Flashbacks 1 (from 12/05/06)

I should have brought my umbrella.  I didn't think it would rain today.  I hadn't planned for a storm.

And the bluebells are comforting but the flashbacks are unrelenting.

I should have known to be a better pessimist, stick to my guns and not miss a trick.  I didn't think it was raining.  Still he reigned in his superiority and ridiculed me.  And all the daisies know, this is how it goes when you're not planning on it and you're unprepared.  Because you'd begun to believe in humanity being humanitarian.

But Mr Allen-T you don't deserve to believe.  You've no need of the word 'sorry'.  

Sorry.

Repeat it after me.

Hlavní nádraží

I left him for the last time here.  Kissed him as he got on the train and haven't seen him since.  

He arrived in his bright, spacious, beautiful new flat yesterday, having driven across the continent successfully to reach his destination.  Cars and trains.  I can't decide which are preferable.  A car is more comfortable, but it's so nice to be able to get onto a train and know that that's the end of your hard work and the train will do the rest.

The coffee at the station bookshop, our last together, was delicious.  I was so wrung-out by then, that I really needed it.  Urgently.  I got two books out of that painful day.  One, a children's book in Czech, another a bilingual (i.e. translated into Czech alongside the original English) Gerald Durrell tale that begins with reminiscences about travel, appropriately enough.

I love bookshops, and travel, so this environment should have taken a little of the edge off of my sandpaper-rubbed wounds, but I don't think it helped.  The songs I listened to there and back, the same ones I listened to when I had been a more valued person for an evening, accompanying him to the airport after he'd been sort of found out, were of greater comfort in the end.

I haven't been to the station since.  Not sure how I would manage it.  It's waiting for me and I acknowledge this every time I have to pass it on the metro on the way to a meeting near Nádraží Holešovice, once a week.

I think I've decided I cannot ever see him again.  I just can't.  The Shakespearean nature of the trick we both fell for is too great and the injustice too unpalatable to be able to watch him forgetting it.  As he must do to survive.  How I am to survive is quite another matter.  It's asking a hell of a lot, in my opinion.  

The edge of the platform looks ever more appealing, as I gaze at the railtracks and imagine my escape from this.  I beg for it every day, but the world seems uncompromising in this regard.  No easy way out for me.  No helping along the way to a quick end.  No "100% solution".  If I want that, like anything in my life, I'll just have to do it myself.  So far, I'm resisting, if only for the fact that it requires more time than I have to plan and get absolutely right.  The saving grace for most of us, no doubt.