I took the morning train down to Starnberg and immediately exited the station onto a stunning view of the lake, stretching as far as the eye could see, towards the distant mountains. Seagulls squawked in squadrons down by the shoreline, flitting by and angrily telling me to fuck off, in so many words. I politely ignored them.

The café on the water’s edge served the usual German staples. Pretzels, schnitzel sandwiches and coffee, of the Italian variety. I ordered a cappuccino and took a sandwich. “To go,” I told them. They talked back to me in broken English, and I ordered in broken German. Somehow, we made it work. It wasn’t a marriage; it was a coffee order. 

Wielding my coffee and sandwich, I took a bench by the lake, next to a young woman, beautiful, with golden hair and a white beanie. She took a pen and a notepad out of her pocket. The pen was pink. She began scribbling, taking down her own impression of the scene. When she looked up at me, she smiled, then looked back down, taking more notes. I had become part of the sketch, part of the scenery, part of this remote German town, packed with tourists and Italian coffee. I had half a heart to fall in love with her, the other half was lost somewhere in the past. 

To my left, a man stood by the edge of the lake in a bold orange jacket and grey pants. Two other men circled round him, snapping photos and video. “Like this” they said, turning his head. His bald scalp glittered in the sunlight, competing with the glitter of the lake waters. The snap of the cameras competed with the squawk of the seagulls, swooping overhead, frustrated by this new incursion into their territory. 

The gulls had no models, no Instagram celebrities or fashion brands, and in their nudity, they represented the fierce indifference of nature to fashion. Long after the man was dead, and the photographers were kicking up dirt, the gulls would continue to reclaim the shoreline, taking back their territory, making sure that humans were never welcomed here again. But for now, the humans had made their incursion, and the gulls parted for them, reluctantly.

An old man walked by, old by my standards, probably mid-sixties. His glasses were an orange-green and rounded, like something Bono would wear. He paused in front of the bench next to mine, undid his jacket and gloves, and took a serviette out of his back pocket. He then patted the bench clean with the servette, scraping dirt onto the concrete below. He then placed both gloves neatly down on the bench, and promptly sat down on top of them. 

Secured in his protection from the dirt, the man’s shoulders relaxed, and he hunched down and stared up, at the passing gulls, at the mountains in the distance, and right, at the pretty girl. He considered her for a moment, a moment longer than I had, but she didn’t raise her head to greet him, so deep was she into her notes, that she would not raise her head for the rest of the afternoon.

As the sun came up, the pier became a carnival. People appeared from every direction, storming the gang plank. They posed for photographs on the bench to my left, smiling ear to ear, then repeating their thank you’s – Danke. Danke. The gulls paid them no mind.

The sun flickered over the waves. People bathed in the sunlight, as if they were at a nude beach, as if they were already nude. Their thick coats seemed irrelevant to the impression of heat, to the impression of summer in the midst of winter, to the desire for the sun to get warmer, larger, and rounder, to pierce through their thick winter coats and allow them to feel alive for the first time in months.

Another old man passed; his hands clasped firmly behind his back. He was wearing a baggy hat which came down to touch his rounded spectacles. He glanced sideways at me, nodded, said guten morgen, before continuing down the path. His stately stature had the gulls parting automatically, without any sign of frustration.

Some men interrupt nature, and some men are part of it, flowing with the river and curving – their bent backs matching the shape of the mountainside, as if they were carved out of the rock themselves. Respect is not earned but born in the quiet and the meek, in the strong confidence of the old man who can part the seagulls with his walk.

I turned to find the young woman on her phone, broken out of her reverie. I was on mine too, and together, we had become a symbol of our generation – distracted and cold, even under the hot gaze of the sun. Realizing this, I put down my phone and I stood, throwing my paper cup and packet into the rubbish. I walked over to her. There was something I was meaning to say.

–

This is part of a short zine of mine titled: Love, Travel and Italian Wine.

This short publication is now available for pre-order on Amazon.

In Love, Travel and Italian Wine, the European continent comes alive in gripping vignettes, flash fiction and poetry, with each story like something out of a dream. In a journey to discover art, poetry, music, literature and philosophy in the humble beauty of graffiti sprayed onto canal-side walls, the protagonist learns to resuscitate his dying creative embers from the ashes, to see the world anew, and to discover a new way to live. From the slow meandering of an afternoon in Rome, to the rush of a Berlin nightclub to a conversation in a quiet café with a Ukrainian refugee, the book unveils a nuanced picture of Modern Europe, and is equal parts travel diary, poetic self-discovery and photo essay.