Letters 1

Intro: I am going to write a series of short stories based upon memories and fiction in flow describing the life long communication with other humans - parents, lovers and who knows what other persons will step in to my stories. I also want to highlight the change in communication, that has taken place throughout my time on Earth. I hope, my short stories will stand as a statement on being human.

This is the first chapter:

“Hi Mom and Dad.
I’m doing well; I’m on my way to Luxembourg, and the train is nice and new.
I hope you are doing well too. I’ll find a good postcard in Luxembourg so you can follow a bit of what I see and experience.
Lots of love,
Your Son”

He was sitting in a compartment on the train from Hamburg to Luxembourg. At last, the journey had begun—the journey his mother had said, “NO – you must not go!” to. But he had gone anyway, because he had already paid for the ticket and she couldn’t afford to refund it, which had been his condition, if one could even call it that. Maybe it was just a late adolescent rebellion. In any case, he did not want to end up like his brother, who had obediently said, “Well, Mom, then I just won’t go,” when the urge to travel had once flowed in his veins.

The train was no express train. That wasn’t included in the travel pass. These were the slow regional and interregional trains one had to use. But in return, he could ride freely all over Europe. He was on Interrail. Other friends had already made the trip—usually with their girlfriend or best friend. He had neither, so he was making the journey alone.

Human beings are, after all, solitary creatures. Born and separated from the symbiosis with their mother, living life in different constellations, yet fundamentally always alone. Just as death will one day be something that happens only to the individual—an uncoupling from life’s great train.

He was philosophizing. The train rolled through a landscape that was new and different from what he knew back home. Out in the fields farmers worked, just as his father did. The tasks were simply different here, where there were vineyards and steep slopes. Did they even see the train passing by? Did his father ever notice the cars driving past on the road? A puzzle with millions of pieces, each only a whole picture for the individual—a motif no one else ever saw.

Was his own life not, in the same way, just a jumble of small singularities, which at certain points fit into others’ tabs and cutouts, but in the end amounted only to his solitude?

He was heading toward experiences and new connections. A kind of formative journey, as one might have called it a hundred years ago. Only the speed was much greater these days. People rushed by, and he did not know them, nor would he ever. The desire to experience was in the driver’s seat.

He would write a postcard every day on his journey. His parents should know that he was doing well, and that he could manage on his own—even out there in the big world they did not know and never would come to know. He would know the world, at least a part of it—a small scratch on its surface.