Mar Adentro

von Marcus Krug

BAM! Once again, the Kindle or something else just slid off his bed and dropped heavily onto the floor. In the middle of the night, I am wide awake, once again.

“Oh no, get off me! Leave me alone!” He whimpers in his sleep, then heavy panting. A nightmare. Again. Since Donald Trump was elected president, my housemate’s paranoid bipolarity has blown out of proportion. Now he drags himself over to the ensuite bathroom just above me, in the attic, and empties his bladder in the usual old man’s way.

Through the ventilation shaft in the wall I can clearly hear the night rain’s soft and soothing sound which lulls me in and fortunately helps me to go back to sleep again.

Then the alarm on my phone goes off. First a gurgling waterfall in the front, fading away to hand the stage over to various species of birds – somewhere in the Amazonian rainforest, I suppose – chirping to their hearts’ content. In the background, condensed water is slowly trickling down, from one leaf to the next, and eventually to the ground.

I open the window in my room and see a flock of seagulls floating in the coastal morning breeze right in front of my window. It takes quite some time for my consciousness, which is still a bit foggy with sleepiness, to realise that their calls are anything but pleasant to the awakening ear.

The crescendo of the old kettle’s annoying noise heralds the imminent availability of tea water. The steaming hot liquid being poured into a big cup relaxes me. I was brought up in the mountains, but since I came to live close to the sea, I grew quite fond of the sound of liquids doing all sorts of things.

My cap and on top the helmet muffle the sounds of the street while I am on the bike, cycling to work. The rain is pelting down on the helmet and the new waterproof high-visibility jacket. I can hear and as well feel it, like little pinheads coming down on a wafer-thin sheet of glass. I forgot my gloves today and the ice-cold rain turns the colour of my hands into the skin colour of these Japanese snow monkeys.

The day’s actual overture in shower water is babbling down on my body, wrapping me in a warm, cosy and somewhat transparent blanket. This gets me ready to tackle whatever human obstacle may lie ahead of me today.

The cacophony of an ordinary open space office, I blank out with headphones and a Ravel concerto for string quartet. It carries me off into a land far far away from where I actually am. There, in the concerto world, are no imbeciles talking in moronic corporate platitudes just for the sake of sounding sophisticated.

The canteen around lunchtime is the acoustic version of the Pacific Ocean littered with tons of audible plastic waste. The silence of my after-lunch stroll recharges my battery again. Outside the office, I can even take pleasure in listening to the calls of the seagulls again.

After work, back in town. There is a storm but no rain. So there is no excuse not to go for a walk. Just along the shore, close to the roaring sea. The sound of the waves’ coming and going is like a perfectly arranged symphony to my ears. It whispers, I am the water, I do whatever I want, come and go whenever the moon allows and, of course, it pleases me. I am the sea, I will always get my way, so I don’t really care.

Dinner time at home, in the kitchen. The simple question ‘What’s new?’ triggers a rant, going from Mike Pence over Reince Priebus and Steve Bannon to Donald Trump. In my temporarily desensitised nature, I ask him if he’s had a bad dream last night, and in a swift and unanticipated counter-attack he accuses me of heavy snoring. For no particular reason whatsoever, he continues on with calling me names and starts to verbally abuse me. But that’s okay, we’ve been there before. To me this has become merely some random white noise in the background. Because after a while, as usual, he snaps out of it, apologises and tries to explain himself. I suppose being American these days isn’t as easy as it used to be. He, for my taste however, takes this running-the-country-into-the-ground-thing way too seriously. It’s not that he’s not also in the possession of an Irish passport. But I think, this is what you’d call patriotism – an concept which couldn’t be more foreign to me.

I feel like taking a bath to wash off the muck of the day. Listening to the bathtub filling with water is balsam for my spirits. Once in the tub, I put my head underwater. My ears filling with hot liquid, relaxes me. I lift my head and the water runs out of my ears again. Then I go underwater again. In and out again. I like the feeling and the sound. It sounds a bit like sea waves coming and going. The sea inside. And then, there is this quite liberating thought again: I am out at sea, and I don’t really care – about anything, at all.