1. Woman

Like many of the world’s greatest stories, this one also
starts with a girl.
Sara had her backpack and a suitcase with her which
i offered to carry after she had saved my life with a paracetamol.
There are some medicine that save lives, some
that make you more sick and some that save hearts. On
my behalf, it saved me from the clutches of a headache,
and later it made me feel that it had saved my heart also.
But this isn’t a written essay on medicine although it had
come to be written because of a headache that made me
ask her for the paracetamol.
It was a night that didn’t start out very promising, in
Berlin, this summer after Fusion Festival. Along with my
buddy Paul where i was staying, we decided to go have a
beer in the park, the Berlin way.
As you might expect, Fusion Festival is indeed a festival.
Its uniqueness lays in the fact that it is organized
on an ex-military airbase from the second world war that
later went to Soviet Germany, about 100 km from Berlin. It
gathers annually tens of thousands of people from all the
corners of the world, and from all walks of life. It’s hard
to describe a festival like this, you have to experience it.
Only after taking part in it did i find out why the people
that shared that experience feel a sort of bond between
them. In a random conversation, the name “Fusion”
would undoubtedly bring a smile on the speakers’ faces,
a smile that holds within a secret that is known only to
those who have participated. Likewise only after I was
there did I understand why it’s named like that. Because
that’s exactly what it was, a fusion, a mix, a melt of everything;
all kinds of music, shows, theater, film, cabaret,
acrobatics and concerts for anybody, everybody. I saw
there everything from little children with protection aviator
headphones on the dance floor to elder people walking
hand to hand mingling in the carnival madness, from
neo-hippies with caravans to scientists in their day to day
life, prepared to enter another world for 5 days.
Like all things on this world, they have their good
parts and they have their bad ones too. I felt both of them
and something extra. It’s true that this summer most of
Europe’s festivals had the misfortune of bad weather,
rains and storms, but what happened at Fusion was more
than that, it was a cloud burst of 4 days, it was the mud
bath of all mud baths. You would go half a foot deep in in
the mud. It rained and rained and never stopped until it
had a reason.
I’m glad to have experienced that moment, when
it all came together, the bad weather, all the festival’s
drug abuse and consequently the mind and body’s, the
filth lying everywhere that almost gave you a feeling of
disgust, the loud psy that was coming from the speakers,
people dancing carelessly. And at the entrance of the
trance stage, on this big water pond, there was this little 5–6 year old boy who was picking beer bottles, putting
them in a row, filling them up with dirty water from
another bottle and putting a cherry on top of each one.
That was when the rain stopped. Everybody was speechless.
We all had our eyes wide open and we were looking
at that pure child demonstrating the power of innocence.
What happened in that festival will stay written in
my mind and soul and never be forgotten. Nevertheless,
the thing I was secretly wanting in a corner of my heart
didn’t happen. I wanted to fall in love and to feel those
emotions. Not knowing in what I was about to get into,
faith had a little laugh on my behalf and gave me a kick
in the ass, a friendly kick.
I think that my gesture to help with the luggage
impressed her because we stayed together the rest of the
night. After we got to the bar, we ordered some beers and
sat comfortably on a couch. Some sort of NuJazz was playing,
the perfect grooves for the mood we were in. She was
lovable, the combination between a down to earth and
festival crazy kind of girl. She was wearing Indian sari
pants that gave her unbeatable comfort and elegance.
Her lite brown hair was matching her eyes and she wore
it in a ponytail. She had dimples, a delicious laugh and
strapped to her waist was a festival leather belt with a lot
of pockets. A good thing to have if you don’t want to lose
your stuff while losing your head.
A discussion on the waitress’s asses followed but
there was no arguing, we had the same tastes, round and
healthy. I remember the “best ass” award went to the redhead.
Funny flirting and all, the butterflies in the stomach
only came when we fell like into each other’s eyes. Here
brown eyes were the leaf carpet on the hills in autumn
and I wanted to be the wind that blew them around.
Our meeting was only a few hours long after which I
went with her to the airport. She had a flight to Lisbon to
catch. We agreed that what had happened was in fact love
at first sight and we parted between sighs and promises
to see each other again. It sounds like a movie scene, it
actually was like that but even movies had to be lived first
before they were written. So was this movie.
They say that beauty is the promise of happiness.
This, the plans to travel the world together and the softness
of her thighs that could exceed even the most delicate
gush of wind and could give any man the will to
move mountains, motivated me to go to the other end of
the continent without any set plan to return.
Happier than ever before, the next day I told Cipri,
who at that time was in London, about what had happened
and it was set: we were going to meet each other
on the 16’th of August in Lisbon.