“Well, I hope that I don’t fall in love with you
‘Cause falling in love just makes me blue
Well, the music plays and you display your heart for me to see
I had a beer and now I hear you callin’ out for me
And I hope that I don’t fall in love with you”
“I Hope That I Don’t Fall in Love with You” by Tom Waits

“It felt like a thousand hands” said the man on the recording. He repeated his phrases in a trance, seeming completely distracted as if he ordered his mouth to move while he was away in a thought. The man continued his ramblings. “The house burned with all of them inside”. As the man’s tormented voice worked as a soundtrack, Kai prepared his breakfast, moving around his spacious kitchen with his ears wide open. The cassette player, who a minute ago had the beautiful voice of a female japanese folk singer, now beared the voice of suffering. “It is so hard to be alone”, the man from the cassette player said. “People don’t understand it. It’s so hard to be alone.”

Kai finished his breakfast and pressed “Stop” on the cassette player. It wasn’t his first time listening to it and he didn’t have plans on listening to it again that day. He had a meeting, after all. He wanted to have a clear mind, away from the thought of burning houses so that his brain could have enough space for whatever she would want to puke in it. The job of a journalist, he thought to himself, carries way less philosophy than he initially thought when he decided to become one. The path to morality seemed not like a steep hill; there was no slope or mountain to decorate the metaphor. The path was any road he had to go with his quite fancy car, and it didn’t have a view at the end of it. At the rainbow’s tail was always its head as there was no road he traveled only forward. He would always return. To his home, to his job or to any obsession he had at the moment. Right now, the man on the tape was keeping him in place. After a couple of hours staring at the Sun being useless in the grey sky of his window, he felt that he would be finally able to move after today’s lunch.

He arranged a meeting with writer Martha Pinegrove, famous for her notorious ability of saying a lot without saying anything in her series of fiction books and screenplays. Some critics would say that she had such an entrancing way of speaking in her writings that it could fool any reader into thinking there was any rhyme or reason to any of it. Others would say that she was effortlessly brilliant while being one of the most elegant and precise auteurs of the century. Kai couldn’t decide which faction was right as he was quite biased. Him and Martha used to be best friends when they were children. But the Earth kept moving and not even God would know how to keep himself in place. Kai still had memories of playing with her in the rain, seeing her soaked in Heaven’s tears as the clouds moved slowly in the back and the laughter was promised to last forever. There was an innocence on this memory that wasn’t found in any other memory he had. When she scraped her knee, he saw Heaven’s wine dripping in the sidewalk. When she singed, it was a supernova. When she was in silence, there was so much sound ringing from her soul it would make you deaf. All these memories of this exaggerated harmony were an old song now, but heaven didn’t wanted to be erased from his brain. It made him bitter to see his heart so empty. It almost made him forget that he arranged the meeting specifically because of the alleged ties of the voice of suffering with the voice of the supernova; she knew the man on the tape.

As he was ready to leave his room, he saw the clouds one more time. It was always funny to him to watch the clouds move so slowly, as if they rewarded you if you were truly patient to see how far they could go. The sky was a mute that day, so he tried to picture himself walking in the clouds, wandering as if trying to find a path that didn’t lead to a day he had already lived. He thought of castles in the cotton sea, dissipating every day as if they were made of sand. Since the clouds travel all the world and come and go, they were the perfect home of the wanderer. You could be above every head, seeing the ants that called themselves humans change everytime you were in a different country. In a few minutes, he pictured himself in every place he could think of that he’s never been to. But suddenly he stopped. “What will happen when I’ve walked through all of Earth?” He sat his shoes back on the ground, grabbed his keys and walked to his door.

*********************************************************************************************************

Kai looked at his hands on the table. They seemed so old, and yet he was still young. They had no stories to tell about anything as they were not his companions through anything. He didn’t think of his body as this ship that he has driven through life in, as this would hold a lot of good memories. No, he was not very good to himself. He had no sympathy for any scar. His body was just there as any body is just there. No need to think of it as a special part of his life; his heart was already completely filled with the people he met so he didn’t have a lot of space left for himself. He seemed to forget that in every memory that he cherished, he was there even if he was in the corner. He loved everyone in those memories, except for the camera man that recorded them in his brain. “How odd” he said to himself, “that these hands that I write with seem so… Unloved.” But he saw a car parking near the cafe he was in, so he prepared himself knowing who would be the next person to enter that door.

She approached his table, waving at him from far. Her hair was brown. She had the same face. The cafe was mostly empty. He got up, kissed her cheek and they both sat, facing each other.

“Your hair. It is different.”, she said.

“I’m sorry?”, he said.

“In my memories you had brown hair. I didn’t remember it being so dark.”

“I guess it got darker as time went on.” He reflected in silence for a short moment. “You look very fancy.”

She laughed. “Well, I couldn’t really pick my clothes when we were younger. But I guess I’m glad that’s the case or I’d be wearing high heels like these on that muddy backyard of my mom’s house.”

They laughed a bit, but silence came.

“So, what is the reason for this meeting? I got surprised when I received that letter”, she said gleefully.

“I’ll leave that to the end”, his smirk disappearing. “You’re a big shot writer now, huh?”

“I’ve always loved to write. You do too, don’t you?”

“I guess I do it with a bit less passion than you seem to do it”, he smirked again.

“We carry our passion in different ways. Maybe it’s the feminine side in me, but there was something so nurturing about creating something. I felt like giving birth everytime an idea would come”, she laughed. “and in the process of writing I guess I took care of the baby.”

“How was it when your baby became famous worldwide? Mister Winter Flower is the name, right?”

“Ah, it felt… It felt…”

She stopped for a second. Her smile was slowly fading. She was afraid she was caught in a trap. It wasn’t deadly, it was just an elephant in the room. It had nothing to do with the man on the tape, though. She smirked.

“Do you remember when you were very sick that time?” She said, avoiding his gaze for a while longer. “You must have been nine, I think. So little.”

“Yeah, I can’t forget.”

“You had so little energy. My mom told me not to worry about you, that it wasn’t very serious. But my uncle had just recently passed away. I didn’t wanted to part ways with you too. So I tried to make you laugh all the time. I would spent the whole day at your bedroom trying to make you not look so blue. And then I brought the ukulele my uncle gave me that spring and I wrote you a song.”

“Winter Flower.”

“Do you remember how it went?”

“Call you my little winter flower”, he sang.”You’re in my heart and my thoughts at every hour…”

“Stop, stop”, she laughed. The smile was fading again. “You see, I didn’t write that song. Or rather, I did. But it wasn’t alone and it wasn’t for you. Me and my uncle wrote it together. He was a musician. I guess we wrote it to each other, he used to call me his winter flower. And then you were sick and it was winter and…” She stopped for half a minute and then continued. “I don’t know what I was thinking when I gave it to you. The nickname. It was our thing, me and his. And you went away and took it with you.”

They soaked in the silence for a short while. With how their brains were working, every second was hiding forever in themselves.

“It is a good song, though.” He smiled. “It’s a beautiful nickname.”

“Why did you have to leave?”. She spoke in between breaths.

“I moved, Martha. It wasn’t my fault. You can’t just be in the same place for all your life” he said, as if he knew about it.

“You seemed interested in something else about Mister Winter Flower” she said, looking calmly for something in her purse. “You can ask.”

She grabbed a pack of cigarettes and started a ritual she was all too used on doing by picking one of them.

“I noticed some… Other similarities between me and the character Mr. Winter Flower” he said while watching her try to light the fag. “Some conversations of ours were there, some symbols written almost as if you wanted me to catch and join the dots.”

She inhaled and exhaled the smoke, seeming more gloomy. “It was part of my life, I’m a writer. You were… Important to me” she said as if it hurt her. “You can’t expect me not to spill you in anything.”

“But it didn’t felt like it came from the same place as the memories I had of our time together. You seemed… Upset with me. And it looked like you wanted to show me that.”

“There are two planes of existence in my pen, Kai.” The smoke she exhaled seemed a bit more lethal to herself now. “One is inside my head and the other one is outside of my head. All the words of these planes meet each other at the world’s end when the pen is lifted. It’s not noble or fancy. I’m not used to write with good feelings is all. And you are a deep well of misery to me.”

“What misery?”

There was a brief silence. She smirked.

“There was something I read from Sartre recently. It was in one of his plays. He said… ‘It’s strange. I felt less lonely when I didn’t know you.” The smoke surrounded her, and she kept releasing it as if she wanted it to cover her face. “I feel this way about you. You have no fault. I just wish I didn’t met you.”

He allowed the silence to serve as a blanket for her cold shoulders. Outside it was raining. You could only listen to the cars and the sound of thunder.

“You know why I came here to talk to you” he said.

“Yes. I figured.”

“Were you close to him?”

“We were seeing each other last year. It didn’t last long.”

“I see” he exhaled, trying to maintain balance. “How was he like?”

“Not crazy. He was kind. He bought me a flower once. No one had ever bought me a flower before. He talked about his obsession with peace, with a simple state of mind. I felt enamored by it, as my mind was always too fast.”

“He seemed nice. Why did you two… Parted ways?”

“The same way it always happens. It became hard to remember what I loved about him at the beggining in the end. He was someone else, but I didn’t mind. And then he left me” she looked distracted at the smoke of the cigarette. “I guess I was the only one having doubts about what we had. He didn’t seemed to have them at the end. He was as distant as ever.”

“Did the police send you the recordings they made of him after the massacre?”

“Why would they? I’m nothing to him.”

“I see.” He looked at his hands once again. “He said your name.”

“He probably said many things.”

“He talked about the feeling he had when he murdered those people. It was like ‘a thousand hands’ were choking him. He was talking about the victim’s families, we presumed.”

“Stop” she said, in the softest of voices.

He saw her pain. He realized it could be too much for her. A single tear formed the stray path of a river through her cheek.

“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t say those things to you, I just thought the police already told you. You see, I came to see you because…”

“I don’t care. I’m sorry, this was a bad idea.”

She puts out the cigarette on the table, its butt met the ground impatiently. She grabbed her purse, hiding her face from him so he couldn’t see her crying. She got up and walked a few steps. She stopped right there. She came back to him in quick pace, pointed at him and said:

“You know what?” She shouted, crying so inconsolable. “One day you won’t have any carpets left for you to sweep your shit under them. You’ll have to face it all. No more ignoring. No more leaving. You’ll have to love who you have to love and you will have to kill who you have to kill.”

He didn’t know what to say as she left the door with her umbrella, ready to let her tears live in the shade of the rain for a moment.

He was practically empty-handed, but he couldn’t really think about what he came there to get from her. It was meaningless. He looked outside. Grey clouds, still. His feet were afraid of the winds of the sky, now. They were hiding in the ground like everyone else’s. He felt a weird feeling. He was emptier. He was sadder.

Somehow, he was lonelier.

“I can see that you are lonesome just like me
And it being late, you’d like some company
Well, I turn around to look at you, and you look back at me
The guy you’re with, he’s up and split — the chair next to you is free
And I hope that you don’t fall in love with me

Now, it’s closing time
The music’s fading out
Last call for drinks, I’ll have another stout
Well, I turn around to look at you — you’re nowhere to be found
I search the place for your lost face — guess I’ll have another round
And I think that I just fell in love with you”
“I Hope That I Don’t Fall in Love with You” by Tom Waits