Only the Lonely~ part 1/2

 Written in Italy, nearly five years ago, written in Saigon over 5 weeks ago and written today, 5 minutes ago

                        Their laughter bangs up the stairs. I want to go down and get a glass of water but I don't want to talk much less be cajoled into some kind of sociability. No, I just want the placating hum of the ceiling fan and the shouts of phantom children blocks distant. I don't want food, wine, curry, conversation, laughter. I don't want eyes on me, I don't want my lazy, and indifferent tongue to be prodded into obligatory remarks and tired answers to tired questions.

The day seems unbearably long. I wonder what I'm doing and if it is possible to lie down and sleep for a month. I've been alone in Saigon for 33 days, if it is indeed possible to be alone in a city of so many millions competing for breath. Today I wear my loneliness like a heavy, stinking blanket. It dulls the clamor of sounds and numbs thought to a dazed stagger. The city, which I have awed at, praised, challenged, presumed too much about and ultimately have surrendered to seems too large and uncaring. My mind keenly trips on the Vietnamese that stutters down the sidewalk. I am called after and courted for my money, money which I don't have.

When you're this lonely you find yourself walking out of restaurants and shops just staring down the road, letting your eyes unfocused, not knowing what do to with yourself. Wondering how to kill the time, murder the moments. In this manner I stare from my balcony, past the prickles of antennae, past the rusting stovepipes and jagged rooflines into purple, billowing thunderheads.

~

            The stretch of track servicing north central Italy is an absolutely no-nonsense, ruler straight feat of tediousness and abject boredom.  The rail line is hemmed closely by unlovely gravel and barren scrubby grasslands. These blasted plains do the shimmy shimmy shake shake in the heat, warbling yellows and browns and stark clean white.  Except for the snoozing, gape mouthed attendant and the captain I can't see anybody else on the train. Even so, we dutifully stop at each sun-bleached sign at each concrete island, wait for nobody to get off, wait for nobody to board then slowly gather steam again in the dancing mirages that always lie just up ahead.  We move unnecessarily slow. Mockingly slow.

Another sign up ahead. I stand to ask the attendant (attendant, there's a joke) if this is Montagnana. As I approach his head begins to shake no.

I ran out of water two hours ago. My tongue feels gummy and thick. I realize with my grunts at the train station aside, I have not spoken to a soul today. We are going so slow that I fail to realize we have even stopped again, but this time we've arrived.

The sun is blinding. I jostle to the dim cave of a rest area where posters of happy Italian youth wowing at the size of their ice cream cones. I sing a little hello and the rotating fan shakes its head. The place is empty. I pivot and stick my nose into a curl of black studded fly paper. Fly paper, with that particularly gruesome goo.

The buildings leading to the red bricked antiquated walls of Montagnana hunker low against the sun like hunted animals trying to appear small and dead and tasteless. From every direction imaginable cicadas rattle fill my head as the walls of Montagnana lie ahead and meet the sky                                                                   

~

                                                   Loneliness is part of the package. Be it a twelve hour bus ride, a cargo ship crossing the Aegean, or sitting in an empty room far far away, Loneliness is a faithful old companion to the traveler. Like the backpack and camera, so comes the sighing solitude of the wandering soul. Loneliness is merely the expression of a pattern of being alone. Loneliness is something we all have to deal with. In solidarity with ones self a better more capable person can emerge. Consider the great tradition of going out into the wilderness or the endless desert. Consider the wisdom gleaned, I tell myself. But it gnaws at you; it fills your stomach with marbles and fishhooks.

The distractions of everyday life back home fall away and leave you with a full 24 hours of both catatonic silence and maddening noise to be filled with thoughts of things left unsaid, plans for the future, regrets, loves, fear and a bitter, directionless self reproach. For me loneliness is a part of the therapy of travel. It lets me see me. When it's good and productive with churning thought and inspiration, I call it solitude. When it is a wet blanket smothering taste and smell, easing you into bed to early and keeping you there too late, I call it loneliness. Before I was married loneliness was a fickle, proud thing; it felt stoic and rewarding. Now it is an impasse, a wall to which to throw myself.

            Saigon's polluted bruised peach sky sags with thunderheads. I've gone underground like a river in a drought. Everything on the surface withers and starves, as my stream of consciousness sluggishly finds deeper and deeper routes. My eyes deaden, my face slacks.  Since I awoke at two I have alternately had the urge to sleep or find a corner and have a cry. Instead I walk to the airlines office, in a moment of panic and say that I will do anything to leave, reroute me to Hong Kong, put me in standby, but she shakes her head. I'm sorry Mr. Johnson you're confirmed for August 15th...

  I sit on my bed. It's 3 in the afternoon. I leave Saigon<>in 9 days, I leave Vietnam in 18 days and I leave for good in 72 days.

~

            Whatever Montagnana was three hundred years ago it is nothing now. At the red bricked walls tall, unruly grasses lap.  Grasshoppers flit and click their heels in the breezy green tangle. Jays roost in the seams of the fortifications, hidden now but dervishes come dusk. Men, women and children stare blankly at me through screen doors as I approach the walls, I  smile, try to stand up straight as an emissary of my people on the western shores and offer a wave. No one moves, their hinges creak under the roar of the cicadas as they turn their heads to follow my strides. Charming. The piazza spreads before me, completely bare. A little dog trots across, his paws clicking happily on the stone,  turning to see me, he starts and lets one astonished yelp loose and clicked back the way he came. That's right, trouble just came to town.

 Montagnana was once entirly a walled city, now the contents of the township spill out the far end like a burst levy. The architecture quickly descends into shabbiness after the walled inner sanctum. The guesthouse literally resided in the old guards quarters at the entry point to the city. The front office clamored with my every movement. The red bricked walls are hollow at each end of the wall and had been fitted with wrought iron stairs like a giant fire escape from a production of West Side Story. The nubbin ends of the long deteriorated wooden stairs marked the old routes up. The place has no smell; well if dry is a smell, then it smelled dry. Dead, like a sun baked skull. Slivers of the bleak day light cut from chinks along the wall slicing through dust for five stories.  There was no indication of life, I finally made it and the species was wiped out years ago.

~

 We have not spoken in two days and it hangs over me like a death sentence. I wonder what she has eaten today and realize at 3 in the afternoon that I have not eaten anything myself. I go through the motions, fill my belly, return home, stare at a blank computer screen and wait. The city is silent and blaring. It is empty and full. Dead and alive, rational/insane. What was, is now not, and what wasn't is is is...

My mind is rice porridge with fish heads. The tile is cold beneath my feet. 71 days...

I plop myself in front of a keyboard and on the screen she has reached out to me and three words bring the world into focus. Three words swing the pendulum back, three words set me right. I read them over and over...

I love you