It is 5 a.m. here in Berlin, and I have just gotten out of the bath . . . I am going to make some tea and lie in the dark and listen to music until the sun comes up, and then I will eat a handful of magnesium and sleep till noon. In the evening, Isabella is coming all the way from East Berlin to my Dracula Tower to edit her commercials with me.

We’re also going to record her voiceovers . . . and I think I’m supposed to help edit her script beforehand. Wow! I guess this is a kind of job now.

She asked me for some stills from the footage we shot so she can make QR code stickers to leave in bar bathrooms. Apparently they will prominently feature this image:

That’s my dead body in the background.

On that note, I’d like to place my Sentimentality Hat upon my head for just a moment. Yes, I know it resembles a dunce cap . . .

Now that I am wearing the hat, I have to say this (one feels compelled): there are these strange moments in time, reliably several times a year, when people from The Past reach out to me. I know a lot of people, and most of them stay within my orbit, but there are certain people who come and go over the course of many years. Often, at some point, they’ll decide to stay permanently, and we’ll talk all the time. I like it best when people decide to do this, but it’s up to them what they want to do. Sometimes you’ve just got to go back out there for a little while.

The ones who go to the farthest reaches of the universe and then spin around and come see me again . . . they don’t even have to knock when they get here because the door was never closed to them, and I’m always the exact same person they remember, and I’m always happy to see them. I get the sense from them that it feels like they are coming home.

Recently that temporal rift was reopened and thus some phantom signal came out from it. Something as huge and as old as God must be moving backwards in outer space, and heeding its inverted silent wail, remembered faces come in from the dark. I glance up and there they are again, and they all look a little sad. My instinct is to let them rest.

The other night when I received a dozen or so messages from one such person from my past, I felt a feeling in some part of me I had not visited in a while. Someone very special to me was standing in a place she had once stood before. And upon seeing her there again, it nearly knocked the wind out of me. The enormity of seven years between two points in time was instantly collapsed, and now there was nothing between us other than the distance it takes to extend an arm and touch the other. I felt that outward arm reach for me first and I pulled it close to me. It is a decision your nervous system makes for you in the time it takes to breathe.

She knew that it was safe to come on back around . . . she had, after all, seen the large conical Sentimentality Hat, which had gotten stuck on my head twenty years ago. And upon fully entering the pleasant gravitational field in which I inhabit, she was pleased but not surprised to find that the HEARTH was reliably HOT. I had kept the fire burning bright all that time.

What exactly had stirred her and brought her back my way? I wondered at it. Maybe she felt lost inside herself. Maybe someone had betrayed her. Maybe life had got her down. Hell, it could have been all three, and then some . . . hey man, we all know how that goes. But if I were to somehow put my Detective Hat on top of my Sentimentality Hat, I think my best detective’s guess would be the simplest one: she missed me. I missed her too. I reckon now we’ve just got to figure out what to do about it . . .