And you sigh a great, a long sigh that ended as something more like a whistle, as if you had been kicked in the chest. But you wanted to scream a great scream, for in that moment, you saw cascading hills of brown and blue, your childhood, flowing water, that time during the separation of your parents in Europe. And you saw jazz, everything you had played in the nightclub already and everything you would ever play; you saw the endless walks through the city that first drew you here, the space between the buildings across the street, the lightning, splitting two great buildings, cascading down the terraces, brown and green, small apartments, offices in New York City. It was dark then, about 10 p.m. And then the days flow by.
Time flows by too, though it’s so quiet you don’t hear it, so bittersweet that you can’t taste it, so magnificent that you feel it but don’t know what you are feeling, don’t know that you are feeling. In the the dawn air when you can’t sleep you gaze down at the cabbies aimlessly circling and the lonely people reading alone in separate booths in the separate restaurants, less lonely than you in that moment, less lonely because they already knew they were lonely, and so they had the chance to join the club of lonely people who do lonely things together, with such a degree of separation that it allows them to preserve their loneliness. But you: it hit you just right then, like a wrecking ball, but with a different texture; it was not iron, it did not taste like blood, it was not big and hard and round; it was more like fog, a fog that smelled like Windex and tasted like rotten pistachios against the roof of your mouth. It was unexpected, too, like a rotten pistachio, as if right then, you had reached into the jar of your soul, expecting to find some goodness and finding only this great void bathed in wind and fog. And in that moment, you wanted to jump.
And then it’s 6 p.m. and they are flowing out the great arteries of the city, thousands of cars and buses, the city breathes out and rests, and then it’s dawn again, the sweet repose of sleep has passed so quickly, and now the city breathes in, and again the air flows into the fortress-like office buildings, and the sax player between our terraced buildings prepares to play. And a few planes roar by overhead and interrupt him.
You are on your way, too. You have not been able to sleep for quite some time, and you hardly want to try now. You count every deep-black wave that you cannot see from your window seat as you cross the Atlantic, knowing each one brings you closer to the end, an end that you can sense, until somewhere in hundred-thousands, somewhere before dawn, sleep does finally catch up with you. And how you needed that rest.
For it’s you, breathing now, after three laps on the beach, seven miles times three laps is twenty-one miles, the beach of Lake Einsamkeit, the highest lake in the Southern Alps, but the breathing doesn’t feel like a flow, but a mighty torrent, a mighty desperate torrent, oxygen anxious to enter and carbon dioxide anxious to leave, like wounded civilians from a besieged combat zone. You did this to yourself. It seemed like the right thing to do.
And your mind goes back, you see straight through the water of an impossible midnight blue seeming to indicate it’s cold, through the desultory thousand-year seaweed at the bottom of the lake and into your past, and you see them all, you see yourself changing your hometown again, your soul goes down, again, to the bottom of that lake, into the frigid water, but then this time it becomes different, from how it’s been so many times. You ask yourself if you could have lived differently. Could have stopped running, running in so many different ways, except actually running, because when you were actually running, jogging, was the only time that you felt free. You couldn’t have. But now you have run so far. You have run to the end of the earth. You have escaped the maw of the city, you have escaped everyone you knew. No one knows you are here. Can you be free now? Have you run far enough?
Because, here, in this thinnest of cool air, high up on the edge of the world, you feel it. You didn’t know what it was before. Time flowing by, everything flowing by. You had stopped to catch your breath, there on the thin, dirty sand shore of the lake, your feet sinking into its matter of fact slimieness, and with the hands on your forehead you felt the first few wrinkles growing in. So early.
You look to your right, at the lake now. You will not run any longer. You will not stand to be trapped by this past, you will give yourself a new beginning. You will start life from zero. And in all memories of all those years, that you so repudiated in the next instant after their passing, that are so heavy and deep and dark that you have had to come here and look down thousands of feet into that water to face, you shed like ballast now, to bring you above the flow.
You give up the decades, the addictions that brought you here; you give up the envy, you give up the inadequacy, you give up the drinking; you give up the loneliness of college, the years, your best years that you wasted back then taking care of your paranoid sister, who begged you to leave but forced you to stay; you give up the loneliness, and the being misunderstood, of high school.
You give up the letters you wrote. All of them. The ones you keep in your right desk drawer, the one you place in your left breast pocket when you just can’t take it anymore, and the ones, too many, that you keep under the floorboards under the sofa in the tiny uptown apartment which you kept just for that purpose. The many letters to many women, some of which were answered, but most of which weren’t. The ones in which you asked for friendship, asked for love, but more often, begged for it, showed your need for it, telling them your future, your darkest secrets (which I don’t think are actually that dark after all), and your hopes and fears. You give up what you said; you give up the pity a few of them felt for you and then you give up the hatred for yourself that pity made you feel. The ones that just wanted to take advantage of you, you don’t have to forgive; somehow that never bothered you.
You give them up, you give up to, the days and nights waiting. You let them be one long flow out of you, the many pens and many papers of different weights and shades of white collapsing into one final, instantaneous scratch, one that is as harmonious as it is dissonant. You loved that paper, you kissed it, pressed it into your forehead; you blessed it. And you cursed it, cursed it a thousand times, what it represented, your desperation, and what it brought you. And you give it up, now. You bring it all back, for one instant, and then, let it be done. The sound is almost laughable. And then, the sound of one hand clapping at the terrible, cosmic joke. There is nothing. You stop running. And it is ecstasy.
You are in the water now. Right out in the middle, or somewhere like that. You swam out there by yourself. And now you float on your back. You have worked so hard, you barely feel the cold, which isn’t that bad anyway, because it’s early summer. And it is quiet, so quiet it is beautiful, there is only the splashing quiet, so quiet, of the calm water. There is nothing left, there is no one else. Certainly not on the lake, given how you bought out all the cabins (the cabin manager didn’t ask any questions, it’s too early in the season; even more so when you set your watch on the table and told him to take himself into town for the weekend). There is no one else. There is no one else. There is only the Milky Way above you as you float on your back. It is Saturday night. And there is no one else. There is no one else.
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Sunday morning. The sun rises over the rim of the shallow valley of the lake. It was a pretty morning but that’s really not the point. At about 10 a.m., the sun clears off the fog, and from the southern ridge of the valley one can see the charred foundations of where the cabins used to be below. The cabins from where you once spied the distant ridges and the distant mountain peaks that you could sometimes see and sometimes not, as they faded into snow bearing clouds or the incredible midday haze, which vast fields of reflective snow inspire when they are hit by the strong sun of these altitudes. The cabins where you first dreamed of running away, of just ignoring it all and living happily in a small cottage in a valley with some goats who would give hearty milk in the summer to make crude cheese to keep you through the long winters. You are nowhere to be found now.