Aug 6, 2015 TW wrote:

Dear Klaus,

Even though you have been dead for two years, I of course continue the discussions and laughs we had every evening for the 4 years I was stuck in Copenhagen, and afterwards when I moved to Hamburg and then back ‘home’ to Italy. Although we excavated every possible subject, the most recurrent dig was always psychology, and I had as much fun helping you interpret your patients’ dreams as you had trying to follow my life’s incongruities. -The greatest of which was the undiminished, profoundly psychic, yet dangerously destroyed love I detailed in my first novel, Banquet of the Sapphire Moon, which I wrote many years before I met you. This is the novel I never wanted to write, but as you must know by now, sometimes the message determines the medium.

Today, 20 years later, my email contained an apology from the novel’s heroine (or Fury), named in the book as Celeste. She does not know the novel exists and I never mentioned it to her -I doubt she’d want to subject herself to it. I discovered her website by accident while searching for something else -she appears to be living as both a designer and a new-age medicine vendor- and so I sent a very few words wishing her well and received a surprising response.  I am passing her words on to you because you sympathized with my twenty-year (and permanent) devastation, and because her email confirmed the diagnosis I reluctantly described in the novel. But more important than any clever diagnosis is how her heart somehow came through everything she’d undergone. The heart I always maintained I had in fact seen and known. I expect you can still read between human lines, and there are some other interesting things here. You can also see from her writing that what I had written is still in her soul. Her pain however appears nowhere near as overwhelming as it was when I knew her. Nothing to be done now about any of it, of course. I’ve myself have been a walking corpse since then anyway. And now you aren’t at the bar for me to show this to you, so I’ll just have to send it on this way, hoping it brings you another smiling solution to add to your heavenly casebook. Here are some of her words:

Aug 5, 2015 M******* wrote:

Wow. Tristan,

What a shock well Venus is in retrograde, a time for old loves to come back into the now. I guess we are all a part of more than I know I like to admit.

I know this sounds really fucked up to say but I actually am surprised you are alive.

I am surprised to hear about the family, but not Italy. I have a son, ******, my love. Happy for you. I believe I have had a dream of all you describe here in that style that is only yours.

I would like to hear more about how you are working as an artist. I am ready to grow now that my son is grown, and feel tired of what I have been doing for the first time. You really did in some way help me find myself that way.

I think it is fair to tell you as you probably knew I was struggling with some pretty severe trauma when you met me. I went through a long healing process and rebalanced my system with food and minerals and good water. You deserve an apology from me.

My going through hell was my journey. I had biochemical challenges then that I did not know I had and healing from that was hell. I am ok like everyone is ok in this thing of life as it is on earth. I do not see one person, even if it is love that can give anyone all they need. I think being oneself changes with the tides on any given day. To me life is a moment by moment breath by breath choice to live the best we can.

I am just learning now what a healthy relationship feels like. I have to say I am better on my hard days than I ever was on what I thought were my good days of my youth. Have peace about me…I am so happy that you are where you are and with a loving family that needs you. This makes me so very happy.

Thank you for the shock,

M*******

[Celeste -TW]