as I’m talking to George; although of course it isn’t, it will have happened either just before or just after, or a little earlier or a bit later, but at this moment it might as well be happening right now for the sheer presence it has, the way it imposes itself:

I wake up surrounded by paint pots, pots of paint small and large, some tin, some plastic, plus white spirit. 

My head aches like Alaska, I open my eyes and close them again and open them once more and then close them again. I hear the voice of my friend who is staying with me talk to his girlfriend on Skype. I don’t hear her side of the conversation, he’s wearing headphones. His side of the conversation goes, ‘uhm… yah… – … – …yoah… – … – …hmmmyoh.’ He’s German, more specifically: Bavarian. He may be the first Bavarian I have ever fancied. I used to go much more for lean, lanky, tall men, and while I still have a residual primal propensity towards tall people generally, I was here for the first time more than just somewhat smitten with somebody of a more solid build and compatible nature.   

I listen with my eyes closed, though I try not to hear. I used to think that his girlfriend was the most boring person alive, but that may well have just been the ill tint of jealousy. I don’t like the idea of being jealous any more than I like the idea of being angry or ungenerous, but since he’s been staying with me, I’ve realised that my friend – whom I used to have a very soft spot, and continue to have a great deal of affection and highest professional regard for – when he feels like it (my in this moment murky mood wants to say: when he’s under her spell), can be almost as boring as her, even though his name doesn’t suggest it; his name suggests mischief and a boyish irreverence and a sense of adventure and a laugh and a roll in the hey and an ice cream too many and a drink on top, and calling on Freddie at two in the morning quite tipsy, and an eagerness to discover. None of which is currently much on display, but we did once call on Freddie at two in the morning after a party, as Freddie happened to live on the way. That was fun. (The girlfriend wasn’t amused…)

He sleeps a hell of a lot. Maybe he’s depressed. Or maybe his girlfriend tires him out. She is very hard work, I realise and find too. He sleeps more than I think he’s awake and sometimes he’s asleep when awake and even when he’s awake he often might as well be asleep. He’s been here for five months now and he still doesn’t speak English. That puzzles me. I must be hungry and hungover. Hence, surely, my state of mind which, to my own baffled unease, seems to signal malfunction. I know myself not so discomfited by the presence of a person I love!  

My brain hurts.

One of the paint pots has leaked pinkish paint onto my pillow, it looks oddly lush. There is no better cure for infatuation than to have someone stay at your flat for a while. I used to think he was the one, and I came close to telling him so. I certainly told him his girlfriend was boring. But I don’t regret that, it was true. Right now I wish myself buried under twelve thousand pebbles. Not dead, just buried. The pebbles would soothe me and ward off the ‘yahem… – … – och – … – nyah’. I keep my eyes closed and try to drift off…

18a Alignment

Here is how the universe aligned itself for it to happen that my young science communicator friend and I could have a wonderful night, with Morcheeba:

I had every intention of going to the Highlands for a few days in the last week of November, firstly because I love the Highlands and like to go there sometimes in the autumn when there are not many people about and there’s a good chance of rain and the walks are solitary and long, but also, secondly, I had an offer of a free first class ticket from East Coast Rail from King’s Cross to Edinburgh, which was about to expire in early December: a gift of ‘goodwill’ from the train operator by way of compensation for some long service delays the year before. I was pretty much sold on the idea of doing this because I craved the craggy hillsides and I thought on the way back I could drop in on Torben in Berwick-upon-Tweed and go for one or two more walks with him before Christmas, and for once I was not strapped for cash. So, so far so good.

The First Thing that went wrong as in right as in different to all expectations and most precedent was that Torben was going to be ‘on duty’ that particular weekend, the last weekend in November, because his wife was going to take herself off somewhere with the oldest, leaving him home alone with the two smaller children. This put a clanking big spanner into all kinds of works, since it meant that far from being able to go on extensive country walks followed by many pints in the pub, we would have to spend time mainly at home, looking after said children. Now, they are lovely children, but that was not what I’d had in mind.

The Second Thing that offered itself up as a variation on the plan was that a dinner that had been suggested a while ago by the Swiss Ambassador and his Wife for a small group of people including me was now scheduled for Thursday 27th and although I had very mixed feelings about the circumstances in which this invitation came about – for reasons that would probably be a breach of confidence for me to enter into in anything resembling detail – I actually rather liked the Ambassador and his Wife and thought that it would be churlish or at the very least bad manners to miss their dinner, in the absence of any good reason not to do so (other than my lingering unease about what had precipitated the dinner in the first place, of which more I shall not divulge). My enthusiasm for the prospect of spending the end of a Highland week at Torben’s already dampened I now also had almost a good reason to stay in London that week and attend this dinner, signalling to the Ambassador and his Wife ‘no hard feelings’, and so all was, comparatively speaking, well…

Now newly in a position of having this whole week mostly to myself in London, I started filling in some other nights of my diary. Except not the way they turned out at all. The Third Thing that happened was that I was having coffee with Tom at the Troubadour. There was no reason or purpose to this, he just happened to be in London with a break near the end of his tour and suggested we go for coffee, which I, being a creature of habit and feeling at home at the Troubadour, in turn suggested we do there. At some point Anders, the lovely lanky waiter of Scandinavian origin whom I have never not had a bit of a soft spot for (but then I tend to have a bit of a soft spot for waiters generally, especially tall ones), came over and handed me a blank envelope. This had never happened before. It was, he said, an invitation to a private view of a local artist’s, Melinda, who had asked him to give some of these to some Troubadour regulars, of which clearly I’m one. Pleased and a little flattered, I thanked him, slid the envelope in my pocket and proceeded to more or less forget about it in an instant. When I got home after saying goodbye to Tom, I found the envelope in my jacket and put it with my unopened mail there to forget about it for a second time.

Around about that time, on the 18th November, to be precise, so actually a couple of days before having coffee with Tom, I was trying to organise a night out with Diego, who is not only adorable as well as Italian, but also fairly difficult to pin down socially, because while he’s extremely loyal and helpful, he’s also unfeasibly busy. It’s a typically ‘London’ challenge, this, which we’re all used to. I proposed two films to him (as an alternative to the theatre, simply because he hadn’t yet responded to my other suggestion, which had been Electra at the Old Vic) and while he was keen to see the film on Turing, he had already arranged to see Interstellar with some other friends. Reasoning that as an Italian he wouldn’t mind, I boldly invited myself along, asking him specifics about the date and time he had booked, which turned out to be Friday night 28th at seven forty-five. I went online straight away and found one of very few seats – mainly singletons left out to the side and very front or extreme rear of the IMAX auditorium – and booked it, triumphantly announcing to Diego that I was going to crash his night out at the cinema.

Also on the 18th November, I start chatting to this man on Grindr. He describes himself as ‘masculine looking for the same, but love a good chat regardless’ and looks like a handsome, slightly rugged early thirty-something to me. He is on his way home, past my house, it appears, after a failed encounter with a ‘weird’ Italian – no connection to my Italian friend, I hasten to add – who has spooked him a bit, and while we’re online he reaches his flat, which happens to be eight doors precisely removed from mine, on the same side of the street. We chat a while longer, find out that we share several interests and are both night owls, until I finally sign off, as I’m beginning to fall off my perch, some time after three in the morning. The next day we chat again, briefly, then we skip a day and then over the next two days (we’re now up to the 22nd November) we again have just a few brief exchanges on Grindr, except I tell him that I had entered his name in the search field on Facebook and the first person to come up was him. I offer to send him a friend request, which he suggests I do, and we banter a bit about possibly finding out too much about each other and the joys of online stalking. So from the 22nd November he and I are friends on Facebook. This is the Saturday of the weekend before the week I was going to go to Scotland, but now won’t be. Nothing else noteworthy happens over the weekend.

On Monday 24th, and we’re now into the week in question, JayJay, more or less out of the blue, and also perhaps a tad surprisingly since we had only just seen each other a couple of times in a row when often we go without catching up for months, suggests I join him and some friends at a tiny North London fringe theatre to see a piece either by or adapted from Gogol. I have no pronounced interest in either the piece or the theatre, but I’ll go and see anything more or less any time and I am again pleased and a little flattered to have been asked and so of course I say yes. The night at the theatre is Wednesday, which tangentially reminds me that I have an invitation also to a private viewing at the Troubadour on that evening, but naturally JayJay and the theatre take precedent over a local artist whom I don’t know, and so I say yes to JayJay and prepare to forget about the invitation I received through Anders for a third time.

On Tuesday all is quiet and nothing unusual occurs.

Then, on Wednesday 26th the Fourth Thing flicks a new switch, retroactively: my friend David reposts an item of his girlfriend Alex’s on Facebook, in which she offers two tickets to see Morcheeba on Friday. The reason the tickets have become available is that she had bought them mistaking the date of the gig for the previous Friday, so she had rolled up at the venue then, only to be told that she was a week early. This coming Friday she can’t do. (Whether she was going to see Morcheeba with my friend David or somebody else, I don’t know.) I respond to David’s forwarded post, saying that I have use for one ticket, so if any of his other friends also has use for one then we could have ourselves a night out with Morcheeba “tomorrow”. This is a slip of the mind, as the tickets are actually for the day after tomorrow, but I don’t notice that. I do, however, look up my diary correctly for Friday, because in the diary for Thursday is the Ambassador and his Wife’s Dinner, and on Friday there is nothing.

This is the Fifth Thing, and it’s decidedly odd: I have three Apple devices, which are all using the latest, up-to-date operating systems and which ordinarily synch all my diary entries across devices via iCloud, so I pretty much trust my diary. Since my diary is free then, I think I can go and see Morcheeba on Friday – the fact that I talk in my reply to David’s forwarded post about “tomorrow”, when tomorrow would be Thursday, turns out to be a red herring. But my diary isn’t free on Friday. As I’m only to realise later, I have a cinema ticket booked, crashing Diego’s party on Friday. But this doesn’t show on the laptop I’m using. Later I am to find out that the diary entry exists, perfectly accurate, on my other laptop. When I notice this and run several tests to see whether my diary isn’t synching properly, I find that no such problem exists, my diary synchs wonderfully, within seconds; and if a device happens to be offline (I test this too) the entry gets pushed through at the earliest possible moment, no problem. So why, of all my diary entries, this particular one did not feature on my laptop at this time, is and remains an unsolved mystery.

Almost at exactly the same time, the Sixth Thing that happens is that JayJay texts me to say that he’s feeling poorly and won’t be making it to the theatre tonight. I read this as a cancellation of the outing as a whole, since I don’t know his colleagues or friends and had made no other arrangements and left it to JayJay to book the tickets. So I think: no worries, I will go to this art viewing instead. Also at the same time approximately, my new friend originally from Grindr gets in touch again for the first time since the weekend, this time on Facebook, where he says: “so we’re facebook friends now.” Having previously mentioned the Troubadour and the possibility of a coffee there in our earlier chats on Grindr, I take the opportunity, offered by the Sixth Thing, to tell him that I’ll be heading down there later today and that there’ll be free vodka cocktails, a fact which Anders had alerted me to from the start, and which had stuck in my mind as a particularly attractive incentive, because how can you say no to a vodka cocktail when it’s on offer. To my absolute delight, my new friend says he could do with a free drink and agrees to come down and see me there, exactly as I’d hoped, because that would give us a chance to meet really informally in a relaxed setting and it would only have to last half an hour if it didn’t go well. He had promised his flatmates he would cook some chicken soup for them beforehand, so we agreed to meet down there at seven, which gave me a chance to also have some chicken soup beforehand, though I didn’t make mine from scratch, I poured mine out of a Waitrose tub.

The art is decorative and nice with quite a bit of character, and as I’m there before my friend, I chat a short while to the artist, who thinks she knows me, but when I tell her that we don’t know each other, though she may have seen me at the Troubadour, she seems to lose interest and becomes almost a bit weary, though not impolite, even though I also tell her, of course, that I had been invited by Anders. The vodka cocktails are Seabreezes, generously poured by Hugo (I think, I’m never entirely sure his name is Hugo), and I find two elderly local ladies and friends of the artist to chat to while holding out for my friend who’s since messaged to say he’s running a tad late. By half past I tell him that I’m more or less done with the art now, but he says he’s just on his way, so I take advantage of my two elderly ladies hanging around near the entrance talking to an attractive and artistic looking woman whom I estimate to be around halfway between my age and theirs and I effectively crash their conversation which leads to me and the very attractive and somewhat artistic woman talking to each other; me facing the open door. My friend bounds up the stairs and I recognise him immediately from his picture and we greet each other like we’ve always known each other, which in a way I feel we have. I introduce him to the attractive woman, whose name I can’t now remember though it may have been Yvonne, and he, realising that I’m mid-conversation and he’s very late, proposes to find himself a drink; I ask him to bring me one too. I continue talking to ‘Yvonne’ until she reckons it’s time to look in on her sixteen year old at home, and since my friend has not got back yet with or without drinks, I go find him. I am massively pleased to find him talking to another random gallery-goer, though for reasons that don’t strike me as obvious but not important enough to enquire about either, he hasn’t got me a drink, he’s only picked one up for himself, so I get me my second one too and I join them. For the second time, I feel like I’m here with him, who else: although we only now really speak our first few sentences to each other, we may, for the level of ‘strangeness’ I feel, as well have been together for years. And I put here ‘together’, though we’re not even friends yet and we may never, in that sense, or any other, be ‘together’. That is also a little strange but not entirely unpleasant.

The woman he has been talking to eventually makes her way off too and we’re finally left to talk to each other, which doesn’t change anything; we have one more drink each and although I feel tempted to eek out another, he is attuned to the fact that the place is emptying out and suggests we make our way home as well. As we get to his front door, we embrace and nearly give each other a peck on the cheek but not quite, and I go home thinking, well that was just entirely perfect.

I’m home shortly after nine, where I find David has replied to my post in response to his post on Facebook: “You must have a friend seb or just crack a grinder one out! Haha.” Now, as I’m about to explain to my brand new friend in a new message on Facebook, I’ve never been one not to “take a random gag as a proper suggestion,” and so I offer the Morcheeba night out to him. It’s a long shot in every sense: it’s just two days’ notice, we’ve only ever had a couple of drinks together and it’s Morcheeba, who create a wonderful sound but who are something of a throwback to the Nineties. But once again he surprises me in the best possible way and he says, yes, he loves Morcheeba, he’s up for it. I tell David, he promises he’ll email the tickets. Everything hunky, except…

Next morning I have a mildly suspicious feeling that I may have messed up a bit. I check my diary and that’s when I find out about the synching issue. I resolve, of course, to stick with the new arrangement and blow out Diego, simply because he’s already got somebody to be going to the cinema with and I can see that film any time.

In the evening, I go to the dinner the Ambassador and his Wife are hosting at their residence, and it is very civil, even friendly. Of the small group who had been invited, two or three have obviously decided they were busy elsewhere, so it feels even more private than it would have done if everyone had attended. As the evening draws to its close, the Ambassador’s Wife again thanks us all for all we have done for the Swiss Embassy over the last few years and hands us each a bottle of champagne.

Friday comes, and there’s a Seventh Thing. Having effectively written off my booked ticket for Interstellar at the BFI IMAX, I do feel it’s a shame that that should just go to waste, especially as it’s a sold out screening. So I look up my email confirmation, on which of course it says no refunds and no ticket exchange, but I phone up the cinema anyway and say to the nice man who answers the phone, I realise this is not your policy but seeing that you have a full house I wonder is there any chance you can resell my ticket. Without dropping a beat he says: “You can’t make it tonight?” I confirm, no, I can’t. “I’ll refund your ticket for you straight away, would that help you enormously?” – “Yes, that would help me enormously, thanks!”

I’m wondering is it a coincidence or have I manipulated my memory or is it just the beauty of the universe that it has aligned Seven Things so my new friend, who I’m about to learn is a science communicator, and I could have a wonderful time with Morcheeba. After the gig we go for another drink and after that we pass my door now and I don’t even have to really ask, we both just go up together and because it was partly the Ambassador’s Wife who was to blame for the fact that I didn’t go up to Scotland, I crack open the bottle of fizz she gave me at the dinner the night before. It tastes all the more lovely for everything that has brought us to this moment right now.