Archive for the ‘BDSM’ Category

Venturing Celestely

Saturday, February 26th, 2022

Mile after unexpected mile surround us, wrap us up in ribbons of new asphalt blackly cordoning off our sorrow. Like gauze, our memories stay light, transparent to the moment; there, but not all there is, even as we recall a silent ride on this road taken in the thin, slicing heat of the master's absolute fury, or the weight of his disappointment over a forgotten provision, pressing bare feet into similar paths.

The international concert of the artist that managed to get every last hotel in La Fortuna and parts beyond booked nevertheless failed to make enough of an impression so as to have their name remembered. Everyone knew the whole region was full, "of course", and that it was for "the concert", yes naturally, but of whom? "I think they're from Mexico". You could see it as bum luck, I guess, that in an otherwise lazy season, in the midst of a crisis of tourism, we managed to pick for an overnighter that one date presided over by anonymous Mexicanos with cult followings --but the better vantage is the one proposing it's a useful test. Of our preparation, patience, of what we've provisioned, of what we're ready to perceive. The very nature of traveling as we do, without promises, without pre-payments, free to call off whatever the fuck we feel like whenever we feel like it or don't, means occasionally some sort of bridge will be inexplicably out, inviting us to be creative.

Speaking of vantages, allow me to interrupt myself a moment to record the current, while the morning sun still dapples through it, warming my throat and shoulders as I perch above, Bimbo's excellent cold brew decidedly not steaming by my side. A grove of broad-leaved trees stretches out some pleasant walk's worth into the distance, old leaves and fallen flowers carpeting the way. These give off into a languid stream, where birds --kiskadees and montezuma oropendolas1 -- drink and flit, avoiding the occasional passing of a gardener in deep rubber boots. Against the crunch of leaves underfoot breeze moves through the trees in hushed, tremulous roars, cicadas insisting somewhere in the distance. The air is clean, gloriously unadulterated by anything whatsoever, which, while a near-constant of my life, is nevertheless noticable --a twist of perception I wish carried out as well in everything else.

In being disconnected from the daily flow of life I find myself tethered differently, that common paradox of acid-washing away life's incremental buildups. It's the earth; it's the sun; love itself, expression in leaf and language, undeniably abundant whether I feel like acknowledging them or not. I breathe in and bit by bit, the surroundings help me take the next, whether I want to or not.

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Ah, but this view, this perch steeped in peace, had to be clawed and carved out of that National and International yet Apparently Solely Mexican Concert Debacle as I was saying earlier. So after a pleasant four hours' meander through familiar jungle paths to this, our intended sojourn, we found ourselves without a place to stay. "Let's just go to La Fortuna, there's a gazillion hotels, someone's gotta have something." Except that mecca at the base of Arenal was booked up right and proper, from unlit shanties barely indicated on the road to the big resorts with strobing signs suggesting the very essence of amenity.2 If it wasn't exactly a pity to turn around and head home owing to the beauty of the drive and the pleasure of having spent a day at trying, it wasn't all that ideal either, so as we turned our horses round I made a point of staying awake enough to see if we might not run into something rentable on the road back.

Twenty kilometers or so later, the "Bar and Marisqueria and Karaoke The River with Cabins" managed to meet the well-lowered criteria of 1) visible from the road, 2) with enough space in front to allow pulling off and stopping without having to brace against something3 . I asked a woman lounging around on one of the cut-trunk makeshift tables whether they had anything for the night, which sent her, all smiles, into the kitchen, which in turn produced a gruff if affable greyhair, evidently the owner-cum-cook. He reached under the bar and brought up a galvanized bucket containing a series of keys, and proceeded to fish around in it thoughtfully. Several keys were turned down despite the evidence that nobody else was there. Eventually, he seemed satisfied with No. 4, and gave it to the woman so she could show me what was on offer.

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I've certainly stayed in dingier places, just not any time in all that recent memory. But it was cheap4 , reasonably clean, and the water did in fact run, so we took it, on the theory that we could check out some of the natural environs we'd come all this way for the next day, and see if the concert deluge had let up any, by then. We passed a fine night as only they happy enough with each other to let immediate circumstances fly for a while may, and though we woke up with nearly a hundred mosquito bites between us, we did manage to sleep. In the light of day, the place looked a little different, and we wondered idly whether the old guy had made this place his project long ago and meanwhile lost his determination, or if he was a newer owner intent (or not) on fixing it up. At any rate, it was apparent that at some point "El Rio" had been a life's aspiration, the nacre of a dream not quite capable of completing the pearl.

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In a typically Costa Rican twist of the unexpectedly fabulous, this place's seafood was beyond exceptional. I don't know if I've heard of more dubious places to try fruits of the sea and fresh-caught filets beyond perhaps an airplane, but I've certainly not been more surprised. I think I had shrimps on the rice device or something.

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With a new day decidedly afoot, we mosied back to our original destination and found it blissfully emptied of concert-goers, and so we let down our suitcases again. This time, much more comfortably.

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rio celeste

A splendid because hard-won repose was had, and then I spent a while appreciating what a proper bathroom looks like:

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So that's: a shower big enough to comfortably fit four or five people, a magnificently large, powerful, vertical shower head, and semi-transparent glass tiling to allow abundant natural light. The curtain's a bizarre if less noticable addition, but otherwise that was one of the best showers I've ever had, and I have no idea why more of 'em aren't designed exactly like this.

Also, the instant mini-bar, as supplied by the Strictly Trained Harem Kitchen Corps5 :

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We spent a while refreshing and then set out to Rio Celeste, which at long last actually was the true object of this trip, that confluence of rivers where the water was supposedly bright turquoise blue. And, it was!

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But that's a couple of hours' drive away yet; first, we stopped off at a...frankly, I couldn't tell you if this was someone's house, or a store someone else had started and kept passing on to family members who changed its contents every turn, or maybe some sort of community flea market or mini-storage or...they had big coconuts, at any rate, which is what I was after.

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As I walked up, three middle aged women were rocking themselves in enormous, ratty barcaloungers, tinny bachata scratching itself out of some receiver somewhere in the piles and stacks of stuff. They slowly if enthusiastically organized themselves into opening a pair of coconuts for me while I looked around and tried to imagine the lives of they who produced this collection, and the organizational scheme, if any, of the owner, if such a role could even be said to exist.

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rio celeste

Didja spot the chicks? Because they spotted you, and you don't look to be bringing them more watermelon.

Rio Celeste had been on the list of things to go see for a while, it's just that we'd made several attempts to check it out during the course of other trips and each time been thwarted by an unreasonably shitty road. On the last pass we determined through sheer trial and error that there are three approaches to the place, and the second's the one we want. As it turns out, what we really want is a combination of the first and second approaches, switching the one for the other at the halfway mark between the highway and the little track that winds up to the accessible part of the river, but anyhow; we finally managed, even if it still took a little backtracking.

There's a national park offering a hike to some stretch of this thing. There's also multiple problems there, such as being overrun by tourists and all the curio-and-overpriced-snackbar monstrosities that go with the clueless if loud and indolently milling throngs. It also "closes for entrance" at two in the afternoon, I guess because the locals don't want to see what happens if goofballs don't make it back to the trailhead before dark. I spent a while talking to a ranger, who described how to get to a different part of the river, outside the bounds of the park. Her directions being perfect, we quickly found our way to the river's edge. This one, with less official if still rather friendly greeters.

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We walked a ways, enjoying the improvement in air that had already seemed unsurpassable. As with anywhere we go, and everything we do, we felt both the presence, and the lack of it, of that man by our side; or more properly, behind us, with some instrument of torture/toying/encouragement. It's as if the majesty of any place imprints the master on itself in the bas-relief of his absence, and even as I missed him with every step along the rocks, every appreciation of some new sight or creature, I nevertheless felt him there. And so we stopped and peered into the bright blue pools a while, until I surprised myself in deciding to go climbing out into the river's center rocks. "Why don't you just take your shoes off?" asked the Bimbo, but I shrugged and set myself the task of jumping and lunging over the streams of water just-so, and may my shoes get soaked if I can't manage.

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But I did, and then the Bimbo joined me, and much revelry was had, along with plans to return.

And so the sun began its second setting on our voyage, and we turned again towards the glorious shower hotel. Which, as with nearly everything here, is a true voyage in and of itself.

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I'd made a note to stop for a picture of this sign to a place anyone'd rightfully want to turn into, not even noticing the true gem of the Jbu in the background. Where is Jbu, you ask? It's where you go to Jbang, naturally. Oi-oi-oi-oing, boi-oi-oi-oing.

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With another day successfully eaten and licked clean, we rose the next morning --which was when I began this winding diatribe-- with an eye to the trail advertised beyond the bungalows.

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To diverge perhaps aimlessly yet again: as a child I was decidedly an urban creature, so surrounded by minimalls and ferroconcrete as to have never even climbed a fucking tree. I wasn't terribly interested, either; outdoorsy stuff, as far as I could tell, was all about spending a bunch of money you didn't have on "gear" you didn't seem to need in order to go make yourself really uncomfortable somewhere while you tempted fate to throw unexpected conditions at you, thus rendering the whole escapade moot. Particularly objectionable in all of this was the apparently mandatory inclusion of all manner of bugs.

Eight-year-old-me would be horrified at the prospect of hiking into the jungle, without even any repellent, what the fuck, aren't there like two-foot beetles and shit in there? Honey, most of this stuff hasn't even been classified. But I've learned that it doesn't give the slightest shit about me (or my preconceived notions, or my fears, or my preferences, or whatever else), and I love it, for it, for itself, for how far away it is from that past, geographically and paradigmatically, entire.

Besides, it's mostly plantlers, anyway.

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rio celeste

Okay, and some bugs.

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If whacking a trail into the ever-ready creepers is as difficult as they say, the same they is extraordinarily adept. A wonderful trail, belying deep understanding of the place and what'd be a pleasant way to experience it.

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The hiking hiked, the river rio'd, t'was time to travel back to town, until the next adventure.

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  1. These are the guys famous for --other than looking like something scribbled on the margins of Pepperland (yes, the Sgt.'s)-- emitting a loud whoop and then dipping down and around the branch their claws stay gripped to. If anything's earned an ostentatious name, this species'd be it. []
  2. I'm not sure La Fortuna, or anywhere else in this minipok lillicountry, has ever been full in this sense before, hence no need for or even concept of "no/vacancy" signage. []
  3. Laugh, but if you've not done a "Let's see what we find" in Central America you'd be surprised how many "businesses" seem to have imagined all custom either coming in by foot or at the very least approximating the speed of such. I can't even recall how many places were insta-vetoed on the strength of being effectively gone once noticed. []
  4. To the tune of $15 or so. []
  5. That's: steak sandwiches, turkish eggplant salad, some fruited sparklvasser thing or other, and, of course, jars upon jars of cold coffee. The various milks and chocolate truffles were in the door and so not depicted. []

Have you any dreams you'd like to sell?

Monday, January 24th, 2022

The flash-fire hypnopompia of the morning brings me out of the dark night's depths and towards the surface of my own thoughts. The dream's a vivid realist exercise in which the fridge's truthfulness to form, the way the silverware's tucked into little trays beside it just as it'll be upon waking, convinces me that all within is real. Master walks into the kitchen without tripping so much as a mote of conflict; of course he's alive, and might as well walk into the kitchen. It's not even relief, but rather something like a wave of correctness washes over me as he stands before the open fridge, his weight shifted on one straight and beautiful leg while the other bends into the beginning of a question: why are there two stacks of eggs? And are the oldest on top, as they ought to be (or, silently --still accurate as any scene that never existed in a life I nevertheless did lead-- did I need to bring the fucking whip)?

But then it's over, or more specifically, I guess, replaced. I'm standing in the dingy parking lot of Satan's apartment building, a squat stucco affair so seventies Los Angeles the sadly fronded inner court and plausibly deniable dark brown shag carpeting are palpable from outside. The Devil himself is standing on the second-storey balcony, saying something I neither hear nor try to as he leans against the metal railing's fresh coat of beige paint. He's short, and fat, a humpty-dumpty figure balding underneath a greasy combover. His striped pyjama shorts and worn-out wifebeater are stained with old sweat and newer calousness, and he punctuates his address from above with occasional sucks on his moist and fraying stub of a cigar. Whatever he's saying, it's got neither point nor personality.

* * *

"Do you actually feel anything when you dream that he's alive?"
"Yeah, absolutely, there's an overwhelming sense of relief, and calm, when I say 'But we thought you were dead!' and he tells me it was just some elaborate trick. And I tell him about how awful it was, and all the things we did to try and get through it, and he laughs, or puts his arm around me, and it's all better...."
"I'd bet it's pretty tempting to talk yourself into going back to sleep when you wake up then, if there's a chance of that."
"It really is."

* * *

The mornings are crushing, the box in my chest clamped shut against its pressure, shifting dangerously this way and that on its hinges some days, stolid and unmoving others. The light, not so much pouring in as flowing forth to illuminate the whole valley before me feels wrong. The light's impossible, light from a sun without reason to shine, mechanical, soulless. But the morning grows easier despite its assault, for being somehow close to him. For reminding me of the cheer in his voice and the spring in his step at the start of each day, whether early or late; that short trek to the corner where I'd catch his face and its wide and open smile, the sound of his fingers roaring over the keyboard, the knowledge that something new was being brought to print and soon I'd get to read it, a piece of his mind.

The way his toes curled and the clean, mild taste of his cock, the old cut in his ear and his gold-flecked iris, the wild leglift-curl he'd spin in the living room and the laugh --truly, most deeply, that laugh, loud and happy enough to fill the valley itself, come tumbling back to me in the morning, even as I crumble under the unbearable ache of their distance.

* * *

I get a sports massage and break down halfway through when the soulful Venezolana working on my shoulders says "your body is very strong, but your heart -- it's so tired". She doesn't know me and I don't really show her who I am, so after hearing the history without meaning or context, what's there left for her to impart but quasi-religious comfort to try to help me through the breathing: "You have to talk to your soul, 'I am love, I am health, I am courage, thank you god', there is a reason you are here, and you don't have to know it, but ask to see."

As much as I feel her reaching to me I feel doubly alienated, separate, severed and cut off from everyone else forever. Back home I press my knees against the cold tile floor and change the canto: I am yours, completely. I will always be yours, no matter what. I am open to the pain. I am open to what I don't understand. I don't know if it's a prayer; what bothers me more is the notion it could be something like a command, but I say it anyway: Show me.

The Road that Winds and the Tie that Binds

Sunday, December 5th, 2021

Life drawls out in lengths of time, knotting over what's remarkable for being different, and what's equally remarkable for being the same. For all the careful skill and military precision in trip-planning we'd garnered over the years, on multiple continents and in many more languages, on foot, in cars, planes, trains, taxis --hell, there was even a llama involved, once--, the grandest trip, the one that really mattered, is terribly confused. Suddenly the very notion of the trip of life has lost its sense, and any concept of such a thing from outside these walls where our lives sped along at breakneck pace, always flirting with the cliffs, well...it's so trite and empty and outright alien as to throw into question whether there's really any common thread of meaning at all.

Not that it's particularly surprising; I'd fall back on the routines of the pointless and witless just as readily as I'd do anything but laugh out of hand at the various queries of aren't I "going back" to the US, or "to school", or "starting a commemorative EFT". Which is to say, not bloody likely. If there's a way forward, it'll be mine; it'll be ours, and I'll somehow have to make sense of what "way" means, now. Perhaps it's just another thing equally remarkable for being the same.

But here's a different thing: Burt Plantcaster has sprouted a flower stalk! Actually, between when this was taken and the time of this writing, which indeed spans a couple of weeks of malaise, he's grown a second, so: two! Two flower stalks! And I discovered just the other day that it's managed to catch a few weirdo species of hymenoptera on its own, fully digested &c, nothin' left but orderly exoskeleton. I've seen bigger carnivorous plants, but I've never seen one quite so happy.

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Same, and yet not: a certain celebratory holiday recently passed, and while the recipe for MP's favorite banana black forest cake remains the same, it was never quite so threatened from oversalting by tears. Somewhat threatened, yesofcourse, for how many times before the fineness of the right components and technique was finally found did girls stir, whip, and temper, tremulant, hoping against hope to get it right, to make something that would be consumed and loved and garner a little accolade? And what horrors might've come, were the sponge found too wet, were the mousse overdense, the ganache too far on the soft side? The unbearable disappointment! But this cake was a testament to the triumph of trial and error, perhaps even to the warm assurances of time: it was perfect.

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A trip within the trip: to the fabulous land of the bongalows. We took the glass one; why'd you choose anything else is beyond me.

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A lane leading from the bongalows to the shady goose glen, where fowl and toucans happily co-exist, tilapia swim underfoot, and there's a sloth doing nothing at all in a treetop somewhere nearby. Seriously, don't intimate that you're interested in sloths, lest you be whisked away in a golf-cart post-haste to be shown the favorite idling spots of some questionably discernable mammalians. All the ends of a sloth-seeing detour are the same: "Oh. Hrm. I guess...it's not moving."

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Wild guanabana. Which is not at all like a guava-ed banana. Or an iguana with a bandana. The guanabana's what you've got when you put the lime in the coconut mango in the bongalow. Do try and keep up.

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Speaking of fruit, don't toucans kinda look like they'd naturally grow on trees? And if they did, d'you think they'd be poisonous?

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The Tenorian lowlands, framed by a fence. The roads that wind around the volcano are particularly unkempt, more suitable for goats than cars, but otherwise the place is a cool bath for the soul, a semi-permanent thunderstorm just barely notyetbreaking over the endless fields of grass, where merled horses bow their heads and the odd crow hops on, tuft to tuft.

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Back in more populated places, crazy continues as a going concern even if its manifestations are ever-unfolding. See that sharp left about fifty meters ahead? He took it. I didn't have time to stop and count how many shits and giggles fell off.

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Pues, eventualmente volviamos en Valle Central, nos encontramos un mensaje especial para las que entienden la idioma Romana: cine cunoaste stie, la papiola sunt curvele cele mai gustoase.

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Which way is up, and which one's down, unanswerable even if what's right and not is just as accessible as always. Piece by piece I try to understand a plan, some days getting somewhere, others unable to do anything but stand still. That anything, through its continuity or its chaos, can be remarkable still, makes me think that steps still ought to be put down too, one in front of the other, attuned to what I've learned under the hand of the master. But the thought's half-hearted. Half of what's left, still beating despite itself, an absolutely aching heart.

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The Tragic Flaw

Tuesday, November 16th, 2021

I won't repackage the truth by suggesting my master is a divisive figure; people are what they are, either curious or closed for the business of the mind. They are interested in truth or swaddled in confirmation bias. They have read, or they have not; they want to read, or they want to watch television. People are smart, or not, and they have a chance at becoming smarter, or they don't --this divide is made long before and deeply beneath their awareness of MP, who sheds light on these great rifts between people, with the perhaps obvious result that the side which comes out looking less appealing is ever invested in the attempt to make the difference look 1) cosmetic and 2) wholly caused by MP himself.

In the face of a man as evidently fluent and talented as MP, such attempts must grasp so fitfully at straws as to make them ridiculous rather than merely unfounded. Indeed the claims and smears and desperate ploys for consensus ran quite the gamut, from uninspired spins through the Rolodex of Shameful Epithets (racist! misogynist! gypsy! MEAN PERSON!) to all manner of fantasies that he was really multiple people, or even someone else entirely. None were particularly interesting, and certainly not important, past their fleeting entertainment value1, but I recall them now for the sake of a common thread I often tried to pluck and bring to master, for his microscope: the tragic flaw.

With Achilles at the center and spanning out in most, if not all, stories, the hero must have some attribute that makes him vulnerable, no matter what his powers and blessings might be. In fact, it seems as if the greater a man is, the more simple and accessible must be his tragic flaw, the better to let far lesser men hope for overcoming him. A Bovary in his simpish surmountability succumbs to the blind trust of puppy love, but a peerless warrior of Achilles' caliber must have a literal inch or two that offers his demise.

It's a search, of course, for balance, more practically the attempt to find a cause for fighting, rather than following, the hero. A reason not to submit in the face of what would otherwise subjugate the lesser party. This bare truth is obfuscated by the lesser's own inability to honestly self-reflect, and further muddied in the fashionable if hollow pretendings to some universal equality that would deny the possibility of greater or lesser at all. But universal equality is given the lie in the universal search for that one great flaw to explain away the great man's greatness.

I knew it then as I know it now: MP had no tragic flaw. No avarice, no vanity, no heel; his greatness, resplendent, was of the sort that needs no crutch to keep it counterbalanced, which is why each day his wealth, tangible or no, his breadth, writing or discovering, his brilliance, technical or artistic, grew. "Each day starts at zero," he told me once. And each day he built more.

Even the day, this summer past, when I woke him before dawn and was greeted with his warm embrace, when I drove him through the fields and valleys that he loved towards the ocean, when he told me "See you soon," and slipped into the sea, when he was caught by the current and I fought into it to grasp his hand: those seconds before his unconsciousness, in the utter chaos of doom, he looked at me with serious eyes, free of fear, and showed me how to die a hero's death. It was indeed the very heart of tragedy. But the flaw belongs to me, and to that ocean, and to the world.

  1. For which reason I suppose I should give an honorable mention to my personal favorite, that being the hysterical suggestion that MP only had one suit! []

A Splinter of it all at Arkakao

Sunday, September 19th, 2021

So many mornings my natural instinct to rise once I'm awake is simply gone. I don't want to remember what's happened, much less accept reality as it now stands. At least, in sleep, I'm either confused enough to dream him into being, or flatly, blissfully out, unaware. In one such brief pause of unconsciousness this morning came the memory, unbidden and seemingly related to nothing at all, of an odd woman we'd met --or, rather, been forcibly met by-- at a coffee shop in Buenos Aires.

I suppose it's not entirely fair to call it "a" coffee shop; in truth it was a sort of salon de residence, a place so fondly loved as to become something of an extension of our apartments. We discovered it one day on a long stroll through Recoleta --the walks in Argentina's capital afforded double-digit kilometer journeys by foot on the regular, with enough confangled and poorly-designed twists and turns of street and sidewalk to make every pass a little different. It was near a grassy nothing of a neighborhood park approached by a multitude of streets at crazy angles, and for the first few months after it was found I struggled to get us back there, even with a few editions of hand-drawn maps.

But we pressed through, and made the place a regular haunt. It was a gleaming white palace of coffee and confections, particularly ice cream. Buenos Aires being unrivaled in ice cream throughout the world as far as I know1, Arkakao was the top of its class in the city. This, on quality alone, but what really cemented the shop as a favorite was its respect for its own craft and presentation. I do not exaggerate when I say that the vast majority of such offerings in BsAs are shoved into ten square meters of space, or else serve ice cream and coffee only in cheap plastic cups with sporks and a zillion packets of splenda, or else have literally no reception at all, like a wheeled cart that somehow got stuck on the road and opted to pretend itself a cafe.

Arkakao was comfortable, an important point after hours of treading the often rough pavements of the city. The ceilings were high, the windows were large, and a polished gold samovar dominated the room, from which all good things flowed and around which all goodies were arranged. Arriving there felt akin to reaching an illuminated page in a long book; it was a sensual idea tucked into the string of ideas that tied the man and I together as we walked, and talked, and he told me things I'd never known nor known I hadn't, endless twists of mysteries and histories that taxed my imagination and memory more than the walk could ever tax my feet, even though they sometimes bled.

One such evening, halfway through a cup of turkish fig ice cream and cappucino, as he was teaching me about the nature of nuclear explosions with many a scribbled napkin of mine in tow, a woman walking strangle side-to-side approached us with a wide, conspiratorial smile. We looked up from the discussion and acknowledged...nothing in particular, no change in expression, just an inching ever closer and closer to our table --so we left her to her strangeness and went back to our business.

Except she just kept coming, until eventually she was practically part of the table, a standing woman in varicoloured streams of whatever fake silk, the sort of pashmina or katan or whatever garments make up the bizarre fashion vocabularies of the menopausal. On finally being proffered a "Yes?" from the man, she introduced herself, not that I can say I remember her name, and she announced that she'd just had a grandchild, whose name she didn't give. That was why she was so excited, she said, though I would not have been at all surprised if it turned out she'd simply laced her ice cream with valium and confused an alleycat with some new progeny. Then she stepped back, as if to take us in, and said that she was happy for us, because she could tell, "It's gonna be good."

It had been, and it was, and I can feel naught but profound gratitude for every moment I had by his side, under his hand. I can't imagine anyone on this earth has had it half so good as to love and be loved by someone so singularly great, to be wholly owned by someone willing and capable to rip anything and everything out, or to emplace anything desired. Save time, I could not have asked for more. All memories, microcosms of the splendour of life with him: of which this, amidst the chaos and clamour of Buenos Aires, our favorite ice cream shop, its extravagances, and its fortune-telling extrovert, is but one of the uncountable many.

  1. And while perhaps not exhaustively, I do know. []

The Sand Dollar

Thursday, August 26th, 2021

The temperature dials are still set to twenty-two degrees. I wake, breathe, falter, hold in the chaos as though it were filling some invisible but palpable bladder, always on the verge of bursting. I water the flowers --the new and the old, the ones that knew your appreciation and the ones that, like strangers, do not. I force myself to talk to people. The fact comes out of me like water pouring from my mouth: hello, my name is Hannah, my Master just died. In one way or another, everyone knows who I am talking about. Everyone takes a little step back, and puts some platitude between us, though I don't know what else I'd expect. Nothing. Nothing changes.

Nothing changes, and yet everything has. The temperature dials in the car still sit at their appointed twenty-two degrees, but now and then, as if in mechanical refusal to accept reality, the car won't start. I wake, and breathe, and forge, and falter, but beneath the surface of action there is storm, not calm; more questions than absolution. You, Master, are life. How can a single thing dare to go on living?

Some months ago, a stretch of time measured hilariously past when time has, for anything that matters, stopped, we went to the beach. The same beach, one of many times at that same beach, and after seeming ages of that dance with death in the waves, we went for a walk on solid ground. The tide was out, yielding a glistening path on the shore in which tiny geometric rivulets of water coursed to or from the sea, reflecting all the while the peach and dust rose tones of the approaching dusk. Master bent over and picked up a sand dollar: perfect, pristine white, entirely intact, a holy relic for they who search the surf for natural treasures. He'd found so many, and my fellow slave too; but this one he gave to me, and told me to safeguard it. I'd broken the last such specimen in my fist while unthinkingly catching some tossed trinket with the other, some time past, a little shattered testament of my own motor confusions.

I brought it home safely and we talked of how to maybe make a necklace or some other decoration of it. I placed it on my boudoir bureau, on a little purple velvet cloth passed down from my dead grandfather, next to friendly rocks and knick-knacks, the egret statuette where sit my rings, small oil bottles, a cup holding various brushes. And there it sat, for months, until....

I brushed my hair one morning, and replacing the instrument in its woven cup, let go, not fast enough to catch it falling back out and onto the velvet cloth, its tip directly against the sand dollar. As though it had been shot, as though some sniper had expertly found its very center and triggered true, the holy relic broke into thousands of pieces, shards and dust, chunks and granules, irretrivably other than what it had been. I swore at myself and made a fair fuss. Master saw the misfortune and soothed me, let me not think too much of it, though each new time I saw its pieces or picked up my brush I felt a little loss.

I felt a little loss, and then, not much later, came the largest one, the largest loss possible, greater than myself, and all else, by such orders of magnitude I shudder at the mere contemplation: him. I see my life in the ruined sand dollar: irretrievably other than what it had been, recognizable perhaps in pieces but undeniably broken. At the worst of times, I imagine I see him in the ruin, too; but he is as far from shattered as he ever was. His deeds still sing their strength and glory, far past the bounds of my memory and beyond, into the world that somehow dares to keep on spinning --perhaps a mere homage, perhaps no more than medium to bear the testimony of difference: then, when he deigned to walk it, and now, when he does not.

Droning down

Sunday, August 22nd, 2021

Fear seems a ridiculous concept, and yet I do: fear reality returning to the plastic facsimile it was before we met. I listen to the droning on of the people I've asked to fill my ears with their droning, an attempt to drown out the terrible quiet. The sudden quiet in the absence of your voice, joyous, deliberate. I listen to the droning on and find remarkable how little there is to care about. How little there always was. With you, next to you, under you, everything was interesting --all things, capable of being considered. Discarded quickly, perhaps, or shrugged away, but still a thing under the sun of your gaze, even if for a fleeting moment. I suppose the consideration for all perdures, but the algorithm that's different; the thing itself was examined before, and now, it's the relation to you, or more often, the lack thereof, that's under the lens.

What can I say about someone else's vague story of a house, or the wind, or a mood, some inconsequential scrap, except for what it might've been in your hands? What can I care for anything but where it might have lived in the annals of your life? Nothing means anything without you in it, and so I am so grateful for your presence in everything, everywhere. The exuberance, the willingness of you made all things yours, and so they remain. I realize they, and I, and life itself, cannot return to what they were, and so I need not fear it --but missing the energy you brought to every moment, we are all less vivid. And I long to be washed away.

A few steps.

Friday, August 6th, 2021

Things fall apart, the poet said, before there was what to fall, before the deliverance from sloth and ignorance, homogeneous ruin.

I remember the early days; the miles walked, desperate to keep up with him. His steps, like letters on a rolling printing press, wrote in sidewalk echo the narratives that poured forth from his mouth, his hands, as the world passed beneath his feet. The soft sound of his footfalls stopped now here to smell some roses, now there to point out some crack in the familiar world, a shoddy roof, an accomplished ant trail. Or the toes would turn to me and I would stand before the reprimand; for not knowing my basics, for speaking out of turn; or he'd kiss me with his eyes lit up and open, all space beyond a foot from us receeding into nothing, never, what and wherever.

Across four continents I walked with, for, because of him. His walks made me become myself, because my self was forced into shape in the space between his strides, in the striving to match his pace, the will to follow his lead, in the perception of how beautiful any, every step with him could be. In palaces and through favelas, to tango and manele, noon and midnight, asphalt and jungle, sand and stone, we walked.

I am but one of many, I know, who learned to walk with him. Who learned a deeper love, or, rather, were left with no choice but to learn a deeper love of him through distances in time and space spent covering the world, real and abstract. My odometer gave up long ago, but the memories, I hold still, and know in other hearts and minds who knows how far away fundamentally similar if inescapably distinct memories float on, full of him. There is nothing in the world I should like better than another walk with the man. To walk forever, into the end, together.

Or just once more. Just one more walk.

Three Motes of the Master's Passing

Thursday, July 8th, 2021

I watched a swoop of swallows circle round the mountain tops and jungle outgrowth of the enchanted lands beyond the window. They described a churning vortex in the air, delighting in the current afore a storm, then soared towards nearby skies above the town where so much recent life played out. A funnel of sharp-winged birds, inching gradually west, until at last a final visible few turned some trick and just like that, blinked out of view.

They flew like a turn of phrase. They twirled in fluid zeugmas recalling the joy of structure and diction when blessed by the grace of his hands.

***

Crickets greet the steely blues of falling evening with a filigree of song. Their indistinct orchestra fuzzes out the sound of civilization, groaning, unbearable, where beings play, pretend, or posture towards some semblance of his soul. It cannot be pronounced by them, but here and there, the crickets try, with innocent motivation, sending tiny notes of peace to my ears.

***

"Do you think the geckos will miss us?" he asked that fateful morning, before the sun and all the savage senselessness it had to show us. "What do you mean?" I asked, and he said he thought they noticed when we were gone. I watch them traipse the odd trail along the window panes, cackling questioningly in demonstrative mourn. The newest, perhaps too new to know, patrol ineptly in the crease of ceiling, cocking their tiny heads. Where is the booming sound of his laugh? Where, the benign, the open greeting?

The flowers do not nod, but seem to curl on themselves, abashed at perhaps not being now as beautiful. All that he touched, and saw, or smelled, or bit, I know now measures less, to itself, despite ever having been more than everything else.

Called

Saturday, July 3rd, 2021

Around the turn of this year, Mircea Popescu and I wrote a book together: Dangerous. He described it as the greatest challenge of my life at that point, and he was right; just as he was right that it was my greatest joy. He wrote,

"For let it be known and trumpeted across the lands -- this is the life of the slave, the true life of the true slave. You wake one day and you are called, and it's always squarely outside of the reasonable, the reasonably expected, the what you thought might happen."

It was a rare day indeed, in my fifteen years under his hand, that I didn't meet with some new challenge, some task that took me beyond my comfort or natural inclinations (and how often are these things one and the same!). The disruption --difficult, often enough (but not nearly always, especially with time) sensually unpleasant, unwieldy-- grated sometimes more than others, but always required an essential thing: it made me open myself, somehow, in some way, to some degree, whether symbolically or literally or otherwise1.

On a Halloween's evening one year, we went out to a self-proclaimed costume party populated by some sort of theatre coven, where a selection of the more artfully attired were gathered on a stage. We watched for a few minutes as they went about their awkwardly-organized attempt at a contest, with voting and all, until MP grew sufficiently bored, and simply picked the most interesting of the girls there arrayed and told me to go ask her if she'd like to come out for coffee and cheesecake with us. "...you mean, when they're done?" "No, I mean now." I hesitated --a frequent fault, forever capable of some measure of harm and no measure of good and yet so often at the ready anyway. "Go on, who cares about their derpy show or whatever it is. Ask her." That feeling of opening pinpricked its way down my limbs as I walked directly across their stage in the middle of their presentation to have an apparently private conversation with the girl, who was standing next to her boyfriend, even. It could have been humiliating; that's what the ego wanted to believe just before it was forced to act, anyway. But it wasn't. All it did was make me more capable: of doing, for him, of answering, to myself, of confronting, others.

Soon after moving to Romania, and while I yet could speak hardly more than a few standard phrases, he pointed me to a certain radio station that played nothing but recitations of hymns. "Pick one," he said, "and write it down." "But I don't know what they're saying!" "Just write down the words you hear," he said. I knew only English, then. Lacking the mental gardens of language, I couldn't even really muster a verbal grid on which to fit the sounds that seemed to come in endless flurries of syllabic chaos, a deranged sort of musical scale: "sa la re na fa ma ca guh shtu fuh le me re deu meu zeu". I tried, more than once, to apologize out of it; clearly I wasn't good enough yet for this task, look how ridiculous, surely he wants me to stop now and be ashamed? "The whole thing." It stung like alcohol poured on a fresh cut that expected only a tentative, split-second dab, but then it stopped, and he laughed and he laughed, and as I recall he even telephoned some relations of his and read it to them so as to laugh with them at me, together. And the vulnerability cast me deeper in love, his control of the space within me, his to laugh at even, intoxicating.

I had a dream, once, that my master said: "Go and document all the water". And my panic was two-fold; on the one hand, for the difficulty in finding a way to even frame the project. On the other, the absolute knowledge that in any case, it must be done. Asleep or awake, in a day's work or in those tasks he gave me that took months or years to carry out, the ways that the man called me inexorably made me, make me, who I am.

And so as I rail against whatever medium will let me --the sky, the sea, the floor, the smiles of strangers who don't know, the watered eyes of those close to me who do-- pressing or cleaving or trying to extract from them what, what, what possible way could I have to meet what I'm called to do now, to witness his death, to exist in the world without him, I am compelled to remember that one essential thing: to make myself open. It's neither pin-prick nor sharp-sting, but a feeling more cutting, deeper and sicker and unbearably strong than anything I'd ever imagined before. It's so far outside of what I thought might happen that I find myself truly doubting it every other second, then reliving it the next. But I am here, and I will let it do what it will, to let it shape me or maim me or kill me or whatever besides, because it is what I have been called to do, and there is nothing else.

  1. I suppose, otherwise as in metasyntactically? Heh. []