If I seemed subdued this morning it was because my heart was breaking at leaving again.
No matter anything, the moment I am in your arms the world changes.
The thirteen hours back was infinitely longer than the fifteen hours there.
The profound black turrets on the ancient, unpolished castles were still the honest memoirs of their thousand years, unlike the shining white remade stones of every castle near Paris.
But it was cold.
Huddled in my coat, your sore throat the only thing I took back with me, I finished one book and began another.
That I'd stolen from my sister's bookshelf in November, and realized upon the third chapter that I'd read it before.
More than ten years ago.
Wondering at the pencilled-in paragraphs, it was only when I came upon the notes I'd written in one of the margins (the horrendously unique handwriting indicative of why I can type faster than I think), in the style that they taught us in school when I was still going to school...
...that I remembered the person I was when I'd first read it.
The book was an entirely different one today.
I still fell into it, the way I always do, eyes tearing at the tragedies, looking at the world through the young japanese student's eyes.
But when she spoke of love and tragedy...
...the paragraphs I had underlined a decade ago were not the most touching of the stories. Not the best written, not the most sentimental, not the most anything.
But they were words that ten years ago I had longed to experience.
I longed to experience the depth of her pain, of her tragedies.
(and boy did I ever)
I longed to find warmth in the tiniest things, in kitchens, in watching a loved one devour something that still scented the entire room from the juices spilled over on the stove.
I longed to love as deeply as she did, and find a different world in someone's arms.
Ten years later, I realize that I needed all those tragedies to learn to love. To wake up. To learn resilience, objectivity, and most importantly, to earn a connection to the humans I had disassociated myself from so young.
And I have learned.
And I love you.
And that one time I turned back to see you receding with the castle-surrounded hotel, the schloss-gardens beside you where I'd sat hiding from the wind in the lee of some statue waiting for the hour of your return to be just a few moments closer...
I wanted so desperately to run back, miss my trains, all four of them, miss the million phone calls to work tomorrow to explain my absence, miss the dinner party tomorrow evening chez moi where I will make those salmon rolls and tortellini with that prosciutto sauce I had made for you, and watch others drink wine that I have no stomach for.
In the train, a muscled young girl, hips wider than mine, told me in halting english spattered with german words that I wished you could hear me trying to repeat, about the trouble she's had with her eyebrow piercing...
And I thought again of the strong german jawlines and how I'd felt so safe wandering the cobbles of Merseburg, knowing that the stares weren't leers like in Paris, knowing that even though I didn't understand a word of the handfuls of people that started up conversations, that they were only saying sweet things.
Part of that confidence was from the lift in the chin you kissed that morning, no matter the magic of the town itself.
And now I am back in Paree, the city that was made to strengthen my character (for it can offer nothing else) and the metro smelled of semen, and the air stinks with a hundred rotten things that were absent this weekend.
I discovered a million things in the streets of Merseburg, my childhood, parts of my eastern european heritage, my love for languages and the resilient sincerity of the eastern germans...
...my inability to find as many stars in the skies of big cities.
I discovered even more in your arms, and still more with you inside me.
I'm sorry I yelled. It is a twenty five year old habit.
I will begin unlearning it today.
I love you. And if I didn't turn back a second time as I urged my legs down Bahno�trauss (trainstation street) towards der Bahnof (the trainstation) and Gleiss 6 (platform 6), it was because I wouldn't have been able to see through the tears anyway.
As it is, I am embarassed at these dramatics.
And so terribly sorry.
The breeze was cruelly light and warm and fragrant on the Gleiss, and the smiling woman whose child climbed unbidden into my lap while we waited for the train to take us to Halles, (where I would swtich for Leipzig, then Frankfurt, then Paris) had kindness in her face.
Visions of you still surround me, and somehow your sore throat turned to fever on the train and I am enjoying the hallucinations that hold you beside me.
I love you.
Happy Chinese New Year. And happy Valentine's.