Sleepy Suffolk

And so the ominous day comes along. Friday October 17th 2008. 3PM. Business as usual. The sun is shining out there or is it simply the knowledge that tomorrow I will be jetting off to Naples for the first time in a month? A meeting here and there swipe the morning hours away.

Natural Elements

And then suddenly the weatherman turned evil-wizard unleashes terrific thunderbolts, the entire building trembles, heavy showers lash the windows of my ground-floor office as I read the very simple French words Laurine has written me on MSN (of all places).
Now of course, it is still sunny outside - need I mention it? The weather only ever matches the main character’s mood in movies. Not real life. If only…

Drifting apart

A rupture is never good. A crack is no good sign, a fault more than a tectonic phenomenon. There is no perfect break-up, only perfect make ups, when they do happen. But an MSN separation is the Grand Canyon of all rifts small and mighty. It could be worse I guess. Much like a man asked his girlfriend to marry him on Google StreetView, Laurine could have posed with a sign in Naples to letter out her desire to carry on her life without me. Thank God, Naples isn’t quite digitized yet.

No, it didn’t really happen, did it?

From then on starts the period of denial, verbal jousts, pseudo-logical reasonings, knots in the brain, sordid calculations, phone harassments, and all for the benefit of mobile operators who reap in the cents of the rupture with their long cruel greedy clutches. Yes! Blame the Phone Operator! Go on, it feels good.
So there we are Friday Seventeenth of October 2008. It is between 5 PM and much later. I am quite under shock and am not really aware of what I’m doing. We have another meeting to close off the day’s work. But work is all in a daze. When I ask Laurine whether I should come, she merely replies ‘do as you like’. Reminds me of Mother when I wanted to do something she disapproved of.
I go out for dinner with friends - we wait for Sergio who never turns up and to top that points us to a shut restaurant. We then head out to the Galley in St Nicholas Street. A bit sordid really as I have only ever been there with Laurine. I remember Josh, Ji, Fadi. God knows who else was there. Ah yes the Bar XIX gang.

Math Myth

I eventually decide to not go to Stansted. Why? The simple answer is it’s easier to stay in bed than to get up at 2AM to grab a 2:30AM Stansted-bound bus. The more complicated answer is in the form of a question: am I that lazy that an early bird bus puts me off from seeing the gal of my dreams? I wish I knew how to draw. I’d pencil the equation of laziness vs. flying to Italy - surely less challenging that of Ostrogradsky.

It’s all Greek to me.
And so, over the following weeks, I ponder, wonder, chew over the previous years. I balance events, equate emotions, measure word impact, sketch out choices, calculate derivatives before integrating it all back together in a poorly knit bundle of feelings. I dream that Archimedes rings my doorbell and brings in a big papier-mâché sign spelling out Eurêka. But of course I don’t read Greek, not to mention he was slain by the Romans: oh dear it all boils back down to them and Italy.

Storia Consumendam Est

The hesitations & totters of my wee little brain do not end with whimsical equations that make no sense. But what happens next is for a later chapter where I get the unexpected visit from a charming young singer at my bedside. For now, here shall conclude the ramblings of a deflating heart.

Not many things I do have an ending. As a matter of fact, if one was to stick one big scarlet-lettered sign on myself to designate my most flagrant flaw, it would be this lack of perseverance, this ability to start one too many things and never wrap them up.
One such thing was my relationship - can’t complain really - an ongoing relationship is like a gift from above. It doesn’t happen everyday. It’s simple true bliss. Warm and cozy, comfortable and reassuring. It’s all we hope for after all, to be wholly and unconditionally loved by someone we ourselves love in return. The given relationship sprung from an incidental meeting between two individuals of - oddly enough - the same nationality - yet living in sleepy Suffolk, a strange and most foreign land to both individuals. It couldn’t have started on the worst terms - at a beer festival - none of the German organization and grandeur - none of the palate-teasing brews of Belgium. In lieu of such merriments, we contented ourselves with the local entertaining batch of tractor boys meddling about several dozen casks coming as far awide as Norfolk (a mere 50 miles north) and perhaps the daring potion from Boston (still no more than 200 mi) or Newcastle. Do pitch in the rare perl from Scotland and mainland Europe to be quite fair. Nonetheless, one can hardly argue a beer festival is quite the place for two young souls to meet. Surely CoEs and popes alike cannot condone such behavior.
Getting back to our flock of sheep, as indeed this story is not about hops and malt, I met Laurine in September of 2005, my mind astray after 11 months in Portugal hacking away at the last year of my Master’s degree in ‘Informatics’. The hacking involved hard work at times, with long endless nights of project report writing in the cold empty lurid (though this may be stretching the discourse) university hallways. One cannot deny it also involved parties, moments of self-discovery, long winding walks through the narrow Porto cobbled passages. Friendships were cemented over long sips of ruby-hued glasses of Port; love was found and lost at a pace Eros himself would find hard to keep up with. The candle of life was joyously burning at both with no end in sight. The wick was mighty and stong indeed. New languages were discovered; others invented; apartments filled with echoes of laughter. This balance of work and play would have seemed enviously appealing to Jack; the scorn for the next dawn, the mere lack of respect for Chronos and its grinding spirals, the youth’s ignorance of tomorrow’s decay cast on Porto an unforgettable phosphorescence of true felicity. Glimmers of true love accentuated this ethereal feeling. Returning to Ipswich, starting a new job, stepping into responsible life with bills, salaries, credit cards, income tax, social security, pension funds, and whatnot doused the wick and the polaroid tones of blithe. The grey tones of this English town, the biased view of a Frenchman, the dark red brick of the seemingly derelict train station led to an incurable sense of saudade. One may assume the change from the life of a student to that of a full-grown person may lend to many a philosophical question on the meaning of life. And no Monty Python pun is a match for doubts of that nature.
And so, in this odd unbalanced climate of hesitation, growth spurt, and sudden respectability undermined with responsibility, there came Laurine, radiant, young, innocent, truthful, aspiring, glowing. A redhead - a mysterious smile à la Julia Roberts - a mastery of the English language that would leave more than one puzzled - a capacity to listen and understand that outpassed many a talkative mouth of the locals. From the first kiss under the statue of Liberty’s green bedsheet to the last one on Naples’s train platforms, a blizzard of fond memories, passionate love, quirky moments, and darker shades have come and gone, consumed by the very same Chronos once defied, now bowed to. There is nothing left of these three years but a basket of mixed feelings that manage to seep through the loosely woven wicker to embitter the present day.
Much later, months and years have passed. Today, Sunday February the eight, after a week surrounded by friends, I realize all this has been pointless. The breakup she triggered may have been salvatory. Or are we all merely mascarading ourselves into a false sense of security and comfort?
Today, Sunday February the eight, I have learned news that belittle this story, irremediable facts of life that suddenly wake you in the bitterest of ways. And I love all the more those people close to me.
Today, Sunday February the eight, I read these words and wonder why I have never seriously studied the classics, philosophy, and litterature in general. It is so easy to write gibberish and kill the essence of a message in a surplus of meaningless phrases. There is no contempt or hubris in doing so, merely the awkwardness of a fairly illiterate young man of the XXIst century.
Today, Sunday February the eight, I have started reading Goethe’s Werther.