Travel

April 2009 with the Nashville.
September 2010 after I first arrived in Naples and was still dating Hans and thought we would have kids by now.
September 2011 after losing Sjors. Twelve floors and the top of the hotel didn't have a guard. Or a rail.
And now, June 2013.
Cameroon.

We took the flight from Brussels this morning, grateful for the 24-hour fitness center at the Sheraton, clean sheets and towels, and the breakfast buffet with the cappuccino machine. Three cappuccinos for comfort and caffeine.

Places hold meaning for me. Always have. I remember the Brussels airport in some deep psychic way: the bathroom in the luggage area where I changed into Winter Netherlands clothes after a flight from Africa and took the train to Amsterdam to see Sjors.

Today, I hate and love my memories. They cause me pain: remind me what my life should have been. But the alternative is: never having lived. Never loving. Never knowing what it is to feel that way. Completely alive. Completely whole. Now I know I live a half-life.

Eve turns to me intermittently, says, "you did the right thing" because she can see that I still feel the raw, hot miasma behind my eyes when I consider that Sjors reached out to me and I did not reach back. My mind knows she is right but my arms, skin, womb, skull, scream: "but he was right there and you did not go to  him!"

This time, I rule my instinct because my instinct would tell me to walk into the ocean rather than live without him.

Today I am in Cameroon. It is the rainy season. Are there avocados? Mangoes this time of year? I don't remember.

On the plane, there were movies. I have a diminished tolerance for artificiality. I hate the way women are depicted. Or men, for that matter. One-dimensional caricatures. And the series of unrealistic situations and stupid choices that seem to miraculously be the right ones.

"A good day to Die Hard", for example. I love a good action flick, but they are filled with such phenomenally bad decisions. With the possible exception of Jason Bourne, I would never want to travel to Africa with any of these action heroes. They would kill my friends and get me into trouble I couldn't get out of.

Six months ago, in Dakar, Eve and I met a group of operators from Canada, holed up in our hotel waiting for  spare parts for their plane. The French had just gone into Mali to oust the extremest militants who had taken over the country. Supporters of this action were passing through Dakar. On the weekend, sunning ourselves next to the water, we counted the military flights and their affiliations.

The group of Canadians were conspicuous in their back-woods manner, excessive drinking habits, pasty complexions, patchy beards, and self-laundered socks and underpants dangling off of balcony railings of the four-star resort hotel. As the days went on, we became more and more nervous about them.

There were warnings for Europeans and Americans - that they might be targets of retaliatory attacks. This was not an unjustified fear. In nearby Algeria, workers at an oil production facility were taken hostage and many of them killed. To be on the safe side, we planned multiple egress routes and a meeting place if something happened. We had phone numbers on speed-dial and "go-bags" with our passports and cash.

Eve and I knew Dakar; had spent months there. Loved the city and the Senegalese. Had friends whose children we knew. We walked around freely in town.

So here was a drunk Canadian soldier, bleary eyed, talking about carrying a gun to go into town.
"Oh," said Eve and I together. "That's not a good idea."
He reconsidered. "Then a knife," he decided. "I'm not going into town without a knife."
There was an uncomfortable silence as Eve and I thought about our Senegalese friends encountering a frightened and well-trained lunatic drunk.
"We like to use our words," I said.

So, this is the advice I offer Bruce Willis as he fights his way through impossible villains and walks unafraid and bare-armed through boxes of Uranium 235, and drives a  truck out the back of a helicopter:
"Use your words."