Inspired by Kieran Halpin „Long lost friends“
He is a musician and never wanted to be anything else. At the beginning he still thought about it. Minstel was too little for him. That centered too much on the activity itself. Troubadour, that had gone through his head, but the word stood as an image of a languishing young man before his eyes, who brought his confessed serenity to the adored girl. He certainly was not. He was a whole man. What you think is the same for a whole man, when you’re just 18, and get ready, the world is just waiting for me. But a musician, just a musician, who was in his eyes one who grabs his instrument and goes out into the world. Every day at a different place. Every evening on the stage, and in between record a few CDs. Besides, he had very soon found out that the girls came by themselves, when one can handle an instrument and acts on the stage. You did not have to strain. It all happened by itself. Free and unbound, always in search for more life, that was what he wanted and what he did.
„It may be quite so,“ his father was not tired of repeating, „But you will see, in the long run it is not the right thing.“
But why should not it be the right thing, when it feels right to him? After all, he lived a life the way it should be – there was no other one to shift his dreams and desires. They had to be realized or left. There is no second chance for life. Sometimes he deserved good, sometimes less good. It came and went. He gave it out when he had it, and if not, then not. It came and went. Like the women in his life. He would never forget the first time he took one of these girls to his room. It was a wonderful night, but still better, he gave her a kiss the next morning and drove away. Down to the next city, the next stage, the next girl. In doing so, he was able to assert that he had not given any of them any idea. Was it his fault that some people thought she was the chosen one who would convert and force him to settle down? Free as a bird in the wind, free and unloaded. He was, and he wanted to stay. If only there was not the smell of her hair, which he still had in his nose.
For years he had held it that way. Decades now.
„That’s exactly what I want,“ he kept saying to himself, even though the words had worn out. He felt that traveling was more and more hard on him, that he thought from time to time, perhaps it would be nice to have a cottage somewhere. But he quickly repressed it.
Only when he woke up, into a new morning, without knowing what day it was or where he was when he was standing beside him and the girl from the last night was still there without him. Slowly he got dressed and went out into the street. It seemed to him as if he had run away for a lifetime, as if something had driven him, always farther and farther. But where? There had to be somewhere a goal, an arriving, also for him? It was as if he had lost himself, in a game that had slipped with the time of his control. Lonely and deserted in a city whose name he did not remember. But the show has to go on. When he returned to his room, the girl was gone. No message. It was also indifferent. He was tired and drained, lost in his own life, which suddenly seemed alien to him.
What then happened was routine. Played over decades. He went on stage and played his program, but it felt like it was not himself, but something in him that acted for him. Should be like this. Until a breeze gave him a fragrance, which he knew and had longed for. Perhaps there would be for him an arriving, a place to rest. But would he still be a musician?
