Existential experience 

After the latest travel plans were clear and appointments such as the PCR-test were newly booked, everything was arranged and time for relaxation, and to joy, a deep sadness seized me. I thought of my family, my friends in Switzerland, and of the unruly Einsiedeln. Sinéad said you're regretting. No, I said, it is simply grief. But "regretting" is probably the same thing. The evening was nevertheless beautiful, also funny, and harmonious. Including the flambéed mushrooms with the fish, which Sinéad prepared in the copper-bottomed frying pan - based on my stories from my sheltered youth. The tinned peach halves and bananas doused with Cointreau and rum, flambéed under blazing flames in a copper pan, illuminating the room and delighting the eyes. This was the order of the day in Swiss kitchens, whether bourgeois or nouveau riche.

In the night I had another nightmare. The Dream Catcher did the job badly or just well, depending on the point of view. In my dream I was riding up this overhanging rock face alone in a chairlift, always in danger of slipping from my chair into the deep abyss. There is nothing you can do. The fear is there, the desperate grip, and just wait until the ride is over. Just jumping and letting go would have been one option, but that never occurred to me. I held on tight. So I landed on top, on this mountain shoulder, where a big house stood. I was inside. On this balcony, an open corridor that ran around a covered courtyard and connected the rooms - like in the stately house that Astrid once showed me in Xela, near Parque Central.

There I saw people, thought of a therapy centre. I thought I recognised a woman, maybe a therapist or a friend; she was sitting on the floor and her legs were dangling in the air through the railing. But no meeting came about. As soon as I sat down there, she was somehow gone. At the same time it seemed to be a mountain hotel, one of those horrible concrete boxes, with extensive cellars, infrastructure, and concrete corridors that echoed loudly and coldly as you walked through them. Corridors that also led back down to the cable car station.

In the middle of the night I wanted to smoke a cigarette because I couldn't sleep properly and my heart was beating in a fast rhythm. But I did not want to smoke. No, not again! I went down into this cellar, unsure whether I should go back down in the chairlift, and saw someone smoking - in a side room, something like a billiard salon or a cellar bar. And I asked him if he could give me tobacco. But he had none. It was confusing, he offered me something like a cigarette that looked like a capsule, a short, transparent green e-cigarette, with chambers. Tobacco, hashish? Someone seemed to warn me. They said this man was a drug dealer from Guatemala.

I woke up, completely. I had somehow been awake before, but now I was lying in bed, and how often, the storm lived becomes a storm in the head, and the body becomes the stage. Storm in a teacup. I thought of the fraud that a friend from Xela had recently experienced. I think the worst thing was or is, apart from threatening material losses, or even accumulated debts, the humiliation, the offence, the defeat. The punishment for simply wanting to help someone and paying dearly for their innocence, for their naivety - and painfully incomprehensible.

I knew that this could happen to me as well, although I had travelled far and wide. And I am Swiss, so usually rather reserved and careful. Right away I thought that this could be a bright, flashing red warning light, that in my case too there was a fraud in the offing, and that I was naively walking into the trap. A real conspiracy! No wonder, because I too am naive, insisting on being innocent, even though I know that this is not possible. Existential experience, as a human being, cannot be innocent. Not guilty either. Both at the same time, and not. Existential. Life can only be experienced, "suffered". Perhaps it could be better tackled with clear thinking, as I have been told countless times. But I simply do not know this. I only know limited thinking. Depending on the point of view. On movement. And of the person opposite, including the weather.

Now I am on my way to Guatemala. The trip is booked and it seems to work out probably now. But I have no idea. For a thousand reasons I decided not to go back to Switzerland to celebrate Christmas there. It was a difficult decision. But maybe it's clear when I say that in the meantime I've had a lot to learn or could learn, that I've simply lived maybe, always ready to separate the wheat from the chaff. Unrelentingly, persistently. I am awake, within the limits of my consciousness, of my experience, but, to go back to Switzerland, I have simply learned nothing "new", I have nothing new to give. Everything pushes towards Guatemala. Yes, the illusion, the task. What is the difference. Perhaps the big defeat awaits me, as my brother once desperately predicted when I insisted on my plans. And no goal, only the next step in sight.

I feel as if I am in Death Row again. It doesn't matter if I'm guilty or innocent. With my head bowed, I walk down the corridor. Anxious, collected. Defeat is not in the future, it is right here, it is contained in every breath.

Perhaps it sounds strange when I say that I feel like a war correspondent. Always at the front, at the border, where the conflicts are being fought. Sinéad says, put on the bulletproof vest. Me, against what? It's not courage that makes me do it, sometimes I rather call it desperation, or simply inner necessity. Perhaps just a consequence of my eternal breathlessness, my restlessness, which has always accompanied me since the beginning. I told Sinéad yesterday that I am still pursuing the same dream of reconciling the contradictory forces of my life, the same forces that I see at work in - or in my - whole world. Often I see that there is no other way. It is simply life. I have to live it, I have to do something, find out what I can and cannot change. Maybe it is senseless, but even this senselessness is a human invention. And I am human, after all, and must give my life meaning. But meaning can only arise "underfoot". And maybe it is simply a sensory experience. Just like the tree, the leaf that "breathes", or the one that is now whirling in the autumn storm and glides to the ground.

PS: The kitchen floor is mopped, the kitchen is tidied up, compost in the garden, waste and recyclables in their corresponding bin, and coffee and breakfast are prepared. The hungry cats are fed. I am ready.