The scalpel landed on the table with a metallic clack. There was an opening of not more than five centimeters through which a yellowish crumble-like pudding was trying to force its way out. Then the steampunk wand started buzzing for the second time and the room was filled with a scent of burning fat.

” He pushes again! Make him sleep Bob. I can’t work like this!”

…but don’t fake those smiles darling
give me something green and breezy
one last beer before the play gets rolling,
you were selling tickets for the numbers
yet this time I do my dance alone
wheels burning on remembrance road…

It was 11:41 on a clear august night. We both sat, feet naked, with the soles glued to the warm cement of the old house’s balcony, lights shut in the room behind us. We went out there to smoke but ended up enjoying each other’s presence and lingered in the calm of the night, engulfed in a faint aroma of minty tobacco and imported quality perfume; long before the worries and the storms that came our way. Her skin always made me think of the grape flowers in late spring at grandma’s farm.

“Let this love never end” we wished upon a falling star.

A police car passed on the alley with it’s lights sending red and blue shades for the slightest of moments, rapidly fading among the buildings. We couldn’t… actually didn’t want to, move, as if trying to prolong the equation that painted both our souls hanging on the second floor of an improbable evening. Ursa Major was easy to spot, covering the most of the northern sky this time of the year. I started explaining how you could draw an imaginary line that passed through the back axis of the celestial carriage and find the North Star, like my father shown me when little. She pointed me to the great Cassiopeia but I found myself being completely lost and having a really hard time realizing which one it actually was.

“Did those stars just move?”
“They did! Must’ve been satellites.”
“Impossible! There were three lights that triangulated to a single point and disappeared…”

Little did we know but others have seen the same thing that night. However nothing came out of it as nothing ever came out of everything else; must’ve wished upon a satellite…

Bratislava… it was the second time smoking with those guys after giving up on the minty slims and the strong regulars. My throat was sore, burning from the raw sensation of his home made contraption of a cigarette, withholding the pleasure of the early September evening from me.

“Come on in!”
“He’s with me and we only do gay bars darling!”

My heart was heavy. It has been five years of sharing pieces of my soul, of love, hope and unmet expectations. I needed a drug to forget. I sought my peace and was far from finding it anytime soon for the simple reason that the heart is a clumsy bastard. Work helped by postponing the electroshock seances. I knew I had to focus and that’s how I ended up studying at the library from morning till dusk. Slowly made new friends and rekindled old friendships.

“I’m like a leaf in the wind” she told me while eating together at the Indian restaurant.
[…]

My mother crying in silence with teardrops washing her face in the darkness of the parking lot. A strong handshake that turned into a hug form dad, proud yet concerned. I was leaving. For good. I steered slowly, avoiding the right side of the exit, the one that completely whipped the paint on my car one morning just a couple of months before. My eyes were watery as well. It all turned black afterwards. I ended up writing a poem about it few weeks later while listening to Bruce Springsteen’s Highway 29 and remembering the 1800 km drive. And the other leaf, the first one, eventually realized that I was right and came to France as well two months later.

It took me three months to start writing again…