I didn’t leave him, as everyone thought, because I got bored. It is, however, true that he was the most tedious, dull person I’ve ever met but that’s something I could have lived with. As a matter of fact, I’ve gotten to think of lameness as a positive trait of character and Gigi used to take me directly to the bottom of boredom, to it’s wonderfully grey roots where we would sit in absolute silence and despair and enjoy a cup of chlorine tap water.
Let me tell you, then, why I did leave him!
I know, you see, that on my deathbed I won’t be able to carry out full arguments like Plato’s Socrates in Phaedo. And, to the disappointment of my traditionalist friends, I’m also not going to have some priest whispering last minute prayers in my already deaf ear and asking me to confess my sins because I simply don’t want to remember the lot of them right there and then. Plus, priests have a mechanical way of pronouncing words which freaks me out. Unless there will be a group of priests who chant something Byzantine style, doesn’t matter what, could be one of Neruda’s poems, the “Communist Manifesto” or the ingredients list on the cream cake we bought last night (an awful long list, believe me!). In that case, I can spoil some time and tell their piousnesses things that will make them not blush but grow purple, beyond purple, cyclamen!!! Moreover, I would even kiss that cross they take from house to house, the one that everyone kisses, even the guy on the first floor who has Hepatitis A and the old woman who died yesterday due to complications of tuberculosis! All this for a little Byzantine chanting…
I also know that dieing in meditation and reaching satori at the end of my last breath is close to impossible (although I’m still hoping that will happen but don’t tell anyone, ok?).
I do know, however, what I will do in order to make my passing away a very pleasant one! For example, I know for sure that the walls of the room in which I’ll roll my eyes towards whatever expects me on the other side are going to be yellow, although I didn’t decide yet if it’ll be a mustard yellow or a brighter, colder, lime yellow. I would, of course, prefer to die during summer but I’m afraid I’ll get carried away with gardening or with lying in the sun close to the sea and I won’t remember to make the world one soul lighter until October or so.
The other walls, the walls inside, will have to be painted too. The color…well, it’s more of an atmosphere than a color. I’ll describe it but if you didn’t spend a lot of time in between, if you’re as solid as a rock, more, as a tree, you won’t get it. You have to loose your balance to see this color. You have to be a bit of a fuck up…
It’s the atmosphere of the airports and train stations. Not any airports and certainly not any stations but only those you love deeply. The airports that you thought of slitting your wrists on because you left someone behind. The train stations you spent many hours on in the company of good friends waiting for trains that were never on time. The passing points where it doesn’t really matter who you are but where you’re going. And that you’re going. The other walls will be painted in this color, the color of the hiatus. I love that word. It does make a lot of sense because death is just like another passing point…hopefully.
October it will be, then! October, like the last time I stepped on that airport, my airport, where I come every time I screw up every single little segment of my life. Which happens a lot. Every two years or so.You get the picture, I hope. Me – immigrant from small Eastern European country, chasing the American dream which is not my dream at all (since I didn’t even immigrate to America but to Canada and it’s goddamn cold here even for chasing the bus in the morning), obsessed about odd things like Byzantine music, yellow walls, Plato and an airport. Gigi – Eastern European very boring boyfriend who waits for me at that airport. Me – happy to be there, I want to kiss the floor of the airport and the stinky sweaty cleaning lady in the dirty washroom. Gigi, looking at the watch with that look on his face, the “I bore myself to death” look. Did I tell you how boring he was?
Then, as I step out of the wonderful place where I pick up my luggage from the rolling band and struggle to push it on the cart, which never stays put, and I enter the unventilated waiting room where sweaty and tired arriving immigrants embrace their sweatier and cigarette-smoke-plus-a-lot-of-deodorant smelling relatives, Gigi does something unexpected. He grins. A horrible, happy grin, something he probably rehearsed at home thinking it gives him a romantic look. You know that grin, I’m sure, Hollywood abuses it. The “I’m lost without you” grin, the grotesque “I’ve been dreaming of you for the last two years” grin, the idiotic “I could die for you right now” grin…
It wasn’t the nightmarish rictus of his letter-box mouth itself that worried me but the fear that this memory which, in fact, will always hunt me, could destroy my love for in-betweens and those interior walls would be stripped down and left bare, just like the walls of Bubulina’s house in “Zorba” after she dies. I thought then and I still think that one boring Gigi is not worth that much. Especially when the same grinning face was pressing hard against my best friend’s hair just two months before it almost wrecked my death plans.
