clinging to the wreckage

I’d cycled to the nearby square to buy wine and a few groceries. It was a stifling hot June day in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and all the young people were out protesting the recent killing of George Floyd by a police officer in Minneapolis. Cars passed through the protest, hooting in appreciation, and probably terrified of having their cars damaged if they acted any other way. When I emerged from the liquor store there was a commotion in the street. I’d been expecting it. Someone had walked through the protestors shouting and screaming at them. Of course, there was retaliation, and everyone was angry… as people so often seem to be. I took a longer route back to my bicycle and cycled towards my apartment. Arriving at the small reservation pond across from my building, I stopped to see the Canadian Geese and their Goslings as they gathered around the area between the pond and the bike path. After a few minutes I made my way back onto the path and started to cross next...

She told me that I need to pray to God. Actually, it was more directly ‘you need pray God’ in her strong Korean accent. I asked her why it was that she felt I needed to pray to God. I couldn’t help but laugh as I asked. ‘To find a good woman.’ I told her that ‘I don’t want a good one, I want a bad one.’ It was a conversation held in my kitchen. She was already wearing her coat and was about to leave when she began to ask me if there was anyone in my life. She had arrived just three hours earlier. When she stepped out of the taxi, I was somewhat shocked by her appearance. She was wearing black lace stockings that came up to the middle of her thighs and a red dress that was barely long enough to cover her underwear, which was open enough at the top to make it abundantly clear that she was not wearing a bra. I’d wondered why the taxi driver had made the effort of walking around the car and opening the door for her, but now it was clear. He stared at me with a look that seemed to say, ...

The second week of April began, and most people had been in quarantine or self-isolation since mid-March at the latest. It seemed that, finally, something of a calm had settled over everyone. Most people were describing feelings of de-motivation or laziness. Personally, I felt that everyone had finally come to accept that we weren’t necessarily all going to die with our lungs bleeding in a red lava from our mouths, and we weren’t going to completely run out of food or alcohol or toilet paper. People had even accepted that, if they hadn’t already, they probably weren’t going to lose their jobs. The last two weeks of March had been frantic, as people scurried and prepared to work from home whilst we in IT tried to support them, prepare our systems for the sudden barrage of remote traffic, engage our teams to remain calm, positive, and hopeful, and manage the panic that trickled down from above. This is because the worst panic seemed to occur amongst those w...

As an early riser, I often find it fortuitous to live in the USA as a European because it means that my friends in other parts of the world are awake when I wake up… so, even if insomnia strikes, I am able to use the time to interact with friends I have not seen for a while. Being on holiday in South Africa means that when I awake, the world is asleep. However, this has a beauty and advantage of its own. It truly means quiet time and peace. The only sound is that of birds singing. Being in South Africa rips me wide open like a leg scraping concrete highway in a motorcycle accident… because I see so much of myself in my parents. I see what I love and what I hate. I feel my dad’s movements and expressions in my own and I see my mother’s face when I look at myself in photographs. Here in the upper business deck of an Emirates Air Bus, having just sat in the onboard bar with a wealthy gentleman from Boston (Peter… creator of TV car shows… and I must look that up later) some...

She had magnetic lips. They simply screamed out to be kissed. I was unable to resist in any way. I’d pick up a take away from a restaurant in the street parallel to hers and then go to her apartment. As soon as I entered, I would be drawn to her like a moth to the flame…and a flame she was. And aflame I was. Such skin, such hair, such eyes, such athleticism, such beauty, such a mind. We’d eat and talk about our days, then we’d start to kiss on the couch and sometimes we’d make it to her bed, sometimes we wouldn’t. I was always concerned if we didn’t, because I felt the people across the street could see us, but she was convinced they couldn’t (I think this was because her vision was not the best and therefore she thought no one could see from such a distance. I always saw some weird guy staring across the street from his messy apartment). Sex with her was fantastic, as was conversation, eating, hiking, sleeping, and everything else. She laughed when I told he...

With nothing other than my longing for you, I set off for New Orleans for the weekend. Feeling very little these days other than a certainty that love is dead, I was hoping to find something to awaken my heart and open my mind to the concept that romance may well be a possibility once more. I was feeling particularly afraid of the flight for some reason and so I arrived at the airport early. To find a bar, I had to walk to the far side of the terminal because the two bars near the gate were both closed for renovations (how can they close both bars at the same time?). I sat at the last seat and ordered a beer. The bar started to fill up and a guy sat next to me and rapid-fire drank three whiskeys. I had time to waste so I slowly sipped two beers. I paid and got onto the plane. Window seat… locked in by two large, tattooed guys. I had to get up and pee twice during the flight and both times I felt bad for troubling them… but getting older earns a certain level ...

In Madrid I met with the Spanish lady, a lady of tremendous power who cannot be named, and she said to me: ‘You are the origin of your pain!!!’ She was absolutely correct. My pain is self-inflicted. One by one I peeled off tales of my failed romances and my doomed and hopeless longings for those I could never be with (and wanted them probably only because of this fact). Mainly the French lady whom some refer to as my muse. It’s true, I suppose, she is my muse and, since I met her, exactly six years ago, on one of my first days in Madrid, I have thought of her every single day. Every night I go to sleep imagining that she is lying beside me and each morning I awake wishing that the first thing I could see is her face. The Spanish lady closed her eyes and sighed and cursed in Spanish as I poured out my emotional verbal diarrhea. I asked her if she has seen the other, the Bulgarian, but she told me that their paths do not cross. Life is wonderful… from 40…...