Mid season (from the insatiable)
At twenty-six, im November war’s, I felt suddenly, that I didn't love Doc anymore. We stood at the bus stop in the suburbs and waited for the bus, That should bring us back. Autos, Trucks and buses of all lines whizzed past, flicked water against our arms and legs. The rain ran down Doc and elongated his oval face. The bus pulled up to the sidewalk next to us, and Doc jumped on the step, reaching out to me. I meant to him, that I want to stay here. He was stunned, the automatic door clamped it and I saw, how he held his elbows against it. Why didn't you get in? Doc had gone one station, this ran back again, and now stood there again. I wanted to tell him, what was wrong with me, but I didn't make it.
The next day I drove to Graubünden. I did not know, what I wanted there. Naturally, I was there once with Doc. In the Intercity I bought a packaged ham sandwich and looked out the window. A barren one, unruly area with a lake passed, the Zurich Unterland, maybe. The railway information was in my pocket. In two minutes I had to change to the Rhaetian Railway. It went through narrow ravines in the forest- and along mountain ridges over the curvy Albula Pass to Silvaplana. There I had reserved a room in the Chesa Martis for the next two days.
The valley was wrapped in a misty veil. Snowflakes fell on my cheeks. Shortly before the village I stopped and looked at the trees. They were pines and other trees of southern origin, which curved under the snow masses. The mountains at their tops shone bare and red. They quickly turned blue, then black.
Unable to undress, I lay on the flowered bed linen on the evening of the trip and could not sleep. Around three o'clock I went out on the balcony. It was a bright night, the stars sparkled like crystals. Some haze enveloped the mountains, who seemed even more powerful and closer to me at night. When I took a deep breath, one nostril stuck to me. I estimated the temperature to be minus fifteen degrees.
When I woke up the next morning, I felt shattered. Nevertheless, I made my way. At the Hotel Albana, that was the only one open, ordered me a cup of mint tea. It hardly had any guests. With a bag of dried fruit, I then stood at a bus stop. Icy wind blew over from the Maloja Pass and curled the turquoise lake. The sight of it reminded me of the ear clips richer, old ladies. In Sils everything was dead.
For a while I strolled through the streets as if through a backdrop village. I actually wanted to hike around the lake, but the wind struck me like a sword in the face. After twenty meters I broke in and sat down in the only cheap restaurant near the window. The waitress approached me, bored. We have mid season, she said with an accent. I didn't bring down the piece of Engadine nut cake.
The Nietzschehaus is just a few meters from the post office and bus stop, alone, two-story, with a simple facade, but somehow monstrous and a bit apart from the sophisticated withered hotels and souped-up Graubünden houses. A small path led to its entrance, on which a sign was attached: From 8. November to 25. Our museum is closed in February.
I put my backpack on the stairs. I sat next to it in the snow and watched, how the sun gradually disappeared behind a mountain. It got dark immediately. The church clock in Sils struck three o'clock.
What is love? What is creation? What is longing? What is star? – so the last person asks and blinks.
The earth then became small, and the last person hops on it, of the makes everything small. Its gender is ineradicable like the earth flea.
I remember, how I talked to Doc: “What is love?”, and I threw him a kiss around the museum. “What is creation?” And I pointed my forefinger into my mouth, which should mean so much, how, that it was time to eat. “What is longing?” And I took an ostentatious look at the clock. “What is star?” And I pointed to him, the asterisk. I think, Doc didn't respond strongly to my signs, the showcase with Nietzsche's handwriting occupied him too much.
Apparently I missed my last post bus. I tramp footless through a snow meadow. The sky was veiled. Gradually the terrain rose. After about an hour I got into a forest, stopped and tried to hold back his breath. Through the silence I heard the soft chorale of the snowflakes, how he settles on the pine needles. Suddenly I saw a magpie boiling in the snow right next to my shoe. At first I believed, that there is a frozen earthworm in the bird's beak. Because I wasn't sure, I ducked and saw something rounded in it, hollowed out bone, probably a mouse skull.
It started again, to snow heavily. I was short of breath, but I reached the tree line. Like a hostile one, The shaved bald moon rolled the bluish curve of the mountain towards me. Two hundred meters of altitude were still missing to the top of the pass.
I must have nodded briefly over a post. Two headlights had approached. Blurred I saw a dark hand slam open a car door, the shadowy outline of a small one, hairless head and a strong shoulder. Immediately I was wide awake. The man was wearing a sheep's cowl and looked monstrous to me.
His hands moved in the many curves, as if they had grown together with the steering wheel. I considered, if I should talk to the man about the weather, he got ahead of me: “What does a young woman do, without proper jacket and proper footwear, around midnight on the Julier Pass?"-" You can let me out of there!“I recognized the steeple of Silvaplana with a relief.
I crossed the Postplatz and disappeared into the telephone booth. I dialed friends' numbers for a while, that I knew in my head. But hung up, when she reported a sleepy voice on the other end of the line. I ran my hand under my sweater and felt it, that my skin was bathed in sweat. I slowly trotted past the village church. Through its sound hole I could see the picturesque bell overgrown with moss lichen. I counted twelve beats. Then I impulsively turned and ran back to the phone booth.
My hands were shaking. I made a mistake. Now, at this moment, where I heard Doc's voice, The feeling came over me again, like at the bus stop: I felt helpless and threatened at the same time! "Shall I come to you? Dear! Dearest! What are you doing there?“I thought I had to suffocate from fear. Didn't understand my inner drama: The dearest person in my life threatened me!
I spent the second night at Chesa Martis without sleep. The next day I left early, stepped across the steppe, the snow crunched under my feet. In the front of the lake the bise fluttered through the light reeds. A small, mysterious forest tongue pulled out into the water. Suddenly I had the feeling again, off the ground. As if the sky were pulling my hair in the air. (I had had this feeling several times recently.) So I ran. I wanted to get away from the lake, and took the mule track. By a snake-like one, Labyrinthine pine grove I stumbled up on a rock cap. There was the Segantini tower. At that time, Doc read the history boards for this tower for a long time and checked the ruinous condition of the rock for a while with a knocking fist. Now I heard the silence. Immediately next to my shoulder there was a tangled jungle, almost vertically sloping gorge. A valley unknown to me, stretched south. I slowly raised my eyes and looked at the mountain. Piz Margna war so nah, That I could reach out my hand, to crumple it up in my fist. Minutely, my eyes wandered along its smooth edges towards the mountain tops. Suddenly I swayed and a strong vertigo overcame me. The tower and its vantage point blurred before my eyes.
Shortly after I got to St. Moritz arrived, I choked out the last pathetic bitter traces of my stomach contents. I still had a good hour before the train left. So I went to the Bahnhof restaurant and ordered a liter of cola and a barley soup. But I couldn't eat them, but rather poured it into the hydroponic soil of a potted plant. When I was back on the Rhaetian Railway, I felt the delicately bumpy subsoil of the Landwasser Viaduct below me. For a long time the train pushed its way through a curved tunnel. Medieval frost and the cool sweat of the rock walls penetrated through the window panes. In the lowlands it rains in twine. From a very dark one, poor skies.
I saw isolated chemical companies tower up between the brown, bloated floors. In Chur I got on the double floor. I saw people again, Faces with their typical complacency. It was already dawn. But behind the window I saw boulders like sooty cabbage stones in the water and the gray, choked lake, that I had already marveled at on the way there. The rain shuttled like cords or upright lightning bolts on the hardly used road. The roof of a big top had collapsed like a weeping onion. Zurich main station!
The scoreboard fell in dominoes, as a skateboard jumped boldly through the air. The waistband sank under the boyish hips. The young woman across from me in the compartment had a CD player on her lap. Light sleep lay on her reddish apple face and pressed a little on the dark arch of the lashes. The place of arrival was announced through the loudspeaker in three languages. I sat there for a while. Then I heard someone panting. The young woman had left her CD player on the bench. This time her face was lively and alert. Relieved, she stowed the item in her snake leather handbag. Then she leaned down to me. We are there, in Bern!
I got out and trotted down to Hopfenweg. It was important, that I made myself something to eat, so I put a pan of rice on it. I stood in front of the stove and watched, how the rice boiled and turned black. I thought of Doc: He's the first real partner in my life. We've been friends and I kissed him on a whim. So we became lovers, because doc loves me. I feel, that Doc's love for me is true and unconditional, yes, it will probably last a lifetime. I think, i love doc too, even if I've never been in love with him. I feel so taken care of and completely with him. But not anymore. When we kiss and make love, then I've been feeling a kind of tightness for some time. It seems to me, like Doc is almost eating me up with his love. And now I'm moving away from his body again. Already when I loved him and deeply connected, and, was symbiotic with Doc, I stopped, to desire one's body. This is bad, because now I'm alone again. I finally found people there, who loves and accepts me, but because I am no longer physically attracted to him, I have to leave him again. We can no longer be friends either, because Doc still loves me. So that's how it is, that I have to try, to part with Doc, even if it could take months or years, 'Cause Doc will just keep loving me. He is just there, he stays there! Oh how threatening that feels to me! Suddenly I feel the whole relationship with Doc as an existential threat! I get scared of Doc being around! When Doc tries to allay my fear, like on the phone in Silvaplana, and, just then this fear becomes even stronger! So is it true?? Do I have to run from Doc, the only person, whom I trust and who love me?! Why can I use the, who loves me no longer? I love him too! Just not really with the body! I can no longer give myself to him, not quite! Oh my God, how lost i feel, because I can no longer give myself to him physically! He remains loyal to me, even so, and I shouldn't be afraid! But up in Silvaplana I got paranoid all the more from this threat to his loyalty! I wanted to see, if I can live alone again, without being loved by a man, from Doc. Because it was clear, I can never see him again, him the dearest person …. I thought, when I see the force of nature in the Upper Engadine mountains, then the natural spectacle dissolves, that happens in me, on. But instead, that nature can make me feel safe, I have now, since I was up in Silvaplana, even more fear ….”
The rice pan was charred. And half an hour later I was brought to the crisis intervention center by a friend.
(Soon after, I was told, my problem is a typical problem for borderliners. And I'm a borderliner. I can't really say anything about that to this day, because I have rarely felt real closeness to a person and therefore have far too few examples or relationship experiences. But if, then I always wanted to get into this person, I wanted to be that close to him. But with Doc, I wanted to get out of the physical symbiosis again after a short time, while I never stopped, to be mentally true to him. While I was momentarily attracted to many assy men, my love life was as good as over. Because like Doc couldn't leave me for years, so I couldn't leave him either. But we were no longer lovers either, that could make love to each other! And I still can't understand that to this day: Why I couldn't make love to her, longer than three months, a few years, a life long, who loved me too and only respected me. I thought that was naturally stupid! Whether the ambivalence, I half doubt that I felt something to do with borderline. What if, If you, this ambivalence could only be traced back to a very keen sense and a claim to perfection? It can be very uncomfortable and difficult, to feel differentiated, much like it is difficult u uncomfortable, to be exposed to the contradicting feelings of borderlines…..)
By the way, I was convinced back then, that the vastness and loneliness is not good for me, when I'm tight inside. But distraction and people would be the right thing, when I'm stuck in monumental inner crises. Unfortunately this type of outbreak and distracting was later made impossible for me by the physical illness. And although I will never have such existential fear again as I did in winter 2001 to Doc experienced, I'm suffocating in my tightness today.)
(* Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra)
(Mid season, 2002, from the insatiable, the mid-season is also written in fragments, like something, that happens to me in fragments, without my being able to understand and integrate it. I wrote mid-season, after I 3 Had been at Marbach for months, I wrote down, what had happened externally, while that, what happened inside of me, had to break off somehow, I could only rely on the factor of time and forgetting…..maybe that's why I was only able to write in fragments, retrospectively, because I could no longer get into the drama and the fear of death, deliberately….I got away and described external circumstances and pictures, in Fragments….nothing made a story then, nothing made sense)