Sol

She was the second girl called Sol that my fickle heart fell for. Or perhaps I should be more precise: she was the second girl called Sol, with a slick of dark hair tumbling down her long back that totally entranced me. I had never intended anything – she was just a beautiful plaything that my calloused heart fell for. The truth I am not admitting is that I am innocent in love. We all are. Which is of course what makes men so mad and yet so undeniable.

I was living in the museum quarter of the city in late 2001. My thoughts were obsessed with deconstruction. I have always believed in nature as a role model. I have believed that if nature decides to have a clear-out every October, live frugally for months on end and then buy a whole new wardrobe in April, it must be a good policy. I would try and loose any superficial frills in Autumn. Winter would be dark, solid and real. Winter is not the time for imagination and games.
In 2001 October was a particularly poignant one – perhaps the whole world was reflecting. There was definitely a sense that one should be tying up loose ends. It was not the time for love. When it is not the time for something that is inevitable, it always catches unawares. Rather than slowly coming into view it tends to leap out from a passing bus or from behind the sofa. Which is how love found me. Or something like that.

The circumstances are not remarkable – they were candy for a boy who had not had sweets all day. Or perhaps just a few rather bland sweets. Or to put it another way, where the penis leads, the heart will follow. I am not ashamed of this truth. The point when those receding pin-pricks of light and gasps of pleasure and deliciously smooth tingles of flesh on flesh and whispers caressing eardrums; the point when that translates into future anticipation and then gets confused with imagery and anticipation of love not sex, that point is perhaps when that terrible affliction first appears. That point can only occur in the warmth of a bed at 3 in the morning. Once it has occurred it is already a memory which will appear whenever the right smell triggers it, or whenever another thought triggers it. That point is the time when love arrives. Yet because it is so slight it is never noticed. Not like the departures, which are always noticed.

The first Sol I said goodbye to was Argentinean. We said goodbye at Retiro, a bus terminal where buses never arrive. It is a valve allowing the heat and pressure of Buenos Aires to dissipate across the Pampas. Normally in railways stations and bus terminals I feel the lively hubbub of travel. Retiro kills that. Like an airport, the happiness of arrival is strictly segregated from the undeniable tenseness of departure. Carnaval music oscillates from a CD stall, but it is a thin plastic layer poorly fitted over the sombre silence. People sit trying to think of things to say. Everything has already been said. Trivial words accentuate insecurity.

When it is time to go, I touch her café-con-leche skin. She might make a passionate plea – ‘Don’t go! You can’t go!’ hands tugging desperately at my clothing. Instead, she turns, searching deep into my eyes. She is asking. We both know each other too well for words to be necessary. If my mind could be changed, the eyes would do it.
I have to leave.
In the preceding twelve months I have said more goodbyes than I can conceive. The hellos were so gentle. People - Sol’s - faded gradually into my life. The goodbyes never pass unnoticed. Sol had been a major part of my life for 6 days. In six minutes she was to become a minor part. She really had changed my life, but no more so than seven, eight, maybe nine others had. She really would make me cry.
We hugged, neither of us wanting to be the first to let go. So we hugged. Occasionally pulling together, then releasing – trying moments apart, hating them and pulling together again into a breathless embrace. Then I am on the bus. I have left her arms. Outstretched fingertips now mourn the joy of touch, tentatively stroking the void, wishing it to shrink once more. I know it is harder to be left than to leave. And I still remember Sol’s parting.

The second Sol was as English as the first was Latin. Yet I loved the second one for the same things. The small gestures which only a lover can notice and the exaggerated gestures, which are there to lure more lovers. She lived an hour away. In the same city, two stops into Central, cross to platform 19, then fourteen stops out to Cromerton Riverside. The journey is important because it is the time when thoughts become bleary sentiment-drenched metaphors. Sol told me how she loved those dreamy, glowy, drowsy trips back to Cromerton, taking in the sunrise over the City Museum on Newtown Hill near my flat. When I took that trip in reverse I realised that those mornings made love inevitable. Spend hours making love to someone you know to be your Venus, then leave half-asleep to a warm sunrise, and there is only one possible judgement. I knew Sol would get the apple every time.

I have never been anywhere more exotic than an unusual district of my hometown with Sol. Already I dream of far off places. I dream of following rivers into estuaries and of swishing ceiling fans stirring soupy passionate air above our naked bodies. I become tense when I realise another moment has passed when I have not taken her to some new place. Every time I allow my mind to drift – when I am buying a newspaper or when I am daydreaming on a city-bus or when I pouring the boiling water into the coffee cup, every time, I see Sol surrounded by noise and heat and humidity. And there is one other person who is familiar in these daydreams, and that is me.

Whether or not love has come, and if it has, if it is here to stay: these if’s are unimportant. What is important is not making up reasons to dodge fulfilling a dream. My father once said, a McSkimming is a creature that knows no single character. It is for that reason that any dream shall be mine. The departures are inevitable. It is the delicious dreams are optional.