Chapter 5 - Southern Europe - dreamless and tearful

I didn’t get to dream of you last night because I couldn’t get to sleep. Feeling restless and depressed, I went to bed early and then lay awake crying all night. The two months after you left I couldn’t cry at all. The hurt was like a stone weight inside me, or a sponge that soaked up any tears I had before they could be shed. Mom said I obviously didn’t really care that much about you if I couldn’t cry about it so for heavens sake buck up and stop being such a wet blanket. She had no idea that not being able to cry was worse. But as soon as I left home, it changed. Now I cry all the time.


I moved slowly this morning. There’s a market nearby for good bread and cheese, fruit and nuts. I’m getting better at speaking Spanish and now feel confident asking “Cuanto?” because I can finally understand the answers. Why do language books always teach students how to ask questions without preparing them for the answers? I have learned how to ask questions that require mostly only ‘Si’ or ‘Non’ in reply.


After my market stop and a beer in a seedy, crowded café I strolled along the shore imagining I was walking with my arm in the crook of your elbow. The sea was glittering and tossing sparkling jets of foam into the air, gurgling in joy and then tumbling onto the sand only to drag laughingly back to itself. Birds wheeled through the air, mediators between sun and sea. I sat on a bench under a palm tree feeling poetic, covertly listened to entwined lovers’ laughing, blind peddlers selling, elderly tourists marveling and young soldiers jesting. The sounds would blur into one, the sound of the waves shooshing onto shore, all human activity eventually reverting back to the sound of nature, a rhythmic beat we all become. I feel like I am watching from afar, from high up in the trees or the sky. Hearing all but listening to none of it. A spectre not connected to life or the living.

I wanna be your poet
Your lover, your hero, your slave,
To stand by your side
‘til I lay in my grave.
To open your eyes
to a love undenied,
Like the truth in the sun,
With the strength in the tide

Why oh why did you leave me? You never indicated that you were ready to or even wanted to go and that makes it worse. It was so sudden. I long to feel your arms around me, and to see your eyes laugh back into mine. My mind keeps trying to change what happened. And shut out the long years ahead without you. What am I going to do with those years? How can I possibly live them? Of course I can never say it in letters home, but I am hoping for some swift and painless accident that will just end everything. I don’t care about going into unsavoury or even dangerous places much these days. That way, if something fatal were to happen it would not be by my hand. I call myself “the suicidal single”, even though I just know I don’t have the courage to actually do anything. I’m such a coward. My only hope is to have something happen out of anyone’s control. Then you too might know a tiny portion of the pain I have felt these last weeks. Maybe then my spirit would be free to seek you out, and follow you forever.