For quite a while, I am overwhelmed. For some reason, I almost immediately find an image in my head that doesn't allow me to understand, but at least describe the situation, and that I now cling to, to have at least a modicum of abstraction going on. That image is that I have been given a severe whack with a frying pan. I can almost remember the corresponding sharp and transient impact sound and its metallic reverberation, and my mind, much like a trapped ulnar nerve, is now enslaved by the trajectory that is dictated by the early part of a damped oscillation.
As often with such things, there is a lot of irony in how it all comes about. Josh and Bede sleep at our empty flatshare after elegant Dan has had too much whisky and weed at Jonas' farewell garden party and is now, after emptying his stomach into André's toilet for a good while, occupying Jonas' couch instead of taking the car back to Edinburgh together with David. In the morning, Bede leaves early for a Fringe show, and so after waking up relatively late, Josh and I sit at our kitchen table, together with Jonas, having some caffè and pains au chocolat before we plan to head off to the sauna. We talk about Dan, I bring up how elegant the man had appeared to me at first, with his physique, his suit, his demeanour, and his watch. Josh mentions how he lost his ex-girlfriend from Italy to Dan, something Josh had emotionally overcome, but something that had happened between them. In my caffeinated mood, I must get my mother's Eric Clapton - Story CD from my room, and we must listen to "Further on up the Road". Soon after, we are sweating together in the Arlington Baths. I am still quite bubbly and chatty and talk a lot, with pretty lateral associations, kind of in that way that I do not permit Jonas to talk in without me hating him for it. Josh is just someone who knows how to make people talk about things that are important to them, someone I want to entrust with my whole life, someone who won't judge, someone who will understand. Josh mentions how something slaps, and I mention how someone had recently chastised my usage of the verb "slap" in that context as a ridiculous example of internet slang that they considered to be of particularly bad style. Josh does not seem as if this would change his vocabulary, but picks up on the thought by asking for more details about the hater, and I continue to mention that they were from Yorkshire, and that I recently dumped them, and hasten to add that I was not proud of it. Whether it was a Gestalt thing or a particular problem, Josh asks, and I chuckle to my German psychologist self and say yeah, it was a Gestalt thing, but something that was very far from being that person's fault, and that I felt sorry about it. Someone else entered the chat I say, and the Yorkshire person had been found on the apps, and now I drop the next brick, finding someone on the apps always left that slight sense of dissatisfaction for me in relationships. Jonas is sitting in the sauna, too, and I try to save the situation by mentioning that I rationally know that this is a stupid way to think about relationships, that I know entirely wholesome relationships coming from the apps, but that I just can't shake off this feeling about them. Another stranger in the sauna, who had, much to our disliking, forced us to listen to the BBC 3 in the gym earlier, chimes in and says that he feels the same as me.
Now we are at roots and fruits for a traditional Saturday brunch after the Arlington. André and Ina are there, too, and report that Dan must have left the house earlier. And Lavinia is there, arriving a bit later. Instead of following my continuously forwarded updates and invitations to tag along for our steamy morning routine, she has brought food to her colleague Dom, who is working his life away in the School of Infection and Immunology. The discussion reaches Josh's private life. He is going to move in with his partner, who is buying a flat, and working, and working out, and running marathons, and the like. I think Lavinia asks how they met, or was it some other similar question. They met on the apps. How her own relationship situation was looking like, Josh asks back. And it is this moment which completely deranges my life for a few days. Lavinia seems surprised by the question, and says, I think she says ambiguous, the situation is ambiguous, or complicated, or something like that, and Josh says oh I see it is ambiguous, ahah, and Lavinia nods, and blushes and smiles, and during all of this I try not to look at her and not react to it, but also a frying pan is being slammed in my face, and I have the worst pokerface of them all, so probably I am not very successful, and Jonas quickly de-escalates the situation and asks for Josh's leftover tomatoes that he didn't finish, and instructs me to have some as well, and somehow I manage to grind out that I am full, and I avoid eye contact with Lavi, who gives me an insecure smile, and soon after we pay and leave, and all I want is to either disappear or be just with Lavi to talk, but we are trapped in this script of a social situation of friends who are going to hang out in the garden on a sunny afternoon, and I wait in front of the café, and lean against a lamp post, while others are getting groceries from roots and fruits, and I try to smile into the sun and look relaxed, and Ina, who has probably heard about what is going on between Lavi and me comes out and says I look cool, in an encouraging and nurturing way, and we head to Huntly Gardens to sit in the sun, and Lavi takes a photo of Jonas and me from behind.
We end up lying in the grass, Lavi has brought a blanket and asks me if I want to lie on it, too, which I do, I lie on the blanket and put on my sunglasses and close my eyes and give in to a strong dizziness. Everyone is reading, but I have no book, instead I entertain myself with the rotating universe in my head. Lavi lies next to me and starts reading a book, what is the book someone asks, and Lavi responds it is a book given to her by Ele, and it is about love and narcissism, and my world rotates faster and wilder, and it might be now that I for the first time think how interesting it all is, I start observing my feelings rather than just feeling them, and I wonder, who is the narcissist, am I a narcissist, IATA, is she a narcissist, what is going on, why did she say that, mmh what you say, mmh what did she say, this smells like the beginning of the end I think, the strength of my reaction seems weird to me from a rational perspective, but it also must mean that the whole thing between Lavi and me is important to me, that is an informative thing to see so clearly, and I am lying there, and Lavi cuddles up to me, and I am getting even more confused, and at the same time I enjoy it and smile, and am overwhelmed, I have to pee, but I don't want to move, so it takes me a good while to pick up on some movement amongst us sunbathers and ask for the keys to go to Jonas' apartment to pee, and as I step back up the stairs from Jonas' apartment, Lavi is waving through the house's windowed front door, we stand in the corridor, and she says she doesn't need a toilet, she just wanted to talk to me, and she asks if I am ok, and that she realised that I am not ok, and I am close to crying when I say that I have no pokerface, Lavi says that's good, I say that she can say whatever she feels about her situation and that my reaction to that is stupid, and she says she didn't know what she was supposed to say, it was just Josh and not Yuxi and Jonas, she barely knows Josh, and I say that I think that the situation is interesting, that I like her, that I like spending time with her, and that my reaction tells me how important the thing between us is to me, and she says she needs time, and there is some heads getting closer to one another, and probably it is me trying to be tender with her, and her just trying to react in a way that is not too rejecting, and we go to the garden, and she says she actually would need a toilet, but she now prefers to not go, and we are again lying on the blanket, and I am only slightly less confused, this was only a tiny fraction of the amount of exchange I needed, and I close my eyes and think about the short conversation, and I get extremely dizzy right away, she needs time, this really feels like the beginning of the end, how do you bounce back from this, and I maybe think about how I would have wanted to talk about it all earlier, how I had wanted to tell her how writing to her on Thursday about ho bisogno di un abraccio felt like a risky move because I was again so needy to see her and the only one trying to initiate contact over the last few days if not two weeks, and she seemed to need so much time for herself and her work, so I felt I was probably ruining it by not just doing my own thing instead, but how at the same time I so much wanted to see her and talk to her, and all of it felt so weird because at the same time it felt so intimate and close and beautiful on Friday night at Rali's and at Lavi's afterwards and in the morning, but then so distant again at Jonas' garden party, and how I started to worry about how I mentioned to people that her mum was running a design gallery in Milan, and how she maybe didn't like me to publicise these private family details, so was that why she didn't want to see me again in the night after Jonas' party, and so on and so forth, I am ruminating and rotating, and breathing and thinking, and wondering about misunderstandings, and not being given anywhere close to enough time with Lavi to just address all of these things rather than freak out over them.
I want a book as well, and getting a book from home could be so quick, couldn't it, a subway home and back, could be just 20 minutes couldn't it, so I go to get Infinite Jest, and I stumble into Stratos, and we chat about his finished MSc dissertation, and his flat situation, and I awkwardly mention how he might move in with us once Galen leaves, and he mentions how I am his supervisor and how this would be somewhat weird, and I don't mind, I admit that this could be weird indeed, and say I got to run now but invite him to come by Jonas' garden later, and he wants to go and eat something now, and I take the subway home and lie on my bed and just want to cry, and can't get up for probably 15 minutes, then I reply to Donata who is inviting me to an aperitivo at hers, I say I'll make it by 7:45, and I go back to Jonas' garden, and I read a few pages, and then Stratos comes, and we chat about this and that, and Lavi is gone, and everybody is leaving, and Jonas goes into his apartment, but Lavi's stuff is still there, and I pack it up and Lavi calls, she is just back at the garden door next to her apartment, so I go there with Stratos and her stuff, we hand it over, and she is there with Dom who has cut his finger and fixed it with a bandaid, and I ask the two Italians what one does for an invitation for an aperitivo as I am not sure what the best thing to bring is, and Lavi says that I should go there, that it sounds great, and I feel angry for her telling me that because I did not ask if I should go, I wanted to know what I should bring, I wanted this to be a way of telling her that I am busy and unavailable tonight, ideally as a response to her asking me if we should do something that evening, but it doesn't turn out that way, and now I ask if wine and some crisps sound good, and Dom and Lavi agree that this would be a good idea, and Stratos and me head back to our bikes and cycle away, me to Waitrose and then home, where I find the Eric Clapton CD still on the kitchen table with its back side facing up, together with the coffee cups, so I take a snapshot of the kitchen table with an f-stop of 2.0 and move the focus on track 7 on the track listing, and I post it on instagram and feel good about it, nobody knows what it means to me in that moment and nobody likes the picture.
I move on to Donata's, where I feel completely numb, but I am happy to see Donata, and I drink a lot, and we mostly talk about superficial stuff, succulent Chinese meals, Italy, Rita who wasn't available, how the Normans invaded Great Britain, the Lord of The Rings, JRR Tolkien, how Donata's workplace in Italy treated her like crap, there is some friend of Donata's and Elias with her dog Patchy who wants to just fetch forever, we go inside in their living room and I am really drunk and feel somewhat fuzzy with Donata and Aonghas, and finally we listen to Eric Clapton's "Further On Up The Road" on Aonghas' glorious sound system.
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