Mr. Portugal

Oh I'm fairly confident you're using a VPN and throwing your IP address wherever you want. But I like to think that you're in Portugal. I was there in December, interviewing for a job. Lisbon. I enjoyed the atmosphere. It reminded me of Naples (a little). What a fabulous little memory.

When I imagine you're in Portugal I think you're Gerritjan  and I feel quite friendly towards you. Oh, I understand you're monitoring me, and I know that I've been fucked over twenty-five ways until Friday. But I enjoyed working with you in Dakar, and running with you in Garmisch, and then working on African Winds with you in Den Helder. We had a really good working dynamic and I thought you were wonderful to hang out with. I thought we were friends. When I met you I had been so sad and driven for so long, and you made me feel a little better.

I'm sick tonight. Bad cold. I left my bicycle at the gym at work because I wasn't up for the 13 mile ride through the wind and the rain with this fever and stuffy nose. I was planning to make the trip but then a nice Italian man named Vinnie offered me a ride home in his Mini Cooper. Vinnie loves living here. He has a motorcycle, and a boat and a German Shepherd.

I had so many things to say to you. but I'm too tired now. I don't have any cold medicine so I downed some Whisky and aleve and I'm heading to bed. The party is still going on outside. I can hear it from my bedroom but I'm done. Goodnight.

Bright skies

I was up at 0630 and biking the 13 miles into work before I had a chance to think about it. So nice. The sky was cold and beautiful and bright. It made my eyes hurt. I'm listening to Matt Ridley again - but irritated he's wasting his time with philosophy instead of giving me the biology fix I've come to expect from him. C'mon buddy, you wrote "Genome" in the 1990s. Surely you can give it an update!

I'm making friends with the other women in the locker-room. The women who bicycle into work, like me. Neat company. Mathematician from Uruguay who studied General Relativity for her graduate thesis. A Dutch physicist working on her PhD and fighting with her graduate advisor (don't we all?); a German woman who does near-earth observation with satellites.

Stopped by for take-out on my way home. I'm coming down with a head cold and wanted soup. Didn't really occur to me before now: the Vietnamese place is neighbors with the sex shop. I could stop by for Pho and a strap-on dildo without ever going out into the rain.

Still too lonely for my own good. I meditate and do yoga and go for long and glorious rides in the sunlight but I am too alone. Extroverted personality traits tend to stretch and expand during enforced solitude and I find myself chatting up the girl opposite me on the train, the man next to me on the bus, the biologist at the coffee machine, and the artist in the hallway. I go to running club so I can punish myself with an 8 mile jog and have someone to talk to while I do it. Pretty much anyone who will take the time to look at me gets an earful. And god forbid someone actually touch me. I'm hungry for human contact. Two weeks ago, when I met the young physicist during a bicycle ride in the rain and we went out for beers in the cold, I said goodbye with a hug that lasted far too long.

I'll be fine, I know. It's just the empty spaces in the transition. This is just another transition.

Bad idea

I went back this evening. Don't know why. In a way its easier not to pretend that there is something good that can come out of my being here. Some reason I ended up here that is independent of him - of either of them. Visiting museums, walking along canals, meditating on the train. That I can somehow rise above it all. So when I just let myself ride a train in the twilight, to the streets where he might be, I feel like a bird migrating home. Relief. But then I'm there, walking to doors I am shut out of. And then I know I've made a mistake because the ancient pain roars into life - not dead. Sleeping pain that feels like anger, too - because the face of this pain is anger. It screams into the grey sky, "why?"

I want to believe there is some meaning to the pain.  This was what I told Hilde those weeks ago during lunch. Always inappropriate - talking about religious belief with your boss. Particularly when it seems she doesn't like me very much.
She said, "I don't need there to be a god to make the universe any more amazing."
"I don't need god for that," I replied. "I need to believe that suffering isn't meaningless. If there's a god, then something can be redeemed from pain."

God was silent tonight, as I walked along the farmer's field in the rain. Or, at least, I couldn't hear above the chaotic echoes of memories and questions that were never answered. How do you let someone go if you never understood why they are gone?

I can't think my way out of this one. I've tried to deploy reason. This is the purpose of my writing here. And writing it. And now it is sent and there is nothing more to do. To know. Did it reach him? Did he read it? Did it matter? Does he still exist? I will never know because he will never come. Because this prayer could not find wings strong enough to move my god of improbabilities.

It was a bad idea to come. No answers here. Only reminders of a loss that has never healed. Of a future that died in its infancy and which I carry in my arms. Grotesque to other people. Spectacle. Horror. Put it down. There will be others. Walk away. But I can't - any more than set down my arm and walk away. It is part of me. You are a part of me. You, bright spirit. Keeper of my heart. You walk beside me in the rain. You sit with me by the lake and this - this is your hand in mine as I weep.

My heart raced (as it races every time I think of you) and I couldn't calm it down to sleep. I meditated, desperate for rest, and at last drifted. In my dreams I am suffocating in the well of a dark ship, or falling from a great height. And then, before I woke this morning, swimming in the ocean, skimming the surface as though flying, trailing my fingers across the taut, rubbery skin of whales that rise beneath me in the waves. And he is beside me. And there was joy. This thing in my arms is not dead, I say.  Not dead. No more dead than my pain. Sleeping.

Friday evening

There was fog outside the windows of the train, clambering across dark fields and pressed into ditches – the stealthy movement of soldiers making for the front line. The rising sun had not gathered enough heat to burn it away and so I, taking my exit at the small town of "V" with my train pass interlaced between the fingers of my left hand, felt the damp and the chill, and stepped onto the platform. The time on my phone read 0721.  

My second-hand bicycle was where I’d left it: perched on the racks between a tangle of bicycles that looked more like wire hangers spawning their ungainly progeny in a closet than transportation. The kickstand fell loosely down more than a month ago, scraping along the pavement as I rode, and I’d secured it with packing tape because my long working hours left me little time to visit a bicycle shop or make the repair myself. What couldn’t wait, however, was my front tire, which pressed into the asphalt like a pathetic balloon weeks after the party.

The hand pump was only partially successful and took all the time I wanted to spend at the gym, so I eschewed the free weights and made quick use of the showers and hair dryer before rushing into work. I have a nasty cough these days- it’s lodged in my chest and refuses to leave in spite of antibiotics I coaxed from a local urgent-care doctor on Monday. So I wonder whether the bicycle ride is a wise decision.  But I ride anyways.

The ride from the train to work is 5.3 miles – plus or minus .2 miles (so says my GPS). It takes me 33 minutes on a lazy day and 26 when I’m racing to catch the train. I almost always listen to an audiobook. In recent weeks I’ve re-visited Le Carre after The Constant Gardner, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, there was Smiley’s People. When I first encountered Le Carre in 2011 I studied him the way some people study language: trying to understand the world he came from – hoping that he might provide the key I could use to unlock Sjors’ cage and let him out. Now, with halting fluency in his mother tongue, I realize the only truths Le Carre really tells are human ones: betrayal, deception, fallibility, and the bewildering pain of love. “In the Spy trade,” he writes. “We abandon first what we love the most.”

Now, I read about Shakespeare again. Not the Stratford-upon-Avon  buffoon who duped the world  - but Edward DeVere – the 16^th Earl of Oxford, whose sharp wit, literary genius, intemperate nature and tumultuous life generated the world’s greatest greatest literature. I read about Edward DeVere long ago and now I think I’ll make a project of him: re-read his plays, memorize his lines, and visit the places he visited: Paris, Venice, the Croatian coastline, Palermo, Sicily, Genoa, Milan.

I’m very alone here. I truly realized my isolation after visiting Lynn in Scotland last week. It was good to have people around me who knew and understood me, who loved me and wanted to touch and hug me (last night, out of desperation to be touched, I accepted a hug from a man during a festival who sported the sign, “free hugs”). Lynn and I visited Edinburgh Castle and I joined in with her husband’s family in Edinburgh and Alyth. We  had Easter dinner together and visited a nearby 5^th century church.  On my last night in Scotland, we went on a “Ghost Tour” at the Cow’s Gate vaults where I heard a howling noise I thought was part of an elaborate sound system but which Lynn and Dan refused to say they had heard. We also visited the Covenanter’s Prison where 1200 Scottish men were held after a Scottish rebellion against King Charles and who spent the Scottish winter in the impossible conditions and died from exposure.

I’m at a restaurant/bar now. Its in the city center – on my walk home from the train station. I stopped here on my way home from work, drawn like a moth to the flame of human interaction. I had a very nice beer (the beers are often very nice here) and an appetizer. But I’m impaired already and asked for something with lower alcohol content. I do want to run tomorrow morning, afterall.