Severin became a clinical psychologist. His faculty shows him gray, Tone in tone with a gray ready-to-wear coat. When I was sixteen and Severin twenty, we have agreed, that we are on the long road between Oberdiessbach and Stalden, through the Stalden Valley, run towards each other and meet us in the middle. There, in the middle of the street, our relationship started. For me it was the first. Severin was stiff, huge and wore round glasses. when we kissed, one of us always pulled out the Stimorol unsugared flavor cinnamon. This brand was new out, her taste so intense, that I can say without hesitation:
Everything tasted of that slightly ethereal cinnamon; the air, the snow, the skin, the sleep ….
After six months with Severin, I never chewed this much too strongly flavored chewing gum again. The chewing gum came onto the market with Severin and I and died again, when we separated from Severin in the spring before I graduated from school. my decision, to part with Severin, happened, when he cried next to a farmhouse near Stalden over a cat that had been run over. The death of the cat didn't affect me, I let Severin cry and rode away on my bike.
Severin often cried. He was arrested several times in the recruit school and spent a weekend cleaning his shoes there, mostly, because he had campaigned for the bad treatment of a fellow comrade. In his letters, which Severin sent me from the recruit school, he cried constantly.
When I said Severin, that I didn't want to go with him anymore, he couldn't understand it. He cried and followed me all the way home, but I was faster and outdid him. I left him crying.
Severin was the first boy, who was seriously interested in me, he was sensitive and reflective, he listened to me and took me to the cinema. He was already in high school.
When I met him on the train a few years ago, a prematurely aged man in a bourgeois' attire, I wanted to tell him, that now I have to cry at the sight of dead cats too. But I noticed, that he wasn't willing to talk about our past.
While I enumerated the various physical and mental illnesses in an entertaining tone, with which I was diagnosed, he didn't look at me, he wasn't there at all.
That is what life has from the questioning, questioning, huge, mischievous, sometimes snappy, made boys built near the water: an extinguished one.