He learned of her death from a friend. A friend who was writing condolences on a no longer extant Facebook wall. A week later he was in Venice, talking to people that she'd known in the last month of her life. They were a mixture of vagrants, travelers, and failing intellectuals, ex-pats for the most part, male and disaffected. She was in Venice to work on something for her disseration. He had never really understood exactly what she was working on, something to do with reconciliation in fourteenth century Italy as it related to the subjugation and subsoquent influence of the people of Gaul. But he could have been entirely wrong. It was entirely possible that she just liked sleeping with older men.
The romance of Venice was palpable from the time he left the train. It was an entire city dedicated to the metaphor of decay, to the passage of time, and the futility of our Sisyphean efforts to deny its passage. Every crumbling facade or basements subsumed in green water, was a reminder of ephmerality, though not a nudge towards living. The key was slowing down--skipping the furiousness of Saint Mark's Square, the pigeon's, billboards, guide books and aimless energy of people here to see the city because it was a spectacle that would one day be gone. These people were missing the essential charm of Venice. It was a great place to resign yourself to death, not to escape it, capture it, record it as it was happening, no. It was the place where a person could end up at any point past twenty five, long enough to have been washed up in the disappointment of knowing that one's dreams will never come to full fruition that they will always be out on some endless horizon.
H was sitting outside, drinking cheap coffee, making these rather shallow observations about Venice when he noticed someone staring at him. The man looked to be in his mid-sixties, he had white hair and a white mustache, and H was certain that he was staring at him.
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