THIS IS NOT A STORY, and it has no beginning and it has no end. All I know, or remember rather, is that I was standing outside an old wooden house in the middle of town, next to an unfamiliar door. When I opened it, I could see my table and all of my furniture just sitting there, collecting dust. It was my apartment, but everything had been rearranged. The windows were not where they should have been. Unmistakably though it was my place. Even my guitar was sitting there in the corner. My books were on the shelves. I walked through one part of the apartment and came out the other end. The sink was different, it looked like one of those metallic sinks from the 1960s, the kinds that were bolted to the wall. The biggest difference was that the apartment had two doors. I exited the other door into a courtyard. I waited there.
There was a bus stop there with a faded sign. I couldn’t read the name of the village bus stop, but the other houses didn’t look much different from mine, being old, wooden, and in various stages of decay. An old bus pulled up and Esmeralda was seated in the back, with her clever eyes and brown hair pulled back. She was talking to someone else, and I knew that she was aware of me, that I was waiting there for her. But she wouldn’t even cast a look in my direction. She was wearing that red sweater of hers. I did love her. Whatever earthshattering mistake that was. The bus rolled on, but I didn’t get on. Esmeralda wasn’t going to give me the time of day, so I wasn’t about to go chasing after the young lady. I had been there, done all of that.
After that, I went for a walk around town. I stopped at the train station and thought I could catch a train to Tartu, only to find out the train had been booked by a school to take them farther out on the north coast, and so was heading in the opposite direction. I got off the train in the heights around the city. Here, too, there were surprises. Things had developed in an interesting way, there were old saltbox New England-style homes with shake facades, and lush green ivy crawling around the windows and chimneys. It was a gray, overcast kind of day, but the yellow flowers in the English gardens stood out. Where was I? It looked like Nantucket.
When I eventually got home, my daughter came to the door and told me there had been an accident in the kitchen. When I went in, I noticed that Gilberto, one of the neighborhood’s local Portuguese settlers, had tried to make some dish but the oven had blown up and there was burned food all over the floor. This was confusing for me because Gilberto didn’t live with us, but rather had rented a place nearby. “Don’t worry, I’ll clean it all up,” Gilberto said. He was dressed in his pajamas. He hadn’t slept very well. Understandably, I found it hard to explain to my daughter why stray middle-aged Portuguese men like Gilberto were using our kitchen.
I guess when you’re lost, you take pity on the other lost ones, the ones who are as lost as you.
north! 