Mad people across the water, part 3

 

 

“What is your citizenship?”

 

The flight attendant is handing out I-94s and customs declarations. Her smile looks like something out of Soundgarden’s “Black Hole Sun” video. In the past eighteen hours I met with an airline strike and a cancelled flight, re-routing via Munich, and got to watch my Dulles-bound 777 have its engine opened and tinkered with by strange men with wrenches and screwdrivers for five hours. By the time they boarded us I would have hung on to a Concorde’s landing gear naked if that meant taking off sooner. I am late late late and, as if my actions could actually make the plane land faster, I cut to the chase and say

 

“I’m not a citizen.” [=I am not a U.S. citizen and will therefore need both forms, please please please can I have them while you go to the cabin and tell the pilot to kindly step on it]

 

She looks at me like a Kindergarten teacher being patient with the slowest kid in class. Her smile gets even smilier.

 

“Oh, but you have to be a citizen of SOMEWHERE now, don’t you?”

 

She might have patted me on the head if I had sat any closer to the isle. And I would have deserved it. Because her common sense trumps my free-spirit bullshitry any time. Because she can function in this world, and I can’t.

 

Yes, dear sweet nice lady who has been taking care of me for the past seven hours. I do have to be a citizen of somewhere. I have to have a passport, and I can’t just go wherever I damn please on this planet. I can’t pick up a suitcase and move in with the man I love, because I have to be out of the country come November. I can’t look for a job for another three months because I have dues to pay to two governments. This whole “citizenship” thing is making me feel like a criminal about the most beautiful thing that I’ve ever been part of. Would it sound pathetic if I said my only citizenship was “this gorgeous Nation of Two?” It’s kind of funny that we’ve organized this blue marble around keeping each other out of territories that don’t really belong to us, should that really be happening? I don’t know what else to tell you.

 

 

_______________

 

 

There was this one time in my freshman year English grammar drill class in college, the topic of the day was definite vs. indefinite articles. The prof used the phrase “he knocked on the door a second time,” confusing some kids out of their wits. No matter how the prof explained it, it didn’t make sense to them to use the indefinite article.

 

“But if it’s not the first time they knocked on the door, why is it A second time and not THE second time?”

 

“Because the first time you mention the second time, it’s A second time, and if you mention it a second time, it will be THE second time.”

 

“???”

 

Delicious, isn’t it?

 

We pulled up to the house and it hit me a second time.

 

A first second time.

 

A second first time.

 

His. Mine. Ours. His, two years ago. Mine, eight months ago. Ours, every time we connect, to infinity.

 

I sit on the pier (his, mine, ours), wanting to stretch it out like a piece of elastic, like bubble-gum, like a finger dragging out a stain across a table-cloth, a piece of bird shit across the grass. I want it to extend into the sea for at least a mile, and I want to curl up at the end of it and sleep, neither here nor there.

 

And I have no words in English for how the sea looks right now. But it looks like someone cast a net over the surface which won’t sink, ripples rhomboiding through one another in imperfect frictional glide. So I say my word for it. And the sea accepts.

 

And I have no words in English for what the sea is doing right now, but it looks like someone lost a pocketsworth of half shells in a trail from the sun to the tips of my blue-painted toes just above the water. I say my word for it, sipping my European coffee with good old American half-and-half, and the sea understands.

 

I couldn’t tell you how we get to where we are. If the suitcases that we pack are mausoleums or survival kits. Why certain embraces feel like memory, and the squeeze of a wrist like prophecy fulfilled. Whether the melancholy anklet we jingle is the charms of our life’s fumbles beating in line with our step, or a summons from within a pair of deep brown eyes. How the vortex of a fellow human and his Triumphs and nuclear winters and calloused hands become the Möbius strip of a lover pouring salt on snails in the garbage disposal and leading you in a dance around the block.

 

 

 

 

 

“Mad people across the water, part 1” can be found here, and “part 2” here.

 

 

 

Soon.

 

 

You can put my pillow back on the bed, love.

 

Open the windows. I want to smell Old Road Bay when I walk in. I know the fish hooks are ready as ever, and that there is Miller Light in the fridge. That is what I want to do first. Grab a beer, or two, and walk out onto our peer, just like last time. The boards will squeal a merry greeting underneath our feet, one by one, and I will turn back to take in the Old Oak in her spring bloom glory. Knock-knock, beautiful gal. Did you miss me? I sure missed you.

 

I will want to watch the sun set over Sparrows Point, folded into your body like an armchair. You can lean your chin on my shoulder, and I will tell you about the crappy airline food and immigration and customs. Slurp, goes the beer. Pop, drops the acorn from the squirrel’s mouth.

 

Yes, shrimp would be wonderful. Heat up the grill, dearest, while I wash my hair and slip into your T-shirt. I am going to need a new one, the others are back in Europe. Here are the tongs and paper plates, she steps out the side door barefoot, her short-shorts barely peeking from underneath the T. I look at the church parking lot, and wonder if that man from last September has taught his little daughter to ride her pink bicycle by now, and if those goofy kids that spied on us from Sandy Beach are still a couple.

 

Please put my summer dress in the washer and get my flip-flops from underneath the bed. Tell the Island lighthouse to hold the cormorants, and Dock of the Bay to save us a table. I hear the ospreys are back, and the geese are shitting up the back yard. Do you think the crazy neighbor will want to take me out shopping again? ‘Cause she drives like a maniac.

 

Put my pillow back on the bed, love. I’ve shed some pounds and cut my hair; there is a new line on the side of my mouth; the tan from last year is gone. Your baby is sensitive and anxious, tremors and amplitudes. Let me climb in next to you, angel. I want to hear of Park Avenue and the Coast Guard, of buildings blown up and Behemoth ships drilled into repair. I want to hear of the men you brought safely home, and of the day you saved yet again. And then I want to make plans for all the friends we are going to see.

 

Hello, star-spangled banner on top of the post office. The clown shoes are coming home.

Whereof One Cannot Speak...

 

 

 

A friend recently posted on Facebook, I am going to have to start noting down anecdotes related to Central PA cab drivers. Methinks you would have plenty to contribute, Chris?

 

I told her to name the time and place, and I would be there. Then I went through my mental catalogue of 2010-2011.

 

There was Rick, the Hawaiian who accompanied his wife when she enrolled at university. He dropped me off in front of the wrong building on the night of my arrival. It was 11.30 p.m. and my soon-to-be roommate had to send her boyfriend out to look for me and my two suitcases in the parking lot that resembled anything but Hemingway’s clean, well-lighted place.

 

There was the pervert, who didn’t take a lot of coaxing to tell me that his favorite cab moment was when two college girls made out in the back seat for, he thought, his eyes only. He had fallen from bank manager grace because he couldn’t keep his big mouth shut. My guess was there was more to that story.

 

There was Mike, the grandpa with the English degree who not only recited Chaucer to me, but helped me rescue a friend who had locked herself out of her house at 2 a.m. That was a fun detour before my Megabus ride to New York.

 

There was Jay-Jay, the Betty-White sweetheart who dared to fall in love with a younger black man, despite the wishes of her racist sons who wanted her to stay forever married to their abusive alcoholic father. I wrote about her on my old blog. Her energy was just amazing.

 

Then there was Danny from the bottle shop.

 

He could have been my age. I called in a cab on my way to a trailer park barbecue [another blog post altogether]. It was May, perhaps some three weeks before my scheduled departure from the States. “So, you’re finally getting deported,” a friend would tease me on my last night. It sure felt like it. My last month was a frenzy. The hourglass was dripping its final grains of sand, and my imminent transplant back home would be painful, jarring, and ultimately unsuccessful. I was out of my mind. I couldn’t sit still, and yet I was paralyzed.

 

Danny had one hand on top of the steering wheel. His complexion was slightly sallow, his eyes ensconced in two dark circles. His T-shirt might have been dark red. He was that kind of savannah lion who had seen enough shit not to ever flinch from a fight. Someone who could inflict a lot of pain if he had to, but given the choice, he would have declined.

 

“You wanna tell me about that ink?” I asked.

 

He had a full sleeve of abstract patterns on his right arm. Nothing decipherable, yet the lines were clear and the color unfaded. Impressive.

 

“I got that while I was in the service overseas some years ago. Most people have an exact figure or shape that they want, to me it was more about the time and place and who I was with. I got them all in different places. This one was London, this one Barcelona, this one in Frankfurt.”

 

“My thoughts exactly. I’m thinking about getting a tattoo here before I leave, any good places you can recommend?”

 

“Sure. There’s that place on B. Avenue, they’re really good. And if you tell them Danny from the bottle shop sent you, I bet they will give you a discount.”

 

“Thank you. I’ll go and have a look.”

 

“Nothing sexier than a tattoo on a beautiful woman. Strawberry mint?”

 

I took the candy. And the recommendation.

 

I would see him the next day, reading in my favorite coffee shop window. He drove by in the cab, and I took it as a sign. I went into the tattoo shop an hour later and made an appointment for Friday the Thirteenth. Danny’s name did get me a discount.

 

I would ask another driver about him some weeks later, just like I asked about Jay-Jay and her love story even though I never saw her again. The driver made a funny face, as in why would a girl like you ask about someone like Danny? but what he said was “Um, yeah. Danny’s a little… high strung.”

 

Danny was a wounded beast, only his fellow cab driver didn’t know it.

 

We chatted some more on our way to the trailer park. Just as we turned off the main northbound road and onto the dirt, I asked the unassuming question “Are you from here?”

 

“No, from New Mexico.”

 

“So what brought you to Pennsylvania?”

 

“My highschool sweetheart. She’s from PA so we moved here after I got out of the service. We were going to get married and were planning a life together. She got killed by a drunk driver.”

 

I had never visited my friend the barbecue host, but I felt the car make its final turn. The leaves shone a leathery green in the four-o-clock sun. Frodo the black lab mix was barking insanely, clearly on canine overload between chasing bees and having to greet a new guest. There was the clunk of bocce and sizzle of the grill, Harleys reclined against trees and trailers, and one four-wheeled metal box of messed-the-fuck-up smack in the middle of it all. I swear the forest spun.

 

He said it so matter-of-factly. In the soft voice of a man who has accepted melancholy as part of his TGAC sequences until the end of his days.

 

Futility ran down my neck like a stream of rancid mud. I wanted to scream. Make him turn the car around – hell, make him turn the planet around and maybe turn back time. Offer… something. A beer. A listening ear. A foreign shoulder to cry on. All ego-options, quickly scratched off the list as inanely, insultingly stupid. There was nothing, except for the black dog barking like crazy through the muffle of the car window, scratching at the door for me to get out, get out, get out now. Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.

 

“I am so sorry,” I said with my reluctant index finger on the door handle.

 

“That’ll be $12.50.”

Wingtips and wingspan

 

 

 

I spent five hours watching planes take off on Saturday.

 

 

I found a spot among the B-twenties gates, directly in front of one of the runways, and stared at machines taking flight like a bug-eyed goldfish from an aquarium. The week’s adrenalin had worn off and my body was giving in to the flu. I sipped my coffee, tapped my foot to the beat of the mp3 shuffle and waited for the aspirin to kick in. It never did.

 

 

I discovered my absolute favorite part of the take-off. It wasn’t the acceleration, even though it feels awesome to be glued against the seat when you’re a passenger. It wasn’t after the landing gear is remarsupialized, wing flaps adjusting, axes finding balance. It was that one perfect moment after parting with the ground. They differed in size, weight and trajectory, yet in that one second they were complete, immediate, power. Absolute vector. Durée pure.

 

 

I spent five hours watching them. It never gets old. Except the Dulles-bound United at five o’clock made me cry. It took all I had not to change my ticket and forfeit my savings, just to feel my baby’s arms around me again. I was one flight away from home, and desperately jealous of all the faces behind the windows that would fly over Greenland and Cape Cod and a shitload of blue water, pick up their suitcases and their lives where they left off, while mine was still in a state of suspension. Or so it feels sometimes.

 

 

Frankfurt Airport knows more about me than it should. I think of it as that casual acquaintance who just happens to be there on the Friday night when you get absurdly drunk, share more than is appropriate, and end up puking all over yourself. They don’t hold it against you, but you still wish that it would have been a closer friend that held your hair and took you home. You don’t really want to make eye-contact, but you work together or some such so you're fucked.

 

 

Frankfurt Airport is ridiculously huge and always under construction. If anyone ever tells you Germans are organized, kick them in the shin and tell them to go visit this place. Signs point in wrong directions, transfer counters tend to open and close randomly, and sometimes you are made to go through security twice. They are just as messed-up as anyone else. And that’s fine, they should be allowed.

 

 

Yes, I have been in Heidelberg before. These cobbled stones are not new acquaintances. Yes, I was up at the Castle, too. Yes, I have a picture of myself in front of the library, from another life. Thank you for your presentation, I will send you those book titles I promised asap. My year in the States? Um. It was awesome. This project would not have happened without it. Thank you again.

 

 

I never saw so many cuticle-biters in the same room.

 

 

I was reminded of how much I love my work.

 

 

I would like to think I am a compassionate person, yet some people’s life stories put me to shame. I have a long way to go.

 

 

I learned that people still find me as abrasively fascinating and ambivalently intimidating at 33 as they did when I was 3, 13, and 23. They don’t know what it is, but they want a piece of it as much as they want to run away. It is as unsurprising as it is annoying. I am an acquired taste. Or is it basically the archetype of human experience, and I am just babbling? Either way, there were a few who did not mind. Bless their souls.

 

 

I took my fever into the cabin and my claustragoraphobia out the window. The blinking red wingtip light might have been the pulse of my own heart, a private navigation device between continents that I madly wished to graft onto one another.

 

 

Airports are the happiest and saddest of places. Departures, arrivals, transits, intersections, cancellations, stopovers, delays. I love them because they are messy. They are not mechanisms of clockwork precision, not at all. They are always-already adjusting to chaos, trying to put the puzzle together even though pieces fall off the board every second. Their flaws betray their human origin. They don’t even try to make sense of the situation. They just try to make it work.

 

 

 

 

Sorry for not writing, I've been writing

 

 

I miss this blog.

 

I miss the black and white, the fonts and titles, commenting, and hitting the “publish” button. Hanging out here feels like coming home from work, tossing the keys into the key bowl, and just sprawling on your cozy couch and taking a nap. It’s comfortable. A no-pants zone. It’s home.

 

The reason I have been MIA is that I started writing my dissertation. After six years of research and reading, I wrote the first ten pages. Five thousand words. I am no longer producing proposals, sales pitches, promises of what I will do somewhere down the line. I am writing. My ships and sailors and whales and harbors are coming together.

 

 

Deep breath.

 

It might not sound like a big deal, but it is a very big deal to me. Everyone has their own m.o. when it comes to these things. There are people who write all the time, edit all the time, tweak and toss into the trash can all the time, and keep moving. Unfortunately, I cannot do that. I hate rewriting, I don’t really do drafts, and I only start writing when my thesis is absolutely clear in my head. Also, I admire my supervisor so much that I would never present her with anything short of a human sacrifice when it comes to mentoring my work.

 

I would be lying if I said that this little breakthrough occurred without the assistance of the universe. I pursued a few different paths in these last few months, which could have taken me in different directions. Some doors were closed (nah, this ain’t for you kiddo), and some opened with fanfare and fireworks, a stick of dynamite that blew the end of the tunnel out and kicked me in the ass. Go. Run.

 

Five months ago I was shifting books from one pile onto another, transcribing notes, printing and downloading, and feeling quite lost. I had scattered ideas and a collapsing structure, but no thesis. It was impossible not to notice that the six years of pure research and no productivity had coincided with the crisis in my personal life. Living with my parents again, freelancing instead of waking up every morning and going to an actual job like a decent person, my synapses were throbbing in a big neon sign, I AM NOT SUPPOSED TO BE HERE. I AM NOT SUPPOSED TO BE HERE. I AM NOT SUPPOSED TO BE HERE.

 

In ten days’ time, I will be presenting my newly minted ten pages to twenty other cultural transplants, heretics of nationalism and goofballs of transdisciplinarity, at one of the oldest universities in Germany. I won’t lie. I cried when I found out. It won’t be my first conference, and it won’t be the biggest thing I’ve ever done. But the timing of it… Holy crap, if that isn’t one big wink from the universe, telling me I am right back where I belong, right where I am supposed to be, I don’t know what is. And I will also go shamelessly ethnic on people’s asses by saying that I loved my lover for being an American when I shared this with him. I come from a hard-working family and have always had every possible kind of support in everything I did, but I swear to God, that loudmouthed, fearless, unadulterated FUCK YEAH of hard-earned, well-deserved success… No one knows how to celebrate the way Americans do. You guys rock.

 

So, in ten days’ time, I will be a travel bug again. I have been missing planes and airports and languages and exchanges, and I am so overdue for another international utopia moment. I also miss this blog, and I promise to write more soon.

Not bad for Jesus’ age

 

 

 

This work

This work is autistic

It makes you agoraphobic at times

But I wouldn’t trade my intellectual orgasms for the world

I turn ivory towers into scrimshaw

That’s what I do

 

 

And there will be moments

Just moments

When someone close, part of the inner circle, sister or a friend

Will touch my shoulder just so gently

And remind me of another pair of hands

The most beautiful I have ever seen

Or claimed

And this body will reel

Gasp

Dissolve in the quickest crash between memory and a life unlived

Then scoop itself up again

Like a kitten in its mother’s mouth

And continue making scrimshaw out of ivory

Dancing its ass off until it can take no more

 

 

My baby smells like a Christmas tree

His cigarette flickers purple in 87Hz light

He chronicles the secret life of a peninsula

And puts broken things back together

He speaks of me the way I would never speak of myself

And I let him

Because, my God, was there ever anything sexier than a man proud of his woman?

And I am not one to lack

I just seldom hear what I don’t already know

 

 

Come on, universe

We are burning daylight here

There are fish hooks to be baited, tucked in the corner of a kitchen window

A pier that is lonely without the squeak of my yellow Chucks

A house that misses my moans

And a summer dress left behind so that friends could say

“You know what that means? She’s coming back!”

 

 

And so I turned thirty-three.

Not bad for Jesus’ age.

 

 

 

 

Safe from harm

 

 

 

Ask me which language of love I speak, and I will tell you - all of them. Except expensive gifts. They make me feel like I owe the giver something, like I have been bought. Maybe there is more Marcel Mauss in me than I know, or it could be that I’m just cheap that way. But yes, I cannot get enough of love letters, compliments and expressions of adoration; I will never leave the house – or come back – without a hug and a kiss; no multitasking or playing with your phone while you are talking to me; I want to hold hands while walking down the street, and if we are just sitting on the couch, I will want to have a finger or toe glued to you, if not more; thank you for making lunch and picking me up from the airport, and… do we have to say goodnight just yet?

 

 

 

I would like to think I give all of that back, but that is for me to hope and others to know. I am totalitarian, inclusive, fluid and osmotic in matters of the heart. It can be a little intense sometimes.

 

 

 

A few years back, I heard the words “Not everyone is cut out to be an army wife.” They struck hard because I immediately recognized myself as one of those people. I was too selfish. There, I’ve said it.

 

 

 

And they are gorgeous indeed; the soldiers, the shamans, the rock stars, the surgeons; the templars, the warlocks, the shepherds, the preachers. They are charming, and charismatic, and lead the way so effortlessly; and you want to be close to their fire, so intoxicatingly bright and infectious. But there is a part of them that belongs to the world. A fraction of their loyalty that will always reside elsewhere. A call in the middle of the night and a disappearance for howeverlong, whereverfar. Is your ego bendy enough to take a back seat in times like those? Mine wasn’t.

 

 

 

It just so happened that my baby was called upon again to do what he does best, and what he does better than anyone. A mission of fixing the human condition, one broken lost soul at a time, molecular and epic in one and the same instance. I knew this about him from the beginning, and I was torn. You want to protect what’s most precious to you from catching the brunt of other people’s shit; an illusion of control, and patronizing to boot, but I could not help it. Yet this is why you love him. This is who he is. This is what brought him to you. How can I negotiate that?

 

 

 

Just one look at his face last night, and my stupid little pussydog ego harnessed its own wicker basket, lit up the propane, and ballooned its way into outer space. Just one look at the toll it took on him, the weight, the pain, and his superhuman strength in dealing with it, and I knew what every army wife probably has grafted into her bone marrow, heavier than lead yet carried without complaint. Because that’s what you do.

 

 

 

I always knew, but I didn’t know. He told me, but I was reluctant to understand. I thought I was protecting him, but I was protecting myself from something I didn’t think I could handle. Because it made me feel small to think I couldn’t match the greatness with which he supported me. What a relief to grow. I knew that I was up for this kind of insight, and I feel embarrassedly late for the party. But there it happened. Everything else evaporated, except for love. I could care less about control and about feeling threatened by the public sphere invading my introvert hamster ball. It will not do to feel helpless or internalize his pain, when it is my place and my power to nurture the nurturer. He deserves a warrior, and a warrior he shall have. This love won’t let me be anything less.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

My first two years

"The catalogue of true thoughts is but small; they are ubiquitous; no man's property; and unspoken, or bruited, are the same. When we hear them, why seem they so natural, receiving our spontaneous approval? why do we think we have heard them before? Because they but reiterate ourselves; they were in us, before we were born. The truest poets are but mouth-pieces; and some men are duplicates of each other... ."
 
(Herman Melville, Mardi) 



Life and work and love keep getting in the way of writing, but you won't see me complain. It is already past midnight in my world so I am technically breaking anniversary rules, but my heart has been facing westward for some time now so no worries.


It was a small step for mankind, but today is two years since I started blogging. Tadaa.


On that lovely note, friends, I invite you to have a glass of wine with me, or a beer, or a slice of your favorite cheesecake, or a scoop of your favorite ice-cream. Or go get your hairs did, or buy yourself something nice. Or just smile.


Whatever you do, keep writing.


Love you all.

2012: What have I learned?

 

 

Recently I went back to my 2012 horoscope and found it funny how things turned out quite close to the “predictions.” Now, my ego will always prefer rummaging through my natal chart to generic yearly BS, but I had to laugh out loud when I saw the Aquarian horoscope for 2013.

 

Apparently, the romance I have started at the end of 2012 will only keep on giving; “Putting up with a partner who does not honor and cherish my essence is a thing of the past;” and I might be “changing my residence.” Hm.

 

Career-wise, I seem to have spent the past few years “collecting the necessary research and finding a slew of inspiring mentors,” and it is now time to “get my genius concepts on the map where they belong.” Also, “Chances are that I am only living up to a fraction of my potential and yet doing incredibly well.”

 

Touché, Astrology.com. Touché. We’ll talk in a years’ time and see who’s done what, mmmkay?

 

When the laughter subsided, what I saw were my plans as I had already formulated them in my head, written out by a stranger’s hand for the entertainment of the general public. Funny.

 

The hourglass of 2012 is just about down to its last grains of sand. There are recaps and stock-taking in the media, the blogosphere, and the private lives of friends and family. I really do not want to do mine, but perhaps I should. Perhaps I will be glad of it some decades down the line?

 

It is too early to gauge the magnitude of this year. Usually, my brain is about ten steps ahead of the rest of me, figuring things out and getting upset that cannot catch up with myself. It amazes me to see it take a back seat to emotions and intuition. This year I have felt on my twitching skin, behind my eyeballs, in the core of my stomach and my bitten, mangled cuticles. Compliments of bravery and expressions of admiration for whatever it is that makes the choices I made admirable, are appreciated and politely accepted, but have yet to be internalized. For now, they feel as if they should be meant for someone else.

 

I do not want to use big words for this. And I don’t mean long, I mean big.

 

I have learned that we are teachers to our parents. We may kick and scream about it or insist that it should be the other way round [OK, I kick and scream about it], but we force them to rise and grow from the moment we are born. And it is our most controversial choices that allow them to grow the most. I have learned that my parents know, understand, and support me better than I ever might have hoped for. I also hope that someday soon I can not only understand, but accept this role in their lives.

 

I have learned that what I used to call intensity, abrasiveness, emotional amplitudes or being high maintenance deflates so beautifully when one calls it a quest for transparency. Thank you, therapy.

 

This has been a year of many lasts and firsts. Last weekends, last conversations, last embraces. And first nights spent in one’s old bedroom, first vacations and celebrations as a single person, first job and conference applications as a changed woman, and first kisses. It’s funny how being part of a couple drapes you in some cloak of diminished accessibility, and how people seem to come out of the woodwork when they hear you are no longer attached.

 

I have learned that, though the universe might have rattled me like a snow globe, it never lost sight of my happiness. The people that I trusted before justified that trust by sticking by me. Family came through in ways that I will be grateful for until the end of my days. My body got rid of some ballast, and perhaps I ought to change my profile to “106 pounds of… something.” My life was purged of pressures and clutter, leaving space and permission for grief, healing, and rebirth.

 

I was blessed with a love of cosmic proportions, and the beautiful, generous heart of a man who is a magician with words and deeds, a templar and a gentleman, an artist and an angel. He writes me songs and sends love notes in my language. He dreams of me and tells stories of who I am and what I do to friends and family with endless pride and joy. Kissing that stranger is the most natural thing I have ever done.

 

Tell me about your year, friends. And the year to come, as you see it now, even if you don’t see it yet. Then meet me here in a year’s time to sit and laugh about it all. Be happy, healthy, and blessed. Be in love with life, with yourself, and one another. Thank you for being here.