In Rome

Everyone wanted to appear in the story. Though they wanted their role to be central. It is hard to picture oneself as some ancillary character in the story of a novel, a person who carries a plate of shrimp across the stage or laughs in the background at a funny joke.

Drunkeness passed over him like a veil. And he sat beneath the veil as a child beneath a blanket, playing a game of hide and seek. The central actor in his life was himself. And yet, the self was diffuse, like sparks flying from a sparkler on the fourth of July. To call it a self was merely an extension of an irrevocable feeling, a western dogma like any other. He was confused.

In the morning they made love, By the afternoon as he walked along the Tigres, with light refracting on water, he'd forgotten her. It seemed strange to him that he could be two separate beings: one wholly invested in the process of pleasure, of the two of them making love. And one who could feel so distant from not only her but himself as he walked beside that old river that Rome had forgotten.

According to Celine travel was a way of forgetting, or for forging something new. He had found though that in travel he was just lost in new ways. He needed to go home, he thought, as he wandered by the dirty river, a small boat tugging tourists by the Castel Sain't Angelo, and there was an angel impaling the sky on his sword.

He was lonely in ways he couldn't quite define in words. Though he stayed awake late many nights scribbling in his journal, trying to give some narrative continuity to the events of a single day. Most days, when he was lonely, he would try to find a woman to pass the time. He was largely unsuccessful as he didn't speak the language and found women confusing.

And so he spent many nights wandering the city like a flaneur of old, taking in the smells and sights of a city that had already outlived its use. Nothing should be in Rome now but a group of archaeologists excitedly telling us what life might have been like 2,000 years ago And yet he found himself wandering past the remnants of the Colosseum, bending his gaze to the frayed edges of a lost civilization and to the frozen moon in a black jet of sky.

In the morning he had been making love, and now he felt so distant from that person that he might as well have lived in another country and never known her. This was viewed by some as a kind of callousness, and he saw that perhaps it was true. But it was something he couldn't shake. It was intrinsic to his very being, like a blood type or eye color. As he wandered the streets, smelling the inviting bread and cappucino drifting up from alleys a thousand years old, he really couldn't connect to the person he'd been last night in her room intent upon the task of pleasing her every desire.

The sun was shining now, and he was walking along the river. These were the only two things that were real. After a time, the wind kicked up, blowing bits of trash along the river bank and skittering along the wall. He considered these bits of trash as one might have considered a cow lowing in the countryside as a thing worthy of a moment's consideration before passing on to the next event in life.

He bought a ticket to go home that that evening while emptying a bottle of Cabernet. He was lonely in the profound sort of way that he'd been since he'd discovered that loneliness was a feeling that human beings could feel acutely, like hunger. He hungered for other human beings and often found them wanting. At home, he wanted to sit on the couch and listen to his mother tell him stories about when he was a child. In short, he wanted to find a brief cure for his profound loneliness.