Only the Lonely ~2/2

 Not surprisingly, I am sole the guest of Montagnana and have my choice of bunks. The room opens onto the guard watch. The floor dissolved centuries ago and was replaced by the same iron grating so I can see 100feet down to an enclosed circle of undisturbed weeds and cigarette butts. 

The place is a ghost town. Some men shoot pool, a lady hangs laundry, that's about it. The cathedral is cavernous and drab, the alter hunches at the far end asking to be overlooked. I return to the fortress, passing no one. Midway to my tower dwellings I shout

"When your a jet your a jet all the way!" waywaywayway rattles between the bricks and the iron. Somewhere someone coughs. The sun has begun to retire and deepens to red. All of the sky above Montagnana is alive with high flying scrappy clouds alight with the coming dusk. Montagana is all sky, brilliant at the start and finish of the day, bleak and mean in between. The pigeons wake each other, crooning and purring and take wing among the sparrows and jays and tiny herky jerky bats and countless, delicious gnats. The stars shine ever so fine and I smoke cigarette after cigarette feeling somehow tragic and heroic in my castle quarters.

The Montagnana moments are heavy and long. I have a day to pass, 24 hours. I lay down in a lush drainage ditch that says hard rains do come. In the vaulting shade of my castle walls I recline in a bed of fragrant green grass. It cushions and swallows me. Without the glare of the menacing sun the sky is a beautiful perfect blue. If anybody noticed me they ignore me. I pass the day in the ditch, staring up, snuggling in the tangles of ragweed and grass, sleeping, waking. I brush myself off. My stomached asks where the pizzas at and well into another sunset I stand on tingly new legs.

~

She loves me. I move along the street and notice the trifles beauties that unseeing eyes miss. Every hair moves with the breeze. The lock snaps loudly twice as I twist my key. Down to my boxer shorts I crank the AC as thunder peals near and far. Her words, the signs she has left for me, the idea...I love you. She loves me. Dusk is lost in purple clouds. Again thunder rolls. Something brushes my ankles and I jump to see a kitten, rescued from the gutters that afternoon. She had been sleeping under my bed. She waits for me to calm, I though she was a rat, then curls through my legs. She stops as thunder booms closer still. She is all ribs in my hand, tiny. I pet the kitten, moving each finger independently, finding the chinks in her bone where tiny muscles live. She shuts her eyes and I think of my wife. Lightning splits the sky; purple, pink and white.

This beautiful kitten, the kitten and the crashing thunder move my heart in equal measure.

I love you too.

~

The place is a dim clamor. On a pot holed dusty lane on its way out of town the restaurant looks like one of the only places to bring a lady or the whole family. I found this place at dusk as it began to fill and yell and simmer over with bay leaves, mozzarella, garlic and thyme. I'm in an attentive daze, drinking in the coming night that is a purple curtain over Montagnana. Nobody regards me, I sit in the middle of the slurping, laughing, sloshing scene unnoticed, and blissfully so. I sink back into my wicker chair waiting for the waitress lost in the silent melancholy reverie that sweetens each meal of the lonesome traveler. Calling to ports and disappearing into the shadows, getting lost, losing yourself, drifting like an oily tomcat through half lit rooms and back alleys. Existing in a space for a time, letting it be around you and you within it. Leaving no trace save for a few dollars to the mercantile and a few more to the bar man, you're gone.  Brown from a life time of Montagnana afternoons which start I the early in the morning and end abruptly at nightfall she is to my right and a little flustered until she looks down at her charge and sees him to be a foreigner. Tall, dark, brown, green, she moves and smells like a tree in the wind. Whatever banter was chasing her around the restaurant, half off her head with Mrs. Marola's dour pouting puss frowning at a perfectly good bottle of Chianti, all that stopped, she stood and faced me. The smile that broke across her face and never fully retreated yanked me out of my moment , we simply regarded each other. Dark and lithe she clucked some Italian, stopped herself and shook her head no when I chirped a little English. The stars stopped what they were doing, gravity took a moments rest, the boiling penne cooled and the cooks closed their eyes. I love you, I want to say but I'm afraid she might know what that means but spontaneously I want to blurt it out and marry her before she can take my order.

I eat a whole pizza, drink two beers and as the restaurant begins to fold in and clean itself I slowly nurse a third. In the dead grasses and scrubland that surround us crickets chirp, field mice scamper and owl have their fill. The ground has finally stopped giving off heat like a fevered forehead and the air is cool and easy in my throat. The only people left in the restaurant are slowly dissecting the last uneaten morsels of desert with their forks and slowly turning the wine in their glass. Talk is low and slow. I imagine her riding out of town with me, smiling up at me as we leave Montagnana to the cicadas and the sun. I imagine my life in a modest villa with Waitress Girl. I just let my mind wallow in these fantasies. I am filled with an excited hum like a nest of bees. The feeling that a woman's eyes puts in me, an impossible, dreamy, already defeated feeling. Mourning myself, mourning my life without her. I am reluctant to leave. My beer is going warm. I pay, wonder if she has a boyfriend and leave. I want to say something, just something to let some of this feeling out into the world, something for her, something small that can be left here floating in the air mingling with the dust and call of crickets. I smile, she smiles. I walk out and the light of the restaurant is now an island in the dark that surrounds me. I watch her from the gravel lane. I still have not spoken to anybody, not really and my thoughts move more easily in my head without the cumbersome distraction of speech. Do you have a boyfriend because I think I love you? I see her flit in and out of view, carrying plates, pocketing change, looking tired and beautiful. The shadows eat me. My foot jerks forward to stride back in there and... What? I stop, realize there is nothing for me here and grind the gravel with toes in little circles. Eventually I walk away, like I hoped I wouldn't but knew I would. Please can't I be something a little braver than me, even for a moment?

 In the morning I am gone, but tonight stretches on like the rail line I watch carry soft white lights into the darkness from my tower.

~

My Loneliness can be rich with contemplations and rotations of the mind. It can also be a desert to wander, monotonous, barren, maddening. By either account Loneliness is a constituent of travel. You are promised it, you paid and packed for it, but you never know where it may lead you. For it is all yours. A traveler's lonesome existence and all the terrain of the wandering mind is the one truly unique quality of your travels. We all climb the same stairs at Angkor and walk the same ruinous routes in the Roman Forum, but the silent journey of the spirit, born on the wings of freedom is the real unknown country. We move to the place, but where does the place move us to? 

                                                                    The boundless circles of our minds may turn over more acutely when lonely. I grow bored watching it return to the used old rotations like an unimaginative dog marking familiar territory then rolling in it, obsessed. Hum the same songs, Promise the same promises, and resolve the same resolutions. Prod the same deep wounds and peek down the same chasms, searching relentlessly for a man named ME.

For me this compromises the greatest Expedition of them all. Travel allows the sweet lonesomeness to ferment in squalor and grandeur, once sipped is the portal to this journey.

When you see the world through new eyes you see yourself anew. Understanding anything more fully is always understanding your own essential nature in a more complete light. Thus the compounding discoveries of the journey translate into a rapid and unceasing reconstitution of the self. This happens in the silence and clamor of the mind, so bored, so elated and confused. Only me to see it bloom in the dark.

Others are only informed of your transformation by your mysterious intention, wisdom and compassion.