After the third day of the seminar, Susanne and I were still driving home, a 14-hour drive, lost in confusing road closures and detours around Hamburg's Elbtunnel for a good hour, finally arriving home shortly after two in the morning.
At noon today, I went to get my fourth Corona vaccination and a flu shot, which my doctor had recommended for me at my age and also because I am considered a high-risk patient due to the stroke I had a few years ago, before I start my journey to Spain.
To my relief, my ticket for the motorail train to Lörrach has finally arrived, so all the preparations are now being made. By now it's nine o'clock in the evening and I'm dead tired, probably still from the exertion of the last few days, the long journey home, although it was very a pleasant one, and the vaccinations that have put my body's immune system into a state of war.
I just came back from late night shopping, the fridge was empty after a week's absence. I bought fruit and vegetables, meat for Jan-Eycke, cheese for us and some discounted fish for me. There are also a few bottles of Tempranillo Reserva on the shelf again, for €2.95 a bottle, a wine with a wonderfully earthy taste, each sip a sensual compensation for the painfully large time gap, separating us from our house in Spain.
Outside, in the forbidding darkness of night, a cold wind atomises the fat rain into a chilly mist that seeps under my skin through all the cracks in my clothes and seems to suck the life force out of me. All my senses feel existentially threatened and long for open fires and hibernation. Images flicker through my mind like silent bats, images of unkempt, weed-strewn graves with wet gravestones slowly sinking crookedly into the cold, damp earth, uncared for, witnesses to a bizarre cult of the dead, a burdensome imposition on those left behind.
Thursday I will tear myself away from the ghosts in my head, or I take them with me on the ride through a rainy Europe. I am alone with them and the restrained, confident roar of the boxer engine, hours and hours on the road on the shrivelled folds of the earth, like an amoeba in a petri dish, wandering around in random twitches without leaving any traces. The difference between a longing and fulfilment is not the belief in the possibility of the beautiful, but the doing in all the sober ugliness of the present moment. Without expectation of any wonderful beauty, humbly and yet with one' s head held high, facing the forces of unpredictable arbitrariness, appreciating life, enjoying it, in every moment.
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