Part eleven: Through the Pass

 

 “December 8^th “ I whisper to myself as I lie in bed the next morning, I wiggle my toes and then stretch long and luxuriously.” So this is it, my last day.” Funny how I it just doesn’t feel any different than yesterday but then, life is like that I guess. Someone dies and people mourn but the moon doesn’t stop rotating around the earth and the earth doesn’t stop spinning around the sun.  I look out my window and the snowing has stopped, now it’s a pristine blanket covering the roofs and hills and lawns pillowing the noises into it’s softness so that there is that beautiful quiet that only happens after the snow falls. The sun is shining and causes the snowflakes to sparkle like diamonds on the windowsill, and the sky above the mountains is a perfect blue, not quite the light baby blue that comes with clouds but not the dark either. I think about the day ahead and wonder about the weather, I had expected a terrible snowstorm, which would cause the car to slide or something like that, but this day looked like the perfect winter day. Things in the mountains are different though and while my valley can be still and peaceful a storm can be raging just over the next pass I think to myself while getting dressed. I grab my bag and take the letters from the side pocket, then I lay them out on the neatly made bed ready to be found. I glance around the room, it’s a mess really but then I don’t have time to clean, I’ve slept in and I have to a two hour drive ahead of me to get to the airport on time to meet the exes flight and get my bags. I sigh, feeling sorry for the person who has to clean this up but even as I think it I am closing the door behind me and heading up to the castle to get the car.

 

The drive through Pass Thurn is stunning; it always is but today even more so since the fresh snow is still untouched on the mountains around me. I turn on the music I have planned to listen too and turn the volume up so that I can’t hear anything but the songs. As I make my way through the zigs and zags that are mountain roads I feel al lightness of spirit that I’ve never known before, I am not tense at all as I expected to be, I am not afraid as I thought might happen. I am simply here, in this moment and it’s beautiful. Josh Groban’s song ‘Your raise me up’ comes on and I crank it even louder as I merge onto the autobahn and I can feel God raising me up, lifting me higher, doing all of this for me so that no matter what happens today, with the ex or with me, none of it will matter because I am lifted high enough that it can’t really touch me. I am on God’s shoulders, like a child who is raised on their father’s shoulders I sit and enjoy the new view. I feel safer than I have ever felt before. While on the autobahn I start seeing signs for the Munich airport, I merge into the slower lane and make the exit. I keep waiting, waiting for the accident, for the screech of tires, for the collision, the pain but nothing is happening and the airport is now fast approaching.  As I make my way around the final turn and into the airport parking lot I figure it must mean it will happen on the way home and I am okay with it but mildly disappointed that it means I actually have to face this guy again. I play the song by Josh Groban one more time for a reminder and then grab my purse and keys and walk towards to arrivals entrance.

 

I don’t have to wait long, thankfully it was only a few minutes before I could see him walking through the security gate, my gut sank when I saw only one bag, one that looked only half full. I knew I wasn’t getting most of my things back and my first instinctual feeling was anger but it settled before he arrived in front of me, they were things I kept saying to myself, it’s just things, over and over again. He smiled at me and went for a hug, it was awkard but I guess these things naturally are awkward, it’s not like I have had to do this before to know what normal is. I tells me he has two hours before his flight back and asks me for lunch. I think about this for a moment because I would really just like to get back in the car and leave but he flew across Europe to give me my things, or some of them anyway, the least I could do was have lunch with him. So we went to the café that was closest to the security gate and found a booth to sit in. Everything I think of to say sounds weird so I am keeping quiet, letting him do most of the talking but mostly I am watching the people around me and listening to the song on the radio in the background. It’s about a girl dying and I can’t shake it from my head and then I hear him, he’s fading back into my consciousness and talking about me going to Canada. He’s telling me how stupid it is, that I left it behind for a reason blah blah blah. He says he loves me, he looks at me and says he loves me and I break open, but not in the bad way that happens when something ends, it was more like a birth, like a chicken breaking out of her egg and seeing the world for the first time. I am still not sure why it happened that way, but all of a sudden this man wasn’t someone to hate or be afraid of or even dislike. He was a man, he was human and as such he was as broken as I was, he was someone that God loved and there was a new freedom in that knowledge. I smiled at him, I try explaining my Canada plan to him, but he didn’t understand and I can’t expect him too when I didn’t understand it fully self, especially in light of the last week and the knowledge that I was going to die. Nothing made sense I said to him, but I just know that God has a plan for me and I am following it no matter what. He just nodded and after a few moments they announced that his flight would be boarding soon so he walked me to my car and put my bag in the back seat, we hugged goodbye and I got behind the wheel. He was still standing there when I drove out of the parking lot, staring at me like I was something he couldn’t quite understand.  “Thank you God, for having my back in there, for raising me up and for giving me painless closure” I whispered as I merged back onto the autobahn heading to Austria. This would be it, somewhere between here and the castle I would die.

 

To be continued…