Cassie

“Who's Cassie?” Akiko asks.

I knew this was coming. You can't tell a story about leaving without talking about what you left. Or who.

Let me just tell you the whole thing, I say.

The whole thing starts before the dorm. It starts with leaving.

Greece, 1997. A country that got MTV and McDonald's a decade late and swallowed both whole, and a kid who wanted the rest of it. Not the beads and the booze. The rest.

I did not miss Greece yet. Nostalgia is a signal that needs distance to travel, and I had none. Just a boarding pass and a family I was done explaining myself to.

Get out. That was the entire theory.

As I escaped my family, Greece, and its conformist ways, I exploded into New Orleans. Purple, green, and yellow are the colors of wacky fun, according to the stereotypical model of color-coding Mardi Gras style. It was one way Americans generated cultural coherence, assigning the details to the western courting ritual: beads, tits, and booze. The novelty associated with the party atmosphere of the city quickly gave way to many other interests. My life merged with my caricature and I immersed myself in the swampy funky melodies of the North American South. I sought information that would allow me to understand and scientifically explain the experiences that had dominated my path since I had met Atalanti. Everywhere I would search for something related to my quest, that being unveiling the mysteries of metaphysical functions. Data seemed to surface automatically and arrange itself in my prescribed grid of already accumulated information. People would suggest books; I would visit bizarre places that would affirm the assumptions and hypotheses I claimed. It all happened naturally. It seemed as if everything blossomed without any particular effort.

Cheating, lying, deceiving, are they faults inflicted upon someone else, or do the deceivers primarily cheat themselves? If the latter is true, what does one cheat himself of?

It was late August and the dense humid climate of the Louisiana bayou had a smell that penetrated everything. Stepping into the dorms on the first day of university must be a day most people who have been there should be able to remember with some vibrancy. I was overly excited and I unloaded the car quickly only to intensify my perspiration. As the sweat trickled down my temples, I noticed this girl looking at me.

The boxes in my hand were slipping, and I was eager to be done unloading, so I quickly smiled and proceeded to my room.

Her piercing blue eyes stayed in the back of my mind all day, as if I had burned an image of a bright light in my retina. Who was she, and why could I not get her out of my mind? My departure from Europe had taken its toll on my relationship with Atalanti; it seemed somewhat futile to continue a relationship across the ocean again, plus the vigor of our flame had calmed over the past few months. The rational path was to move on and explore the new possibilities of the American landscape. Maybe this girl was the one.

Several weeks went by and I had not seen this blue-eyed creature; I could not get her out of my head.

On a Friday evening, my newly formed group of friends and I headed off campus to go to a party. The group got larger as we strolled through the grounds; before I knew it there were at least thirty of us parading through the spooky streets of the Garden District. The colonial mansions entangled in the droopy Spanish moss dangling off the weeping willows, and surrounded by the scattered stone graveyards. The soft and marshy terrain forced the locals to bury their dead above ground, and so as to prevent the occult lootings they built large stone coffins that created a scary maze.

Our group chattered in the dimly lit cracked streets, as a nebula of voices, senselessly gibber-jabbering, hovered above us mirroring our enthusiasm and introductory nakedness. The light from a street lamp shone through the foliage of the tall trees, and fragments of our clan were illuminated in grayish blue. She was among us! I saw her face, as it passed through the beam and then swiftly merged with the shadows of the background. My blood froze and I realized that the opportunity was staring me in the face.

Our group was approaching our destination, so I quickly needed to isolate her from the flock. I swooped in and introduced myself, overwhelming her with my bold entrance. Before we knew it we were sitting on the stoop of a deserted house. The column holding the tin roof up had been half eaten by termites; patches of tin dangled waiting to fall. I talked most of the time; I bombarded her with anecdotal innuendos and exotically Greek cliché proverbs. Before long I was talking to her about Atalanti, and the story on the beach. This contradicts the first rule of dating: never talk to a girl you want to get to know better about your ex-girlfriend. It was odd; I was aware of the tactless choice of topic, but for some reason it was the only thing that could come out for me, and it did so effortlessly. She was enchanted, as was I.

Her pupils in her dreamy eyes pulled me in like two black holes surrounded by delicate baby blue dandelions. We kissed.

We ended up being together for three and a half years, through most of my university life she was my muse. Her West Coast attitude liberated me from the dreariness of my analytic mind. I shared with her all I knew; my mind would run off and my mouth would follow. We wrote when we were not close to each other, usually by regular mail; there was something special about reading another person's handwriting, smelling the paper in some desperate hope that we could get a whiff of the other's scent. The slowness of the letters' speed made their anticipation a climactic ordeal, which popped once the letters were ripped open at their destination. Mixed emotions flooded us as we gazed at the paper, reminiscing what we had just read. There was something romantic about this way of communication; it had a mystique very different to the flashy characteristics of email.

School ended in May and I was going to travel on a freighter ship to Nigeria, thirty-five days working as an apprentice officer. Long days of intense physical labor kept my mind distracted from the heartache of separation, comforted by the line that separated the two shades of blue on the horizon that surrounded me. I sought calmness in its meditative minimalism.

Disembarkation in Lagos is probably one of the strongest culture shocks one can experience nowadays. The mutated cancerous failure of the western urban paradigm stared desperately at me as we entered the port, through the empty window eyes of its abandoned skyscrapers; multinational corporations had pulled out when the price of oil dropped in the late eighties. The ship had been waiting for 3 days to unload; having been at sea for 35 days, these 72 hours went by dreadfully slowly. I sat on deck staring at the few lights of the city in the distance; we had pulled out over fifty miles in order to avoid the pirates. The whole situation was like a bad joke, and no one seemed to mind but me; all I could think of was looking at something other than rusted steel and the colliding fields of blue. I puffed on a cigarette and hung over the side of the deck. The chief officer stepped next to me. He was one of three other Greeks on board; other than them, all the others were Filipino or Polish. This had severely limited my social life, and had made my separation from Cassie so much harder.

I couldn't get to sleep and the ongoing battle between the lumpy mattress and me continued into the early hours of the morning. I resented the room; it had witnessed me in my weakest moments, tackling loneliness, boredom, and most of all my incapability to take advantage of a unique opportunity to be still and meditate.

The vibration of the engines was the best way to be woken up that day, it meant that we would soon be on land. I tossed, tangled in the sheets, enjoying the morning slumber. We had had the last three days off work since the ship had been waiting; we spent most of the time fishing and lounging around. At sunset the cook would set up a barbeque on the stern and blare Greek truck-driver music. It almost felt that I was on some surreal cruise, surrounded by men exclusively and being initiated into some bizarre code of machismo behavior.

I scampered on deck and found the entire crew watching the Nigerian pilots navigate the ship through the mouth of the river into the port. Mixalis was on the other side; I could see him leaning over the rail looking out to land. A dense aroma I could not really describe saturated everything, and as the ship curved around the bank of the river, a cloud of dust emerged behind the dense vegetation. A pandemonium of people scattered like ants for as far as the eye could see into the city, while the large white cement docks waited to hug our boat.

Mixalis shouted my name and signaled me to go over to him. I moved through the crew and joined him.

“Look, look, there is a scuba man!” he said, and pointed at something in the water. I leaned over to get a clearer view, but still couldn't see what he was pointing to. “Where?” I asked. “Right there,” and my stare rolled off his arm and lo and behold, there was a man. Puzzled, I looked at Mixalis and asked him, “What is he doing?” “He's not doing anything. He's dead.” The word dead echoed in my head, and I only just then realized where I was about to disembark.

The madness that exists on the densely populated areas of this earth is probably the hardest thing to wrap one's mind around. In a city of 12 million registered inhabitants, knowing that each of those has a life which has meaning and which they live day in day out, with all the miseries that plague a developing nation.

I can only say that my stay in Lagos can't be put into words. The guilt I felt as a westerner was overbearing; it crippled me, silenced me, and as overwhelming pity and sadness dominated my stay, I could not help but notice that most people were smiling. Who was I to pity them? The more I wondered about this, the more I realized that the pity that I felt stemmed from my own dissatisfaction with my life, my inability to appreciate the opportunity that had been given to me, just by being born in Europe.

Shattered and in desperate need of love, I flew to Greece, hoping that my family would show compassion for the reality check I had just had. They didn't. The only person who could save me in this disillusioned moment was Cassie, and she would be there in a few weeks.

The summer air in Greece defines almost all my memories, the dry heat that relaxes both body and soul. The new airport, which would be the pride and joy of Athens, was still being built. It took them 5 years after they contracted it to the Germans; had it not been for them we would not have finished it yet. I impatiently waited at the old Ellinikon, in the waiting room outside the luggage area. It had been the longest we had not seen each other since we had met, a grand total of 7 weeks. The sliding doors opened and she walked through with a backpack on her back; she was looking straight ahead and didn't notice me immediately. As we made eye contact, time slowed down. Jumping in the air with her pack still on, we collided and embraced.

The drive home was sweet and soft-spoken; I had been telling her about Greece since we had met and now she was here. The early evening breeze had cooled the sun-beaten concrete of the capital; she was really tired so as soon as we got home, I took her to the guest room and settled her in. She was not allowed to sleep in my room, a rule maintained in my house till this day, reminiscent of a conservative upbringing. We lay down on our backs on the bed. We didn't speak; we lay there fully clothed with one of our hands on each other's chest. We almost fell asleep; we lingered in that zone where you can't really tell if you are awake or not. Fully relaxed I felt our bodies fuse where they touched. Once again the exact same thing that had happened with Atalanti on her first day in Greece happened with Cassie, only this time neither of us was high.

I later realized that I had told the Atalanti story to Cassie the first day I had met her. I couldn't help but wonder if that had influenced our experience that first night. I was afraid that as the drugs had endangered the legitimacy of the first experience, my prologue to Cassie had done the same. But it also didn't matter because every day that summer our union was confirmed through the connection that we shared; the only thing that I couldn't understand was the repetition of a cycle I could clearly see emerging in front of my eyes.

If one could make a graph representing the curvature of one's relationship with someone else, I felt that each person had a programmed version of that curve inside of them which repeated itself when they were in love, no matter who the other person was. If the two were meant to be, the curves would overlap and their combination would give birth to a new curve which ideally would harmoniously fluctuate producing the music of two lives intermingling. The tune was the same every time; it just got richer as one got older. It was as if you played in a band that played the same songs but the rest of the musicians alternated, as the band evolved its sound.

The summer was magical, and the more we fine-tuned our song, the more entangled our lives became. She had kept a notebook while I was on the ship; it was full of the turmoil she had experienced during our separation, in Seattle. The book unleashed hooks that dug into me as deep as anything ever has; it was visual proof of our bond.

Naive as we were, we let go and danced together through college, complementing each other's grace through our effortless coexistence. I shared everything I knew with her; late at night I would go on for hours before we went to sleep analyzing and philosophizing till usually I ended up talking to myself. She returned to Greece two more times; we traveled to all my favorite places and discovered several new ones on her own initiative.

She balanced us, brought presence to my never-ending mental masturbation, and exhausting analyzing. We played together like children, and stepped into the margin of typical college socializing, going on bizarre adventures and meeting odd people, satisfying our lust with late night sexual antics on the art studio's roof. Our codependence was fierce and our lack of emotional fulfillment from our families made us inseparable.

Sophomore year.

Gaia theory, Buddhism, Carl Jung, Nietzsche, Ram Dass, James Joyce, Ken Wilber, alternative healing, homeopathy, reiki, tantra, kundalini, yoga, conceptual art, the connection between psychedelics and eastern traditions, astrology, sacred geometry, golden proportions, chaos theory, fractals, ecology, the internet, all twirled into a new looking glass through which I could look at the world. I was flooded with information that gave me an overwhelming reassurance that I was not crazy and that there were others out there who were dealing with similar issues. Something fundamental was missing; it might have been associations that made the whole system work, a glue of some sort to bond it all together.

The Western Rational Materialistic Paradigm failed to embrace the body of knowledge that I found profoundly interesting and important. The lack of cross-cultural integration in my opinion fueled many of the problems the West is still facing; yet at the same time I felt that the information was screaming at us to integrate it; it seemed so obvious.

It is hard to articulate the shift in my consciousness during the few years in university, but I slowly started to notice patterns. Patterns that transcended one discipline and conveniently fell into place when projected onto another. Intuition was the driving force, followed by persistence, and faith, which kept me on track so as not to get discouraged by suggested dead ends. It was almost as if my mode of inquiry was more similar to that of faith, yet the content of my search was scientific. The process surfed the fine line between the two realms and somehow incorporated a magical dimension to otherwise dry data. The magical and the real complemented each other; in fact they were the same thing.

Visualization and projection were crucial in illustrating the path; intuitive sense revealed a mechanism of how things work. The more in tune I was with the emerging pattern, the more accessible the pattern became, the more faith I projected into my path, the easier it became to walk on. This was related to how I was feeling: when I was happy and felt connected and in an erotic union with life, life became poetry, unraveling circumstances with fatalistic twists. Individuality fine-tuned within a spectrum of infinite possibilities, archetypal understanding and a neo-animistic viewpoint. This neo-animism was layered over a very rigid and pragmatically constructed foundation; their fusion was not always easy since each perspective had blind spots and unresolved issues based primarily on dogmatism. There were other times though when the fusion of the projecting lenses would overlap with such grace that obvious truths would radiate through and bring forward a new way of looking at old problematic issues.

Late at night, when Cassie and I were lying in bed and she was trying to sleep, I'd go off on these tangents.

“Listen to this,” I'd say, reading from whatever book I'd found that week. “Lovelock says humans are like bacteria in Earth's gut, we think we're separate, but we're part of a larger organism. Gaia. And the internet is the nervous system finally forming.”

She'd open one eye. “So we're bacteria?”

“Yes! But conscious bacteria. Bacteria that can choose.”

“You're insane.”

“Maybe. But think about it, ”

“Nikos. It's 3 AM.”

The real breakthrough came when I discovered the I-Ching.

I'd been researching divination systems, tarot, astrology, all the irrational methods humans have used throughout history to access knowledge that couldn't be obtained through logic alone. The I-Ching is one of the oldest texts in human civilization. Over 3,000 years old.

I bought a translation and tried to understand how it worked. You throw coins or yarrow sticks, generate a random pattern, and that pattern corresponds to one of 64 hexagrams. Each hexagram has a poem, a teaching, an insight. You ask a question, perform the ritual, and the I-Ching gives you an answer.

It's a source of knowledge that somehow has been woven with meaning into your moment and into that particular time when you're doing that, and thus that must have some significance and it can't be pointless. That's how they used to think about it.

The whole principle behind the I-Ching is that if you set an intention to an act because you really need it, and in many ways that's the principles of prayer, you put yourself into this position of humility and openness and being receptive. And at that moment, through that act, you seek some sort of guidance or information or help.

And that's when it hit me.

One night, I was lying in bed next to Cassie, unable to sleep, mind racing. I sat up suddenly.

“Holy shit.”

She groaned. “What now?”

“The internet. The I-Ching. They're the same thing.”

“Nikos, ”

“No, seriously, listen. The I-Ching is an ancient technology for accessing the collective unconscious. You have a question. You perform a ritual, throw the coins, focus your intention. And the system gives you an answer pulled from 3,000 years of accumulated wisdom. Sixty-four hexagrams. Sixty-four possible states. It's a code. A language for interfacing with something larger than yourself.”

She was awake now, looking at me. “Okay...”

“And the internet, same structure. You have a question. You perform a ritual, open a browser, type a search, click links. The system connects you to knowledge accumulated by millions of minds. It's divination through technology. Eric Davis calls it TechGnosis, technology as modern magic.”

“You've been reading too much.”

“Or not enough. Baudrillard says the map now precedes the territory. We're living in a simulation of reality, not reality itself. The internet is making that visible. We're about to live more in the virtual than the physical.”

She was quiet for a moment. “That's... actually kind of interesting.”

She was looking at me with that expression I'd come to know well, the one that said I was either brilliant or completely full of shit; she wasn't sure which.

“You should write this down,” she finally said. “Because you're either onto something or you're having a psychotic break, and either way, it would make interesting reading.”

I did write it down. Pages and pages of notes. Diagrams. Connections between ancient wisdom traditions and modern technology.

I often wonder what is the essence of technology’s contribution to the unfolding of events; in one word, I realize, it is acceleration. If human consciousness was a visible field like a halo, and if, as we moved, this field left a trail, this trail would cover the world more and more. Over the past 500 years technology has helped us multiply exponentially, adding this trail of consciousness to various different layers of the physical world. As humans conquered the sea, soared in the sky, climbed the highest mountains, orbited the earth, and landed on the moon, this field physically visited these new environments. If information can be defined as a difference that makes a difference, as Bateson has written, then all human radio waves, and all other radiation produced through human interaction, qualify as extensions of this field. As the population increases, the field covers larger portions of our world, energizing it. The overall field produced by all the smaller overlapping fields is becoming denser and denser. Since industrialization, this change has taken on an exponential character, and technology has facilitated and simultaneously alleviated the growing pains associated with the acceleration of our evolution. A vicious feedback loop that speeds up as it transcends through the layers of time.

Hurricanes look the same as whirlpools of the sea, or galaxies. Roots and veins and networks of computers are similar. Rivers and veins. Now you can put two images next to each other. A hundred years ago they'd say a river looks like a vein, and maybe they'd understand it conceptually, or the galaxy looks like a whirlpool, but there was no way to prove it. Now it is something that is intuitive; a child can understand it. That is a gift of technology. That is something that a shaman or a mystic would have to go off into a cave or into the desert for fifty or a hundred years to come up with. Now it is staring us in the face.

And now the internet was doing something unprecedented: connecting all humans to all stored human knowledge in real time.

We were in the middle of a phase transition. Like water turning to ice. Individual humans were still individuals, but we were also becoming something else.

But I knew this: I needed to see it. I needed to experience the world at the moment of this transition. Not from a classroom in New Orleans. Not from a library. But out there, in the places where the old wisdom traditions still existed, where people still performed rituals and consulted oracles and believed in the invisible connections between things.

I needed to walk the Silk Road that the hippies had reopened. I needed to see the temples the Mayans had built to track cosmic cycles. I needed to sit with shamans who still accessed the plant teachers. I needed to dance at the festivals where the global tribe gathered to remember we're all one organism.

The internet could show me the map. But I had to walk the territory myself.

Junior year rolled around and we had been dating for two years; our passion remained intense but never reached the climax of the first summer. Cassie wanted to spend the year in Europe. Enchanted by the Mediterranean way of life, she chose Madrid as her destination; this presented a tough challenge to a 21-year-old couple. Long-distance relationships were my specialty, so I was not too concerned, but we agreed nonetheless that if we felt like having fun we should indulge and be honest, sparing each other the haunting details.

It was tough at first, and my incapability to fathom the adjustments Cassie was going through made her initial months doubly hard. The structure of our arrangement was foolproof; it was a win-win situation. If we fooled around, we fooled around; at the end of the day we would be together again. It didn't really matter if we cheated on each other or not: it isn't cheating if the rules allow one to cheat; or is that true?

Distance and time made our relationship fade into abstraction again; we lazily resorted to phone calls and emails, poorly replacing the richness of our earlier paper trails. Our voices echoed our dissatisfaction and yet we pretended we were invincible, and that made us further insensitive to each other's needs. Being sure that one will find what one expects is probably the primary reason one will not find it. Life bends in incomprehensible ways and only an arrogant mind assumes it can control life's contortions.

Immaturity and arrogance made it easy for me to slip on this path I was sure was secure. Four months later I fooled around with another girl. It wasn't easy to tell Cassie, but I did, casually thinking that because it was part of our agreement it wouldn't hurt either. This started to unravel a sacred knot we had been tying for so long, and the most painful thing was that I was oblivious to it occurring.

The year was finally over and we would get to see each other again. She wasn't too eager to go back home to Seattle, so we arranged to spend the summer in NY. We would be staying in my parents' flat, sharing it with my younger sister. It was a small two-bedroom in Midtown, a dreadfully boring place for kids; the only redemption was the park within walking distance. I was going to be really busy that summer working and taking classes; the millennium had rolled around and the superficially hyped festivity made our stay even more hectic.

My roommate for 2 years and best friend, Damian, wanted to take a film class that summer; it only made sense that he stay with us also. My parents didn't think so; they made a big fuss, and I fought hard to get them to let him stay. I won. The four of us shared the small flat, and tension built up; my busy schedule further widened our gap. The humid sticky city clung to us with its grime, and like rats we scampered through the subway feeling dirty and jaded. I was glad the summer was ending.

Then senior year.

I tell Akiko this part slowly.

The seasons turned and Cassie returned to New Orleans for her senior year; I went back to Greece for a few weeks and let her stay in my house in New Orleans till she could find a place to stay. Conveniently, the house across the street opened up for rent and she literally was a stone’s throw away; the house had a swimming pool and I could see into her bedroom window from mine. At first it seemed like the best of both worlds: we would not suffocate each other by living together, and would be close enough to go over for breakfast in our underwear.

The school year accelerated its pace, and the anxiety of what to do after college quickly dominated the landscape. Senioritis, as it was popularly called, had bypassed me. Cassie and I had been planning to go to South America together; her fluent Spanish would get us moving and I would learn along the way. We would drive through Mexico, sell my car and try to get to Brazil on the money we got for the car. But as the fall set in, our conversations about our journey became frustrating and I could sense that she did not feel comfortable planning. She was not the planning type anyway; her spontaneity kept me loose and didn’t allow me to drift into the endless regression of my analytical mind.

My fear of catching ‘senioritis’ put me in further denial about Cassie’s perspective on traveling. Much to my surprise, just before Christmas break we took a break from each other. She initiated it, and it came so briefly before the end of the semester that there was little time for negotiations; in any case I don’t think negotiations really work under such circumstances. I was going to South Africa to meet up with my parents who were gallivanting around in some Land Rover on the African savannah.

At first our split had not registered, and I often forgot about the fact that we were not together anymore. We had spent so many weeks apart from each other during our relationship that it almost felt normal. Africa and distance, though, once again made the heart grow fonder; the hunger for her started to kick in. Almost like withdrawal, the realization that I was alone cut into my gut and made me twist in bed till late at night. I wrote her a long email regretting our separation, but she did not reply. I didn’t feel any better.

During most of my free time, I tortured myself with memories, projections, and inappropriate jealousy; it hurt, a lot. I had lost her but I was sure it was going to be fine when I got back. We had plans to go to South America together, how could she bail out on that? We were made for each other, or so I thought. Returning to New Orleans and walking into my home, I suddenly realized the predicament I had just got myself into. As I unlocked my front door I gazed across the street in the late evening glow. Her window light was on, and I wanted to run over and say hi, but I couldn’t; I was no longer allowed to do that. The darkness of my house reinforced the chill I felt in my stomach, realizing that I would have to lie in my bed every night in full sight of her window and wonder what she is doing, with whom, and where?

I was taking a Buddhism class in philosophy and Cassie was in it; it had a mandatory meditation workshop 2 times a week. How was I supposed to go to meditation and have my ex-lover in the same room as me and expect to concentrate? My limits were being tested and in some fatalistic way I felt I deserved this challenge. A tantric opposition of extremes pushed me through my insecurities and forced me to deal with neglected issues. I felt that even though I was at an all-time low, there was still an opportunity to learn, to grow, and to expand.

Chen was a graduate student doing his PhD at Tulane, teaching the course as part of his research. He had this way of speaking, measured, deliberate, almost robotic in his stillness, that made you lean forward to catch every word.

Chen drew a diagram on the board:

Lithosphere, the rock layer of Earth. Biosphere, the living layer. And noosphere, the thinking layer. Each one emerges from the previous. Each one more complex.

Through February, my discipline and pride led me on the way, making me feel confident that I could overcome the tragedy that had dawned on me. I saw Cassie a few times a week and pretended as if nothing was wrong. The toughest were the meditation workshops, getting there and waiting in a quiet room with my shoes off, for the session to begin. Cassie was usually late and often didn’t come. The gong would sound, and as the echo lingered in the air, with my eyes closed, it seemed that every moment was a lifetime. I would catch myself checking the door as every other student entered the room, and if she didn’t show up….. let’s just say I didn’t meditate on those days.

I gave her space but asked her when we would get back together and how much time she would need alone. She would tell me, “Soon, just give me some more time.” I researched further into our trip to South America knowing she would eventually return; how couldn’t she?

Time went by very slowly, and as I compiled the information for my thesis, data stormed at me from every direction. My thesis was about a shift in consciousness that I felt was occurring, and focused on certain social phenomena that reflected this shift. The Internet and the information revolution was one aspect, but another was the increasing interest in the west toward alternative healing practices and philosophies of life. Life re-enchanted through the fruits of technology, deepening it through its accumulation of data and its cross-reference. The energy I had been putting into our relationship was now available for my mind to wander and some of the strangest synchronicities happened during those months. The more I believed in the myth I projected, the more it became a reality.

Excited and in need of sharing my thoughts, I couldn’t bear not being with her anymore; I needed to know if I could finish mourning and get on with my life or wait to be with her. One day after meditation we walked home together; I told her that I needed to know in a week if we were ever going to be together again. We flirted a few times and I felt the tingling sensation I had not felt since our first dates; it made me want her even more.

The week came to an end and we walked home from the same class again. It was a beautiful day, one of the first really warm days of New Orleans’s early spring. We giggled and threw innuendos around as the clicking sound of our bikes ticked while we walked them. She was so beautiful; her blue eyes glittered in the sun’s reflections, walking casually, wobbling her head as she soaked in the light. We got home and she told me she would have a shower and we could talk after that. Unsure of the possible outcome, I anxiously walked over to my front door. There were two messages on my voicemail; one was from amazon.com (I had ordered some books related to my thesis), and the other was from a neighbor down the street. I called her back.

She told me that she had picked up some packages that had been torn up by the high school kids down the street. She had then called amazon.com and reported the scandal; they in turn gave her my number. There was also a package for my roommate Damian; it had some photos in it that had spilled over the street. My neighbor had picked up most of them, but there were quite a few scattered further down. Damian had been in Italy over Christmas break, with his girlfriend and father. The photos were of their time there together.

I went over to my neighbor’s house and rang the bell. An overly polite southern woman came to the door and went over the story with me again. She then pointed me in the direction of the rest of the photos, which I could see in the distance. Thanking her and carrying the books and photos in hand I strolled down the road. I flipped through some of Damian’s photos; he had a good eye, I liked most of them. A trail of scattered photos lay on the sidewalk, like Hansel and Gretel’s crumbs; I picked them up till they led me to a white picket fence. Over the fence lay 30 or 40 more photos; they were black and white and didn’t seem to be taken in Italy. I jumped over the fence and looked closer.

Cassie was in most of the photos, on her bike in shorts and a T-shirt; it was summer, I could tell from the light. It looked as if she was posing in the New Orleans graveyards. Flipping through the photos I wasn’t sure what to think. Then all of a sudden one photo landed in my hands. Damian’s face dominated the frame; he was taking a picture of himself; he had a large grin on his face, and Cassie’s profile stared at him on his side. It was the look in her eyes that gave it away. At that moment I knew; I saw it.

The moment’s intensity pulsated the shock through my body; every moment of our collaboration had been betrayed, and memories flashed through me as I realized something sacred had been torn. A physical pain cramped my chest; I had never felt anything like it before. An ache that did not give way and twisted, in anger, sadness, despair, confusion, betrayal, guilt, regret, and every other negative emotion; they all surfaced together.

Running over to her house I attempted to calm myself from screaming down the street. I knocked on her door, but she did not reply. I waited, knowing she was still in the shower. Standing on her stoop, I rubbed my cold and clammy hands, anxious to confront her. As if I had to take a piss really bad, I jittered in place. I knocked again, harder this time, and I could sense that my desperateness was seeping through in my banging. She came down and hesitated to open the door; she sensed my immediacy.

The door opened, and she stood there in her bathrobe with a towel wrapped around her head. I could tell she was suspicious; her eyes quivered.

I told her the story about me returning home and getting the phone calls, walking and finding the photos; she stared at me blankly. I then mentioned she was in most of the photos; she still acted as if nothing was wrong.

“Who took the photos?” I asked her… After a long pause she said, “I don’t know.” I could not resist; I pulled out the photo of her and Damian, sticking it in front of her eyes. I said nothing.

Our stare penetrated each other’s soul as it hovered above the raised photo. It was the last time I looked inside her that far. There in the center of her black pupils, our dance flickered, as they glazed up and her eyelids began to trickle the bittersweet juice of our passionate times.

A short and potently painful civilized talk took place; I listened and then I spoke. Our lives had collided out of nowhere, and then 3 and a half years later, equally abruptly ripped apart, and the proof lay on the floor, in a photo that had faded, it had lost its power now, it had been released, it was just another photo.

Heartbroken, we hugged and said goodbye, she closed the door behind me. Drained of the emotional roller coaster, yet peculiarly alive and centered, I looked up and saw Damian leaving my house in a hurry. I immediately imagined Cassie calling him and warning him that the cat was out of the bag, and to flee and meet her at the secret hiding place. I saw them planning and taking into consideration my Mediterranean hot blood.

“Damian!” I shouted. “Can I talk to you for a second?” “I am in a hurry,” he replied and ran to jump into his car in the driveway. He was wearing a suede coat with fur around the collar, topped off by an old man’s hat; it was definitely out of season. I had noticed Damian’s style had changed over the past few months; he had become much more flamboyant, but I had never made the association. Everything made sense now. I remembered coming home early some nights from the studio and finding them watching some movie with a half empty bottle of wine on the coffee table. I would think of it as being a little disturbing, but I never thought … no that’s not possible. But it is, and it’s a cliché too, how could I be so naïve and self-absorbed as not to notice?! “You will talk to me now!” I shouted and he froze. I abruptly changed my tone; it was calm and friendly, honest. A brotherly confrontation began. There was nothing to explain; just letting him know that he betrayed me.

“So are you going to punch me now?” he replied. I went home.

Two weeks later he moved out; I wasn’t sure where to.

It had all begun in New York, that past summer when we lived together in my parents’ flat. She acted in his film; she was his girlfriend who got killed. He avenged her death in a short duel scene in Central Park. The villain who stole Cassie’s watch and then killed her was wearing my clothes. The only copy of this film and its transfer to video arrived in the mail the day after Damian moved out. After watching it I sacrificed the film version and kept the video.

I planned to go to South America alone.

Following data leads of broken links, sorting through conversations leaking through old emails, San Francisco was my first stop.

Akiko stops typing. Looks at me.

That's it? That's how it ended?

That's how it started ending, I say. The actual end came later. After September 11. After I left for Mexico.