Universe – EDEN

Phantom

The guilty look of the winner after the loser is thoroughly beaten.

‘It is really simple,’ Sedartis suggests, which has me a-wary, but I know him better now than really to doubt him. ‘Of course it is,’ I think back at him, ‘but what?’

‘If the young people—the generation now growing up, the fifteen, eighteen, twenty-one, twenty-five year olds, and maybe some of their allies, who, young at heart, are older in years but still see a future and want that future to be different to the present, which is, though it may not always seem so, thoroughly different from the past; and who, good of soul, and embracing of the expansion of the universe as an indication, a hint, perhaps, an invitation even, to expand with it our minds, wherever in this universe we happen to be or be from; and who therefore, by definition, by implication also, and by both conscious and subconscious intention, seek a future that is, in definably qualitative terms better than the present, which, even though it often may not seem so, is certainly better than the past, because it is wider, with therefore more scope for both meaning and interpretation, for both substance and differentiation—if young people want a future at all, they have to demand it. Not ask for it nicely, not politely sit in the corner waiting for it to be offered, not wonder will it be offered at all, but get out on the street, get up on the box, get into the fray, whatever, wherever it may be, literally, metaphorically, passionately, and demand it, their future.

‘Because the old people will mess it up for them, for certain. There is no alternative, sadly, and no alternative outcome, because old people—with comparatively few and notable, also respectable, exceptions—are inclined (I’m inclined to say “programmed”) to maintain their status quo, for no other reason than that it is familiar, comfortable.

‘But realise, of course, that in an expanding universe there is no standing still. If you cling on to the status quo, thinking it stable, thinking it solid, thinking it, therefore, by definition and by implication, dependable and so, if nothing else, for yourself, “good,” you are in fact regressing. In a world like yours in which—as in all worlds currently known to anyone—entropy is an inescapable principle at work on everything, stagnation is a move to obsolescence. Old people—always allowing for significant, but comparatively small, numbers of exceptions—surrender to their own fate of obsolescence long before they reach it, and that is why old people cannot, in their majority, help but mess things up for the young. So unless young people get up and demand their future, there can be none. There can only be the status quo, which is in fact a regression, which is the past. Which is definitely and infinitely worse than the future. It has to be, because this whole universe was smaller, narrower, more confined than it is now and than it will be, with therefore less room, both literally and metaphorically, and less time, both literally and metaphorically, in it to think, and invent, to love, and to be.

‘How mundane it seems to me, as you can imagine, to cite for you concrete examples, but since you ask’—I didn’t think I was asking—‘take the obvious ones, the ones in your “news” right now, as we converse: If young people are in Britain and want a future in Europe they have to demand it. If they are in the United States and they want to survive their school years, they have to demand it. Demand freedom of movement. Demand education in unarmed environments. Demand the right to live somewhere affordable, clean, safe and sane. Demand free and comprehensive health care. Demand the right to speak and think freely, and to disagree with anything I, or you, or anybody else is saying. That’s the promise of civilisation, everything else is barbaric.

‘Your youth has to claim civilisation. Not with violence, of course, but with power. Their force is in their numbers and in their energy, in their ingenuity and in their spirit. Their force is their future. They must use it. You can’t do it for them. But,’ and here Sedartis changes his tone, and, for the first time ever, I hear him sound almost seductive, ‘you can help them: you can tell them you are on their side, you can let them know you want their future for them as much as they do, and they will understand; because of course they know all this already, they don’t need to be told, they just—if anything—need to be encouraged. Reassured maybe. To know that you don’t hold their rebellion against your present as directed against you, but only against your present, and that their demand, no matter how unreasonable it may be made to sound by those who oppose it, is reasonable, essential even, to the continuation of your civilisation. They instinctively know this. They need, if anything, only perhaps to be reminded.

‘Remind them only: you are on their side. You want them to live and to thrive. You want them to stand up for their future. Because if they don’t, their misery will be great, and their death, their despair, their destruction long. And it will fall to their miserable, angry children to do what their parents failed to do: to demand—not request, not beg, not buy and not steal—to demand and so shape their own future.’

< Plea Critical Mass >

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Obsolemnum

Then always the inherent question to self: am I going to be one who says I would if I could, or am I going to be one who says I could and I did. It’s a loaded question, heavy with expectation, anxiety; pressure, even. And it’s also maybe the wrong question. Because if I could and I did, what is remarkable about that? Isn’t that what we do: what we can? If we don’t do what we can, then what do we do?

So is the more pertinent question: am I going to be one who says I could and I did, or am I going to be one who says I couldn’t but I did all the same. I found a way. I learnt how to do it. I overcame my reluctance, my objections, my fear. I surmounted the obstacles, of which there were many. I was told what I wanted to do was impossible and I said: I hear you. I don’t believe you. I believe what I have in mind may be difficult, it may be near unattainable, but impossible is nothing. I shall do it anyway. And if that is my way, and my way alone.

There are so many who opine. There are so many voices that make up the din of the world. There are so many who have tried, and tell you so. There are so many who know how it’s done. From experience, from having done it themselves. There are so many who will dispense with advice, with counsel, with rules. These rules that are being laid down by being followed. These patterns we draw on the mindscape of our culture by walking the path that has already been walked, often enough for it to be seen, to be recognised, to be followed, again, and again; to be treaded into the ground, until it appears inescapable: that’s the way, the only way to go. No other way seems possible now, it has been decreed. Not by authority, maybe, by convention.

What if the question is this: am I going to be one who says I took the path of least resistance, the path that was already mapped out for me, the path that I could follow, conveniently, because it had been taken many times before – so much so, it had become a road, and one much travelled – or am I going to be one who says: I saw the path, I recognised it, of course; it held no appeal to me. I was curious to know. What lies beyond the path. Where does the non-road lead. Whom shall I meet, and what encounter, if I take the unmarked route. So that’s what I did. I got stuck, many times, I took turns that weren’t so much wrong as simply dead ends. I had to double back on myself on occasion, and I cut myself in the thicket. My feet hurt, and my head. My limbs were weary with travel, with toil. I was alone, sometimes lonely. There were nights when I cried for want of shelter, for want of care, for want of some body to hold on to, for some mind to reassure me, for some light to guide me. I persevered, I continued. I had to. It was either that or the abandonment of myself: failure complete. It was either going on or getting lost entirely, in the wilderness. It was either holding on to the hope, the idea, to the notion that there is something yet to be discovered, something yet to be said, something yet to be thought that is in one sense or other worthwhile, that has not, in every possible manner, been expressed before, that is not fully known, or becoming obsolete.

Am I going to be one who says I tried, I wish sometimes I’d tried harder, but at least I tried. Or am I going to be one who says I tried and tried again and I did not give up and whatever the outcome – is there an outcome, ever? and is that the point? or is the point not a point but a wave and that wave is the process, the doing, the thinking, the loving, the giving, the taking, the seeing, the learning, the sending, the receiving, the being? – I put my all into it. Am I going to be one who says things happened to me and I made it through, or am I going to be one who says I am the things that I did.

Yet to what end? There is no end. Then to what purpose? Let the purpose be bigger than me, greater, if I dare think it so: nobler. Let the purpose be the ideal, the aspiration. Not for myself, but for my world. The world not as it is now, the world as I know it could be. That ‘better world’ that is forever in our power to create and seems forever out of reach. Because it is, both. But what if that is meaningless, what if we all mean nothing at all and are simple quirks of short-lived accidental matter in a constellation of incomprehensible – because random – energy fluctuations that have no purpose, that have no meaning, that have no end and no beginning, that may or may as well not exist?

What does that concern me now? Who cares if it matters or not? What need do I have for a reason? What I know is I am here, and I have so much time, maybe less, perhaps a bit more. What matters then, surely, is only that I be, in the end, one who says that was my time well spent, that was my cards – whatever these cards were – well played; that was my fellow human loved, my world respected, that was my work well done, my life well lived.

Istanbul

We wander on for a bit, and I breathe it all in: the people, the tourists, the tram and vendors; the noise and the scent and the flavour.

George, I’m beginning to realise, is telling me everything I need to know. He’s hardly said more than a couple of dozen sentences since we met, improbably and unfathomably, a few hours ago, but I know now that seeing him, listening to him, looking at him, being with him—in his presence, in no other than that simple, literal sense—has triggered in me the abundance of memories, connexions and emotions, the thoughts and the synaptic excursions, the diversions, the captions, the mild insurrections of heart, mind and soul, that I need, to move on.

Move on from what? Had I got stuck? Most severely. Had I manoeuvred myself into a dead end? More than of sorts. Was I on the verge of becoming obsolete, not just to myself, but to the universe that has somehow produced me? I fear me I was. Is that now all at an end? Who knows…

I again put my arm around George, instinctively, without thinking, and he doesn’t shirk or pause or look at me, he just lets it be. My George: that’s how I know him. We wander, like father and son, like brothers, like friends, but not lovers—can one constellation embody all these in one, even, ever?—and I feel me an abundant sensation of love. Of loss too, and of forgiveness. Most of all of forgiveness: I forgive you, George, for everything, really. All your inadequacies. Your presumptions, your misunderstandings. Your aloofnesses and your hesitancies. Your delusions and your noble intentions. Your foibles, all of your weaknesses. Your constant quest to connect, your patent inability to do so in so many senses. There are too many things to mention.

Too many things too, for which I do not need to forgive you, for which I can quietly, humbly, respect you: even admire you. Your sense of justice and your faith in humans. Your optimism, your hope. Your openness, your curiosity. It may, ultimately, have killed the cat, but the cat had nine lives and so it continued. It lived. You’re not unlike a cat, George, I’ve known this for centuries, for all the millennia that I’ve known you. And I’m beginning to know you now, George, and I’m glad on’t.

We reach Taksim Square where we take a turn to the right and keep wandering. Not aimlessly so much as non-directionally. We both have no particular place to go, not at the moment. We end up by a steep small street that looks a little familiar and quite attractive, and decide to head up it, rather than down, and before long we recognise a wooden house and a half hidden entrance: we have inadvertently come back to right where we started: the Limonlu Bahçe.

There is, probably, in some way some significance to this: have we actually gone round in a circle? I like to think not, not least because we are not moving in three dimensions. We have, at any rate, walked a spiral, a triangular shaped one, as it turns out, but that is most likely quite by the by. Some things have meaning, others less so. Some things are profound though we but capture the surface, others are really surface. Or maybe I’m being lazy. At some level, most likely, everything has some other layer, some other meaning, some other significance that could or could not be, or become, at some point quite relevant. We can’t take it all in, all at the same time: we do need a filter. And that’s yet another insight I’m having, right there.

We’ve not walked very far, maybe less than an hour, perhaps a bit more; we’ve been ambling really, rather than striding. We’ve not been saying all that much more. Metaphorically, though, we have come a long way. In my mind I have travelled a little light year. Is there a big light year? Or even one of average length? Aren’t all light years the same? It is not, of course, and I realise, a year, and it’s not one of light. Some metaphors don’t stack up. I have percolated, I feel me, through my own conscience and come out enriched. If that makes sense. Does it have to? Make sense? To me, it doesn’t have to, even though somehow it does. I don’t think it matters to George if it does. Does it matter to you?

I realise I have a reader. I realise I need you as my reader, because without you I don’t exist. I realise I am not alone in this, nor only with George: I realise we are, in our own constellation, triangular. Hello, Reader: welcome to my world.

George and I are both creatures of habit, and having walked for an hour or so—maybe a little less, possibly just a bit more—we both fancy another drink, and we readily, easily, without thinking or negotiation, decide to go back to the Limonlu Bahçe: we liked it there, we were comfortable there, why would we not now go back there, seeing we are already here.

I like that about George and about me: we can stay in one place for hours and never get bored. We both never get bored, George and I. That is a realisation I had and passed on to him long before I knew I would be him: if you watch paint dry close enough, it’s entirely riveting. At molecular level, let alone subatomic: there’s a riot of things happening, a mesmerising display of spectacular wonder. How could you ever get bored?

We head down the hidden staircase back into the garden which is now not full and not empty, but at that agreeable mid-to-late afternoon state when luncheon has petered out and dinner hasn’t yet started. The table we had been sitting at has been taken, but we find one as pleasant in the mid-to-late afternoon speckled shade two or three tables removed and sit down, and our angular waitress returns and recognises us and smiles, and we order another couple of mojitos and some chips, just to nibble.

Now, for the first time in maybe a million years, I am here. George, because of the configuration of the table, the bench and the chairs, has naturally sat down next to me, not opposite, so he can survey the garden with me, this paradise of our own making. This Eden. “Look at me now, and here I am,” she had said, and I had understood her, immediately. Joyce, Shakespeare, Stein. Then Shakespeare again, then no particular order.

I can be at home with myself in a paradise of my making that doesn’t know what it is, in a city I’ve never been before, within an instant and find me not tempted by knowledge, in no need of a companion, at ease. Not forever, of course, just for now. The curiosity and the fascination, the alertness and also the need will soon get the better of me, that I know, it has ever been thus.

But now. And here. We are.

< {Memories of the Past}

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EDEN miniatures

Saturn

Dione, Tethys, Mimas, Enceladus – your friendly moons’ names sound like characters to me, in a pastoral play. Even Titan and Iapetus; they have been overthrown, dwell in the pantheon no longer: neighbours now, living downstairs, or, to wave at, across the street.

Your rings, though no more mysterious now than you, are delicate still; and you are inviting too. Against thy will, methinks; like the old rustic who grumbles at first and enjoys the thought of himself as forbidding, but turns out to be at heart quite congenial.

I am at the stage now where I feel there are fewer surprises. Fewer certainties too, and fewer woes. Fewer intransigencies and fewer instances of despair. That can only, I sense, be a good thing. Journeying has put me at ease with myself. I feel millions of miles away still from where I envisage I should be, but this seems natural now, and of little concern. The hereness and thereness of it all: the potencies of the potential. The meta nomenclature of the id. The closer I get to being myself, the more I disperse myself across the quanta of energy: thought. Insubstantive meanderings that then turn out to make sense after all. At some point, at some level, in some way. Not conscious, perhaps, but innocuous, calm.

I sit down on one of these rings and let my legs dangle in the brook of what looks from afar like a void that surrounds it, and my toes tingle at the excitement of being and wriggle with a childlike and clean and unjaded joy: they haven’t walked as far yet by far as it seems, they have simply strolled. Over the meadows of this spacescape, this English garden, this Ermitage. I feel my thin body, pale and slender but resilient and robust, as it was back then, when I was a boy. It never preoccupied itself with itself. The etherealness of it all, the curiousness. And always, always the wonder. Nobody joins me, yet, and maybe none ever will now, and it saddens me not, I am free.

From where I perch on my borrowed bank, my legs suspended, my hand—the left one—playing with marbles, the molecules, the droplets, the pebbles and the whists of yellow-blue algae that get trapped in my fingers, cool and gentle, soft and strong, my eyes, inclined toward what lies below and therefore what also above, my face reflected (reminiscent, perhaps, after all, of Narcissus, though he, I know, does not belong here any more than he does on Mercury), my lips catch my attention, and for a fleeting moment I wish me a one for them to be kissed. The longing, the curiosity, still, and the awe.

I am on the brink, I realise, and at this point, sooner or later, there does come the point where you have to decide. Do you jump, assuming that you will fly, or don’t you, fearing that you might drown.

Why do I do this from here, and not where I started? Have I conspired with circumstances to manoeuvre myself onto the fence of a planet whose patron is the god of the farmer of all things to finally return to the George in me and embrace him as much as release him in exactly the same gesture, at exactly the same time, for exactly the same reasons and to exactly the same end? It wouldn’t surprise me. Hardly anything would. The universe finds a way, of that I have long been certain, and whatever happens next is bound to happen, just as what happened before was in its own liquid way quite inevitable.

All the querulousnesses of adversaries (they were friends in disguise), all the insurmountablenesses of obstacles, varied and frequent and each in its own right unreasonable, from here, from this tholin perspective, rotating at speed, and wobbly, a little bit drunk on the juices of life, but steady and safe in myself now—as far as there even exist such notions as ‘steadiness,’ ‘safety’ and ‘self’—look irrelevant now and benign.

My right hand that has been holding on to the ice, to the carbon, the substance, such as there was, in a vain grip on something the brain interpreted as ‘reality,’ still, after only another decade or so of faint hesitation, lets go, and, much as expected, I sink not, and nor do I soar: I float, once again, now earthwards, I’m sure.

< Uranus Mars >

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Expiration

We are not doomed.

We may well be determined and we may be defined but we are not definitive and we won’t go on forever and we won’t ever die: immortality is granted, though the wish is monstrous, as long as we take it upon ourselves to be the centre of our attention.

Conduits to the stream. The energy, the code, the connection. We may yet go extinct; we need not mourn ourselves: we leave behind perhaps no legacy but our intention to do well.

Complex situations, simple choices: do you put anger in the world and hatred and want and division and them versus us and incomprehension and rejection hostility enmity loss, or do you put hope. Do you put recognition, respect. Enjoinment. What we call empathy. Different, differentiated manifestations of one and the same.

Never even mind that we’re human: remember we are god. When every mistake we’ve ever made is multiplied with every catastrophe, our hearts may hurt from the unwisdom we yield to. And yet: we can make it so, we can make it other.

The thing that we’re made of may yet lift us up. We can, whether we want to or not; but wanting to is harder than saying no. Everything is known, everyone can be understood.

Accept as the deepest part of you that which you loathe most. The person you despise: you are him, you are her. Embrace them. The child murderess. The suicide bomber. The bludgeoner to death. You celebrate, you cheer, you dance your pride when your football team wins. When your psychopath strikes: suffer him to be your disaster no less than you appropriate your goal scorer’s triumph. The medals on the athlete’s chest are badges of your honour no more and no less than the bloodstains on the knife stabber’s hand are witness to your failure. Own it.

Grow up into the painful truths and free yourself. There is no freedom without truth. There is no truth without pain. There is no pain that does not carry a reward. When all is said and done: start over. There is no reward without loss. There is no loss without self. There is no self that stands alone.

Surrender to the motion of a greater purpose. Even if you don’t understand. Even if you do not believe. Even if you’re not convinced. Your heart knows long before your brain, because your brain is more powerful than you think: when knowledge is you and you are the world and the world is an instance in just one universe and the universe is a thought and the thought is expressed then you are god: you are god.

Accept the burden of being all powerful. Make good on your promise. Dare love.

Uranus

I wander to the place I know least and for a while I maybe like best, in a way; as an idea, as a thought, as a concept: the abstract liking of something from which you are distant, the fascination with unfamiliarity, the lure of the other; the stranger, the comfort, the awe.

The steady roll on an invisible plane, the cool electric hue. The very slow seasons. Even the unwitting humour, lame though it is. It is a laconic planet I find here, unruffled, smooth and cyan. The awayness of it all, as at the end of despair. A well-neighboured distance; bookended, escorted by giants: significant in its own right but overlooked, overshadowed and, for no fault of its own, just not taken seriously: why would that be me?

There is no life here, but there is otherness, and that in itself is interesting. It feeds my curiosity: to go a step further, to move beyond. To tumble on a different axis, to fall upwards; float frozen but not still, to sense a different kind of heat on a newly defined horizon. I expect to be alone here, but I’m surrounded by character: here, in the outskirts, in the slow moving cold, there are others like me: how did we all get here? What projected us into this orbit, so far away, it would seem, from the soul, so within?

These layers, these clouds, these rocks and these crystals, these rings, this ice and these moons, this magnetotail. They are not, perhaps, home, but they are a meaning all in themselves, and they are somewhere, beautiful. True.

For quite some time I enjoy this tangentiality and become part of it, willingly, coolly; I relish the arm’s length attention I get. Nobody knows me here, or cares who I am, but my aloofness my look and my languid demeanour are being noted. My hair the peroxide silver of this unbreathable atmosphere and my clothes the black of the all that surrounds me. If you know where I am you can find me, and find me foreign and alien too.

Yet after a while I miss the simplicity of warmth. Not that I know what that means, but it means that I’m out in the cold, and I want to come back now, closer to home, closer to the sun, closer to people who don’t understand me, closer to something I vaguely remember as love. This strangeness leaves me estranged from myself, and enjoying it now seems an effort. Soon, I know, I will have to let go, and I realise now that I’m not living my life in chronological order. That puzzles me for a moment until it occurs to me that time too is down to perception, and there will come a time when it’ll all simply blend into one, as it must.

Entropy.

(Yet still, yet again, only more so, always more…)

Out here I thought I felt a sense of freedom, until that sense became quite oppressive. That, too, was a surprise. And so I let go. Slowly, at first and then readier, more. This is not for me, after all, this agreeable spectacle, this isolation: it could quite easily turn into a habit, a mannerism, a cliche, a role.

The young man at a soirée (it was that more than it was a party, a dinner, or drinks) who’d looked at me and said: ‘are you for real?’ That’s when I knew I was in danger of becoming a caricature of myself, and Uranus could be my place no more.

I like this now, this clarity, this resolution. This immense relief too, not to have to be defined by weirdness forever. Strange, yes, curious, always, different, maybe (then ‘different’ to what?), but not impenetrable and not obscure.

Not even, in that sense, mysterious, really: there are so very few mysteries in the universe, apart from the multiverse of all possible universes itself, and that, too, is only a matter of consciousness and the cumulative number of brain cells firing at it: one day it will be just another reality too. Like blossoms, like spring. Like the awakening, too.

I’m getting better at this, being me. This walk seems to be doing wonders…

< Venus Saturn >

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Perfection

That day the universe was on my side. Because for the first time ever it gave me not just a second chance, but a third; and that really had never happened before. I never even normally get the second chance, for the simple and obvious reason that it’s just very unlikely to come about, so to be given a third chance – imagine how lucky I felt, and how happy.

I was on my way to the party; that was on Monday. I was in a good frame of mind, I had just arrived in town and seen two decent films, and I’d picked up my invitation and now was determined to go to this party even though I knew nobody there, and I thought I might therefore leave it again very soon. But in my good frame of mind I started chatting to a woman on the shuttle bus that the festival laid on from the last screening in the grand piazza to the lido by the lake where the party was happening, and after seeming a little distant at first she then, as we arrived there, almost grabbed my hand, and we went to the bar and had our first few drinks together, talking a lot about this, that and the other, and I thought this is great: I’m already not alone at the party.

When she left, I spotted a good looking man with a beard who was on his own and, buoyed by my success so far, started talking to him, and for a while we had more drinks and chatted about this and that too (though not so much about the other), and he met some people he knew, and I talked to them as well, and I quite liked him, but I also realised he probably wasn’t that interested in me, and that was fine by me too.

We’d by now drifted back towards the bar, and then suddenly out of nowhere the handsomest, friendliest, loveliest of all the men at the party—and it was a fairly big party—stood next to me and looked me in the eyes, and we hugged, and we kissed, and I don’t know why that happened so quickly or how, I only know that I’d seen him before, when he was working, taking pictures, and he had pointed his camera at me and the woman from the shuttle bus, and I had raised my glass to him and said ‘cheers,’ and now here he was, and we were kissing and hugging, and I didn’t know how or why: we must have been into each other, I suppose.

It was now nearing the end of the party, coming up four in the morning, and people were already leaving, and he simply said, ‘so to Locarno?’ and I said, ‘yes;’ and on the way to the car he told me he was staying in a flat with ten people in it, and some of them needed a lift, so we may have to wait for them, and I said that was all right, but in the end nobody wanted a lift—those who were there at the party decided to go by other means, maybe walk, or by bicycle—so we took his car, a convertible, though he didn’t put the roof down, maybe because it was coming up four o’clock in the morning. He told me he didn’t have his licence at the moment, but that that was all right, and I thought, well, he’ll be driving carefully then, and he did, and we got there without problem, but with a little help from his phone.

As we entered the flat it was dark and already quiet, and in the darkness we walked through a room with nothing much and nobody in it (maybe it was a hall?), into another room, which had a large double bed with two people in it, a man and a woman, both young, maybe the same age as he, and there was a narrow mattress on the floor, and he said: ‘this is me, but it’s all right,’ and it was all right.

We lay down on his little bed, and within seconds we were undressed and were what used to be called making love, and it felt like that, it felt like we were just making some love, and the couple in the bed did not seem to notice or mind and then we both fell asleep in each other’s arms.

Now and then the man from the bed would call my young lover’s name because he was snoring, and that wouldn’t help, so I would hug him closer to me, and that would.

In the morning we woke up, and he said: ‘dormi – sleep,’ but he had to get up and go to work, and I got up too though I didn’t strictly have to go to work, but I did have to go to the flat where I was staying, and do some work there. He made me a coffee, and we kissed again and hugged and said goodbye, and he disappeared, I assumed into the shower.

I got dressed in the room with the big double bed and the little single mattress, and a young woman there was also getting dressed, and I left my card on the window sill and let myself out and walked home in the happy sunshine.

He didn’t phone me or text me, or send me an email, or friend me on Facebook, and I thought, well that’s fair enough, he’d told me how much work he’s got on during the festival here, and he was young, so maybe that was just that, and that’s fair enough. But a little part of me wished and hoped and believed I would see him again; I would bump into him, I reckoned, at some point during the festival, it’s not that big a town, after all.

Nothing happened till Friday, except I was happy all week, doing some work and watching some films, and then Friday I was out with some friends, and we’d just had something to eat and decided to get an ice cream before watching a late film together, and from the ice cream stand I could see him walk towards the Piazza Grande, and I thought there he is, but he didn’t spot me, and I was too far away to call him over, and I didn’t know whether he’d want me to call him over since he hadn’t called me, and he was gone, and I thought, ah well, that’s a pity, but maybe there will be a second chance (even though I don’t normally get a second chance, as most people don’t, most of the time: the probability of circumstances arranging themselves such that one could come about being just so incredibly small).

Once everyone had their ice cream, we realised we were running late for the film, so we started to make a move towards the cinema, and there he was again, coming my way now, with a plate of food in his hand and passing at just a couple of feet distance: again I didn’t call him or stop him or say hello, it happened too quickly, we were late for our film, he had his hands full with food, and he didn’t see me, again. And again I thought, ah what a pity, but maybe there will be a third chance, even though I had never had a third chance before, or heard of anybody who had.

We went to see the film, and then on the way back we passed a bar with a big garden where sometimes they play live music, and one of the group said let’s not go in here, there’s another one which is nicer, but the other place was already closed, so we returned to the one with the big garden, and it’s a huge garden with different sections separated by old stone walls on different levels, and it would be impossible to get a view of it all, especially at night when it isn’t that brightly lit, and usually very busy, and we were going to stand in the courtyard nearest the bar, but then the same member of the group said, let’s go up there, and we went up a flight of steps, past another bar, and into another little courtyard, and we sat down at a table, and no sooner had we sat down at the table than I saw the back of the head that I recognised.

He was on the phone, stroking his short bleached hair with his free hand, and I recognised his short bleached hair in an instant, as I had stroked it too and so much liked the feel of it against the palm of my hand, and I recognised the little wrist band that looked like it had come from another festival, probably music, and I thought I should get up now and say hello to him, but he was with a group of people and so was I, and I thought, ah well, he’s here and at one point I’ll get up and say hello or he’ll get up and turn around; and then he finished his conversation on the phone and got up and turned around and there he was.

I said his name, and he said: ‘Sebastian.’And we hugged and gave each other a kiss, and he told me he had a problem with his flat which he needed to sort, but how long was I here for now and what had happened to me Tuesday morning, and I told him I’d left him a card and didn’t want to hang around as I knew he would have to go to work, and he said he hadn’t seen the card but now that he knew where it was he would find it, but I gave him another one ‘just in case,’ and he looked glad to see me, and we held each other’s hands, and we hugged again and gave each other another kiss, and then he had to go and sort his problem with the flat; and I knew that today the universe had been kind to me, because it had given me not just a second chance but a third, and I had taken not the first, not the second, but the third chance, and I don’t know if we will see each other tomorrow or ever again, but just knowing that he was glad to see me again today, and to see that spark in his eye and feel that hair and hear him say ‘Sebastian’ and smiling at me his broadest of smiles, that alone completely made me happy that day.

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