Part 25

The escape

It is 10 o’clock and the sun already stands high on the sky. I stop at a small resting place, because my sunglasses are somewhere in my bag in the trunk. I use the opportunity to take a sip and to eat the last chocolate donut which I had bought in a diner. The street is deserted, just now and then one of these brightly painted trucks rushes by. A hawk yells loud into the sky like he wanted to order his prey to come out and to wait until he falls off to prove him the unavoidable last tribute. I think of you and our little weekend trip in the beginning of our relationship. Exactly like I we had only a few things motley packed together and simply drove off. Maybe this was the reason I did it too now, maybe I just searched a way to get back that time. We had spent most time in the car or in hotels. It’s quite typical for two people who had just fallen in love. They just felt with every fiber of their heart and body the unceasing urge to touch each other, to kiss, to be as near as possible to her. We have gone just 40 miles on that weekend and have later amused ourselves so often about the fact that we could have had that also much more comfortable and easier at home. Today I know for what it was good, Tina. For me being able to remember at exactly this moment. For conjuring a little smile to my face and giving me the feeling that you are just around the corner in the drugstore and will climb immediately in to the car to me again. So that we could start to the next faraway resting place. How strange, I had almost forgotten about this in the last years. Suddenly I can feel your hand again which lay softly on my right thigh or which you laid for a little stroke on my hand if I was on the gearshift. From the corner of my eye I saw your smile and the surreptitious look in your eyes, unmistakably saying: ‘It’s time for a little break.’

Although we hadn’t known each other for long there was so much nearness between us, so much closeness, and we regarded all as a matter of fact. I have always believed that I would never experience this, this intensity of love, this intimacy of thoughts, and this indestructible bond of respect. At that time I asked myself how deep all that can be a few years later, how silent, without needing words, how unconditionally, blind in the most positive sense. Of course I have not imagined that these words can also work so negative, and that wordless blind understanding could become wordless blind lack of understanding. That unconditional devotion could lead to unconditional surrender. The more I loved you, the more time we spent with each other, the more intense we planned our life, the more I saw you as a matter of course, and the more I took you for granted. I knew I could count on you and that you would follow me and stand by me. And without I realized it, I degraded you to an object of my everyday life. You had not deserved this, Tina, nobody has deserved that in a relationship. Out of the former "us" I made an "I", even more … I made it my implicitness. It were not any longer our life, our plans, our jobs, our friends, our aim … everything changed, I changed it to my life, my plans, my job, my friends, my aim … Jesus, how selfish I have been. I am so sorry, Tina. I was such an idiot.