Zuza c/o Si Hodges

“This will be my whole life”

She intoned in a Czech accent dented by 4 years in Inverness, now Edinburgh.

Dark hair and steel-rimmed glasses, breasts loosely held in a an duck-egg blue sweater.

It was the first day of summer. The world was on the Meadows sitting cross-legged in groups, drinking beer, smoking , soaking away winter's dust. Bikes lay beside make-shift picnics hustled from the local deli, supermarket or organically prepared at home as contrivance required. Red and yellow gymnasts, jugglers and circus performers – fresh from the season's first festival (face paint still visible behind the ears) garbled to drums and hypnotic music booming from an amp powered by a car's battery.

Our four was gorging on oatcakes and avocado exchanging stories about violence experienced as youths and inwardly celebrating summer with a sigh and thrill that life could be so perfect, so easy and would be intermittently for the next four months. I'm lying on my back getting carried away with the sky, the hum of ball games, relaxed and excited chatter, bored contentment at old friends' stories that I've got nothing to add to but affectionate insults to throw them off balance.

Then from above my head drops and approaches the Czech princess speaking philosophy to unseat me this time. A drama student, talks of plays, books she's read, projects she's engaged with as though each were merging, encircling the other, dreams and reality barely knowing a difference making just as fond impression; what the rest of us would consider joyful, sincere, depressing were for her equal bubbles to be grasped at, admired and pricked according to a whim that somehow managed to spin unconcerned perfection while avoiding none of it.

“I want my whole life to end like this. In nothing. Everything I've done, say or do fading to stillness.”

She was working on a project for her drama degree: “Getting raped by God”.

She had a habit of staring single focused as mental elegies poured from her; piercing eyes behind glasses, serious expression, fine china lines of her jaw shattering into glorious grins at the intermittent pauses where she forgot high-spun theories about Faust, eccentric mysticism, the forgotten history of Eastern Europe.

It was the kind of intellectualism I had come to treat as a bad habit: that existence was to be understood from day-to-day entanglement with it, not spinning in intellect's farther reaches, grasping at straws that couldn't capture its beauty any better than actual happening. But was it possible that she was weaving something that illuminated rather than obscured, breathed life into each Czech-inflected word, gave flesh to dry and dusty concepts otherwise hidden in forgotten storehouses, poured over by the neurotic and obsessed? She would tail across ranges populated by Dadaists, Dionysans, Situationists, send fleeing ideas that took men of grand minds manifold centuries to fashion and divine, weaving ill-conceived threads into something that chimed with her own impressions, life as she saw it. This was not some dirging textbook recital but impassioned symphony of the spirit. I was intoxicated.

“This is how I want my life to be, like my theatre. Collapses to nothingness. Stillness. Just existing in pure peace.”

A phrase to dispel the notion that my fascination was a bi-product of admiration for the vessel from which it flowed.

We sat listening and exchanging long after the other two had gone and the Meadows turned cold: the 6 o'clock shadow swept down from the trees in an arc that scraped up sun seekers as it went, depositing them to cafes, bars or home to work, children and the next day albeit with a warm glow that for at least one afternoon they'd been free.

We walked up George IV Bridge in fading light, bought a pizza and sat on the Mound watching the Forth mistening and darkening, the city below it – a throwback to its days of Enlightenment punctuated by squalor – today relaxed in a warm haze of aged gentrification. Cars and buses somnambulantly cruising Princes street and past tired shoppers, their red lights pricking the dusk.

The evening was taking on the colour a love affair, emerging from the status of mutual appreciation or so I thought, praying that signs of simulated interest in my observations and amusement at statues of cats peering from red-tile roofs were pointing to something that could tentatively be described as 'more'.

Summer's first night was deepening and long summer was stretching before a 'me' dreamed of as an 'us' that pirouhetted in intellectual orgasms between fevered gasps of love making; long breakfasts after long lie-in mornings and creative afternoons devising plays that would allow people to know the ecstasy that forged them.

But dreams and insights were falling short of her galactical grasp:

“There's no understanding and nothing creates. This is the first principle of theatre, before it can really happen”

So the summer would be an education then, rather than a shared exuberance, but it was time to return to studenthood - and with such a sublime teacher - if God could just grant a razor-chinked opportunity to ground our ruminating souls in carnal communion. Passion dodging like a schizophrenic between guises of base lust and romantic longing and whether it made my very being there an exercise in disgust or heroism, I'm still sitting here trying to decide.

For lustiness, the night was unsuccessful.

For peace, it was sheer delight.

Walking by her side, bike wheeling between us, combined contentment at what was shared, daring to thrill at what was to come

the night stopped

went blank

pedestrians and cars cease beyond memory of moving,

light surrenders to conquering dark,

lost

to the ghost of a failed second.

And, emerging, stillness, the shining face of an author who catches my eye knowingly as if the non-experience was a device in one of her perfectly orchestrated plays, and bidding goodbye, wheels through a grey envelope of sky, pavement. Love fading with a light less certain than minutes before.

Alone, I'm distracted by a rap from the window of Vittori's revealing the Mullins brothers – grinning and ginger - drinking wine, inviting me to join; converting my night to one of comforting revelry, though one bemused by its lack of significance, an easy enough burden for both the plain and the terrifying man, but cursed by the wonder at what it is to be plain or afraid when the even fog of alcohol can't hide that it's very screen is a desperately confused veil worn through days lost in counting, causing scenes that expect to be engaged with once the reality underpinning them has been shredded and forgotten and in here we're meant to find a will to continue?

Love gives the wanderer such pleasant tokens to continue as, in the final act, it is fatally ripped away.




{more from the Ever Rolling Snowball}