A touch of blue, under the Stockholm sky

On the terrace of Radisson Collection Strand Hotel, with a view over the astonishing Nybroviken waters, I sit in a folding chair, smoking my usual, Camel, with a fine cup of coffee and Chet Baker playing in the background.

I tried hard not to think about Ela, but that was a mistake. Like she had done for years now, she slipped through the cracks on the walls I had built to keep the world outside.

This time, the situation was different. E., was dead and, unfortunately, there was nothing metaphorical about it.

Two weeks ago, while it had been the most usual day for me, someone had forced his will upon her. I always thought there was something indestructible about her. Her being, hersoul. So much pride into her eyes, like a queen. Like there wasn’t enough force in the world to compress her being, into oblivion.

In an autumn day, much like today, we had parted ways. Looking into the distance from the 9th floor window, in my apartment in Vasoko, I knew that, she smoking my cigarettes was bad news. She detested smoking.

“We’re out of time”, she said, coughing, under a cloud of smoke.

I stayed silent, for a while. It wasn’t unexpected. I don’t really know what I had expected. I really adored her. Since we had first met, in a Literature Festival, in May, ’91, I had cherished her existence. The green one piece looked so natural on her, as if she was born into it. She had a special eye for Kafka. In my eyes, there are only a very limited number of ways a girl can get hotter than that.

I loved her. More than myself. I would have died for her, in a heartbeat. Yet, I didn’t know what would happen to us. They say that a kiss is a promise written on the lips. At that moment, I knew, that we had made promises we weren’t able to keep. We had screamed “forever wild” many times, walking under the moon light, but only then I understood the meaning. She used to call me “Mr. Moon”. God, I loved our night
walks. I lived for them.

When I kissed her, I forgot. The past, the future. I only felt the moment, and it was a present. A magical one. She was so lovely; I would have sworn that she was materialized from a fairy tale. The traces of her lipstick on the cigarettes laying on that ashtray, signaled that our fairy tale had gone bad.

She had left soon afterwards, taking with her what was left of the cigarette pack. I had spent all day looking at the ashes and the faded lipstick on the cigarette’s filters. I only saw her once more, a month after she had left. She came to take her things and we barely met on her way out. In a surreal scene, she opened my hand, put her copy of my key and gave me hug. None of us talked. There was a special kind of coldness in her eyes.

That look would come back and haunt me many times. It meant that from then, we were strangers.

Some months after that scene, I had packed the suitcases, to never go back.

After flirting with Paris, Berlin and Tokyo, I settled down for Northern California, the place that accepted me as her son.

The only things of Ela I had, was the memory of the time we loved and a picture. Even that was taken by accident. She was wearing a shining dress, looking stunning. Her shining eyes, in the sparking dress, what a piece of heaven. How was it possible to be near her and still have that lifeless look I had in my eyes, I wondered. She looks gorgeous, but the smile on that picture looks a little forced. Looking at it, I wait for answers. I learned from a mutual friend, Regina, that E., had also left the country to pursue post grad studies in psychology. The last time I heard about her, she had scored a great job at Memorial Sloan Kettering in Manhattan.

Looking deep into the Stockholm skyline, I tried to imagine the trajectory of her life. How could things have gone so wrong? How would she end up with an abusive boyfriend, that also was the son of a senator?

The news of her death had become a hot topic, for weeks now. Probably, extra hot, because the name of a senator was involved. E., had open a case at the local police station against the guy, but there was a problem with her story. She had marks of hits on her body, but that was not the entire story. She also had, what appeared to be, cigarette’s burns all over her body. Yet, she insisted that they didn’t have anything to do with the case. That made the entire story, doubtful.

Was I wrong, for never trying to find out the woman she had become? How did she live?

Was she lost in life? It seems like she never found a way out of my mind.

Thinking of her, I fell asleep. I dreamed of her.

“These are the marks of your cigarettes”, sitting in front of me, in the floor, without looking up, she was pointing at the marks on her stomach. There was so much pain in her shaky voice.

“…but why?”, I said.

“You know why”.

I looked in one corner of the room. A guy was there.

“I didn’t do it”, he said, “you did.”

The room phone ring woke me up. I counted nine rings, before it came to a halt. I turned on the television. They had American TV on there. An interview of Anthony Hopkins with Craig Ferguson was on CBS.

I was making fresh coffee, when the phone rang again, this time even more persistently.

Finally, I answered.
To my huge surprise, it was Regina.

“How did you find me?”, I couldn’t hide my delight. Hearing her voice, warmed my heart so much.

“I’m a Libra, baby”, she said with a solemn laugh, “what did you think, that you can enter my city, without me feeling it?”

“Come on, even you are not that good”

“Well, Dahlia telling me was also a little help”

As always, my big sister couldn’t keep her mouth shut. I was glad, for once.

“Well, you are not a real Libra”, I said trying to imagine if she still has that straight, long black hair, reaching down her back.

“What do you mean?”, she questioned me, her hand probably caressing her chin, lightly.

“The calculation done is wrong. There should be an extra astrological sign, which means that everyone’s sign should be pushed to about one month. Not to mention that you are practically saying that you believe that the position of arbitrary selected constellations somehow affects your fate and personality”.

“Aren’t you a funny one?”, she said, with a gorgeous, big smile on her lips. It was one of these smiles some people have, that felt like it’s pushing quanta of pure energy through space, “Don’t you ever feel like there is a pattern of behavior in people, say, that are born under the same sign?”.

“I used to have this thing about months, not all of them, just May, October and November. I was always able to tell if someone was born in November, in fact I freaked out one of teachers ones, when I asked her if she was a November soul”, the memory made me chuckle.

“Ah, yeah, I remember now, you used to talk about October and November souls. Come to think about it, being born in October, your description always made me feel special. But say, what is the difference between an October and November soul?”

“The frequency”, I took a slow, long sip of coffee, before continuing, “Both operate at a very high frequency, very different from other people. That makes them able to catch a special interval of feelings, their souls are more sensitive and thus, able to connect at an intuitive level thing that otherwise look fully disconnected. Yet, the difference is in the intensity. A November soul burns heavy, it is very intense, it might
escalate to pure craziness, while the October soul has a lighter touch. If they were an abstract painting, the November soul would be full of intense nuances of red, while the October souls would have some dreamy touches of blue.

“Which one is better?”

“There is no better or worse, there isn’t a moral code on the type of souls. It is, what is it, so to say. Like when you look at the sky. The is nothing wrongly arranged there, everything is as it is supposed to be”.

We didn’t talk for a while after that. We both were lost in thought.

“You know? I used to write you every October, but then, one October, my email wasn’t coming through. I understood that you probably deleted that account”, I broke the silence first.

“Wow, really? You are an idiot”, she was very blunt, this time. “Couldn’t you just create a Facebook, for God’s sake! Your emails were so deep, a refreshing change. I must have missed so much”.

She seemed to really regret not being able t read what I had written. The thought of it warmed my heart. “Someone actually cared”, I thought to myself.

“What did you write about, in the last one?”

“Well, you know, how I get. My mind switches to a lot of things. I once talked a little
bit about Bruce Lee!”,

“About Bruce Lee?”, her eyes lit up, in surprise.

|Yeah, about his first date with his wife, in Seattle’s Space Needle, on the top floor.”

“Wow, I want to see that”, she said, then took a deep breath. “well are you coming
down or are you going to let me wait forever?”

“What, you actually are here?”, I loved this girl.

“Of course, I had to convince the receptionist to let me try the phone myself. She had already given up on you”, she was a pure delight. “Come on, already. How about grabbing a drink at Sergels Torg and catching up?”.

“Okay”, I said, hanging up. She truly was an October soul.

In my heart, I carry the pain of a million goodbyes. The ones I never said, are the ones that hurt the most. I looked, once more at the Stockholm sky.

What a gorgeous touch of blue./*54745756836*/