Compass

I remember the tall-ceilinged room with French doors opening to a petite balcony, where white curtains billowed like sails, carrying the existential fantasy playing out before our eyes, beneath our finger tips and between our lips; her name was Silke, and she was The Princess of the Darkness of Night. We met on the rooftop of the hostel in Sevilla, members of a motley crew sitting on the warm tar in the glowing redness of late sunset blurring into twilight. A group of travelers sharing time and jugs of red wine and cans of warm beer beneath an orange-blossom scented sky, morphing into new shades of blue. She sat next to me in our ragged circle, and I asked her name. "I am the Princess of the Darkness of Night," she said. What does one say, sipping a beer, new to town, on the cusp of the instant, when a woman with amber eyes and smooth bare thighs tells you she is "The Princess of the Darkness of Night?" "Well I am the Prince of the Light of Day," I said.

We laughed out loud for quite some time. That introduction carrying the weight and warmth of ten thousand words and the walls between disappeared almost instantly. We carried on with beer and song and I went out and got more wine. A Frenchman played guitar, we sang and some danced and people left and people joined, the wine was good, the air warm and the sky blurred into blackness; Buds of starlight blossoming across the canvas of night. After a while, we both got up without really saying anything and she followed me to my room. It was dark in there, not cool nor warm, but a gentle temperate atmosphere. The hostel had once been a home of an aristocratic family and that room had been the master bedroom. Silke was six feet tall with a swimmer's body and a fraulein's twinkle in her eye. She walked gracefully to the bed, sat down, lit a joint and the smoke rose, a pale ghostly swirl against the dark shadows and the white sheets of the bed. I stood by the open doors and the balcony hanging over the alley. The long white curtains blew in like a veil across the vision of Silke, seated with good German posture on the edge of the bed in a room in a hostel in Spain I never imagined I'd see…

Praise the Lord, that compass inside of me I've tried so hard to find and free, seemed to be working perfectly.