Don't You Dare To Think Out Loud!

I don’t believe this record can be broken, but who knows? All it takes is a madman to allow American missiles to be launched at Russia from Ukraine, similar to the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962. Yet the final year of the last century still holds the record. Plus, in my lifetime, I won’t witness another turn of the millennium.

But it turns out that yesterday, I received the news of the passing of a friend who suffered a heart attack. Astrid was two years younger than me. In 1999, she used to host gatherings at her old and somewhat ramshackle townhouse, where my old friends and I would smoke weed in front of a wood stove until we were pretty baked. And we split a gut laughing over the stupidest things and have soft drinks to avoid the cotton mouth.

When the weather was nice, we would go up to the large terrace to cook Argentinean asado, cut into slices that we slowly ate for almost six hours, paired with red wine, and enjoyed it, if anything, along with more joints. We often watched wonderful sunsets, which, with such a buzz, sometimes had a suspicious crimson splendor.

I used to live alone on Zeno Hill at that time, in a small studio with a single barred window because it was on the first floor. Sometimes, the girls who came home from school would greet me while I was writing on my desktop computer. When the sun went down and I wanted to get some fresh air after being confined in that hideout for so long, I used to go to Astrid's to meet my friends, much like someone going to a pub.

That year was my annus mirabilis. In March, I penned Gold Plated, after hesitating for long as to whether to set it during the Srebrenica massacre in July 1995, and highlighting the appalling behavior of the Dutch troops who allowed the Serbian general Ratko Mladić to pass in exchange for beer. Due to financial constraints, I was unable to travel to Bosnia to conduct thorough research. As a result, I maintained the three characters and developed a somewhat auto-fictional plot, a Faulkneresque tour-de-force. I could do now what I couldn't do before, but the somewhat auto-fictional plot was compelling enough for the legendary Carmen Balcells to express interest in becoming my agent.

Of course, each passing day without any news, I found myself sinking into the quicksand of anxiety. I hoped to hear something before summer arrived, and I thought that maybe rewriting my first manuscript would help. And so, I deeply sank without hardly realizing it into the quicksand. Additionally, the cannabis licenses that were intended for Astrid's ended up instead in the wrong place, that is, on my desk.

In early July, I had a stay in my mother's hometown for a change of scenery. My good friend Fred had a penthouse by the river, and I could watch the otters from the balcony. However, I was shocked to discover that Fred was deeply involved in experimenting with chemsex using MDMA, a fad that seemed such a load of tripe to me. Instead of pursuing his passion for playing the saxophone, he often spent days in an endless orgy, drooling on his philosopher girlfriend and his other friends. That was a sticky fly trap, and I felt very disappointed with that show. Looking back, I realize there were signs that something was off, such as his frequent mentions of the French poet Henri Michaux in our correspondence.

Following in the footsteps of the master Rainer Maria Rilke, it did not take long for me to garner the complicity that a young writer attracts, especially with the appearance of a musketeer straight out of the French novels of Alexandre Dumas. I couldn’t write during those chemsex sessions, so after my birthday, I landed in a historic stone house attached to the Romanesque cathedral. On August nights, I could hear the storks noisily bill-clattering on the patio. Over there, I might have been able to regain the focus required to write, if it weren't for the fact that the stone house had stocked a hundred bottles of Verdejo wine in the cellar. Already struggling with cannabis, using the joints as appeasers, that easy-drinking white wine in the infernal heat of August finished me off.

I went to the Matrix to reclaim the full strength of my mother's language, as if I were drinking from a magic fountain, but in forty days and forty nights, I had wrought my downfall. Yet, I managed to have a moment of clarity to bid farewell to my grandpa, who was in his last month of life. Maybe because of my sailing years, I could clearly see how he heeled over in his armchair like ships slowly heeled over before they were claimed by the depths forever.

I almost ran back to the stone house to pick up my things. When I got into the taxi that took me to the nearest airport, I ran across a talented sculptor who was making ends meet by trafficking MDMA. Fred had introduced me to him, and we almost became good friends. I didn't hear anything more from him. In fact, at that time, I had begun an endless flight forward, a scorched-earth policy.

Once again in Zeno Hill, there was no message from Carmen Balcells on the answering machine. Instead of writing another manuscript, I felt the urge to continue rewriting the first one, just like I did in spring. This time, I aimed to create a grand cathedral of words.

If I could go back and talk to my younger self, I would disguise myself as one of his confidantes or beautiful muses to get his undivided attention. I would tell him that the abuse of appeasers would undermine his confidence. It would be costly for him to concentrate and would worsen the symptoms of his mild dyslexia while impairing his judgment. A total clusterfuck. After all, he had just acquired that weakness, but he could still overcome it as if it had never existed.

There’s no harm in asking. I might as well approach the young writer as I am now. I may intimidate him with my streaked silver hair and the eyes of a castaway of time, instead of the mesmerizing gaze of before. Like the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come penned by Charles Dickens, I would choose to remain silent in his presence.

I would take him on this diaphanous September morning to hold the wake of our old friend Astrid. She never took her foot off the gas until she finally managed to burst her heart, abandoned by the friends she pampered so much and with increasingly sinister partners, mostly cocaine users. Like people with poor judgment and too much heart always ends.

Here’s to you, Astrid. May you rest forever in my heart.