a very long summer out of doors

Looping conversation with a lady sitting on a park bench. She had met her husband at the age of sixteen when she stuck her hand up through the sand of some faraway place and took his. Maybe on the other side of the world. Maybe Australia. This was painful, she explained, “because I’m just 5’4″ and the earth is 40,000km deep.” So, ah: that’s how you met? Well, no, we actually got married earlier, when I was five. She sat between three bulging sports bags rimed with grease. She’d been homeless for 93 days. A very long summer. The conversation had first started up with her objection to the idea that, Well, it was cold, but it’s autumn. “I prefer ‘late summer,'” she said. I passed her my tray of chips and she sat with it on her lap, half laughing, before passing it back, unable to share. “Ordinarily, I would love to. But I’m too drunk.” She was intelligent and kind. She had polished off a bottle of apple schnapps and was working up the energy to go buy another. A friend of hers, a fifty-year-old punk with a seamed face and combat jacket, stopped behind the fence and they talked about collecting bottles. At the centre of the green, fenced square a brindle dog leaped at one passing furry friend after another, demanding play. After her punker friend had gone I brought the conversation back round to her husband but still can’t work out how it all was supposed to have happened. We kept looping away from the questions I most wanted to ask. When you met, how did you work out it was him? How did he work out it was you? Did, like, both of you remember this strange experience, feeling someone take your hand from the far side of the world? Why didn’t it work out between you? Or did it? As he is still “my husband.” So then is he homeless too? Where is he now?

This is a story from a strange encounter back in Berlin, eight years ago today.