swirling

And so it was that I lost some hours on a train.

But in the losing I came unto myself again.

I was on my way to Stuttgart to spend some time with a dear friend...

Because he had lost the love of his life...

And he had come unto nothingness.

Anton.

My friend.

My brother.

My mentor in some respects.

But this is a solitary business...

This living.

Except for those indescribably happy moments in which we are permitted the company of people we love...

Moments in which we texture the panes of our perspective with such wondrous colours and tones...

Moments in which we don't actually feel...

Alone.

I'd found it ironic for many years that he should have come to know a love so deep and real with his beloved...

Anja...

Anooshka.

After all, he had once been the prince of objectivity and as he liked to put it... 

"Respectful but necessary distance" that one must maintain between one's self and the subjects of one's observation for the purpose of chronicling and recounting this glorious yet insipid reality that we call...

Life.

The train steward came to check my ticket.

I patted my coat to feel for it.

Finally, I found it and presented it to him.

"Sir, you have a first class ticket here."

"And?"

"Excuse me, Sir, but why are you sitting on the floor beside the sleeping drunks and the bicycles? Why are you not in the carriage for which you have paid?"

I knew what my heart would say, but I would not waste the words then.

My heart would say that I am with my dear friend Anton, and we are come unto nothingness, but to the steward I simply smiled and asked, "Does it really matter?

He smiled too.

"I suppose not."

He shuffled on to the next carriage, pausing only at the glass door to look back and regard me with some modicum of consideration before he continued on with the execution of his duties.

The drunk nearest me on the floor twitched and spasmed against or in unison with whichever dream sequence it was into which he had fled...

The day.

But the irony in his way of looking at the world... 

Or in the way that he had for many years professed to look at the world...

Was exactly the point.

It was ironical because it was not who I knew him to be in his heart.

Even at his worst...

Or in our darkest hours...

In Bosnia.

In his heart he was needing a partner and a companion...

A soulmate...

And I celebrated his relationship with Anja every single day...

From the first day...

Unto the last.

But now, he is come unto nothingness and I must reach down into that absent state to deliver him once more unto the sun...

As he has so often done...

For me.

Despite his...

Objectivity.

I think of the way he had been so upset with me for having earlier in my life reached down into some other scene or reality in which to try to lend a hand to those in need, despite the requisite objectivity about which he incessantly lectured me.

He used to pump his misshapen fist in my face as he repeated the mantra again and again...

"We are not these bodies... we are not these stories..."

But the only thing I could think of in those moments was how both his hands had come to be misshapen in the first place.

In a Gulag...

Beside his father...

Stretched flat on parallel boards...

Being beaten...

And maimed.

The train rattles on the tracks.

The further drunk on the floor beside me flails his arm and wallops the nearer drunk across the head.

I think of the relativity of distance and time.

How is it that I am so in love with the greatest woman I have ever known, and my friend is now undone for such a love for her having passed...

Away?

I think of Eckhart imagining a relationship with God in which one is almost painting on a canvass together with the Father...

Interchangeably swirling colours to render more than what we feel...

In life...

Beyond those indescribably happy moments we get to feel...

When we...

Love.

Soon we will need to turn our attention once more unto the East.

Soon we will need to say something about the abhorrent war in Ukraine.

Soon we will need to reach our hands and our hearts deep into the centre of the most Hobbesian conflict the world has yet beheld.

But first we must emerge together...

As brothers and sisters...

From nothingness.