Remembering Macedonia. Chapter Five. Tropical Storm.

And we decided to leave. Leave behind this world of illusions and step out out and feel the earth beneath our feet and the breathless gasp of life clamped in our fists. The Great Renunciation. Just that, for all the life in me, I just couldn't place what there was to renounce in this joke of a world, in the first place.

The seven beer bottles had sweat in the humid midday air and left round pools of condensation on the cracked, ash-strewn wooden table. The air was choked with cigarette smoke and the sultry smell of scanty rain. Smoke and the funeral pyre of life as we knew it.

Nirvana. Parinirvana. All that was left was the divine rebirth into eternal time. The ashes scattered into those round pools of time.

I was sitting by the highway - my fraying linen shirt open to the breeze, my faded jeans soaking up the sun, my half-torn boots growling impatiently on the sand. I could see Alex walking down from the horizon, his shoulders held up, his feet striding over the incompetence of melancholy. The sun shone behind his back, and the breeze on my bare chest brought the tattered loneliness of lavender and Mac's perfumed hair.

While they stood in the alley, his head already swollen with cold beer and summer rain, he was assaulted by the very same scent that clawed through his senses and made his hair stand on end. He would have taken her then and there and lost himself in those shadowy groves of her hair. That scent of loneliness.

But they didn't speak a word. He brushed a lock of hair from her petal-pink ears, but his whisper came out as a sigh. He smiled, as his fingers drew a line down her cheek. But her face was drawn and her lips taut with the grimness of a stormy sea. Her eyes caught him in a distant silent stare - Midas and Medusa locked in this woven tapestry of fate.

It was not that she understood. But neither did she question. But those eyes were filled with such a density of resolution that it shocked and scared Alex for the only time in his life.

The black hole of desire. The singularity of dismal fate.

When he turned his back to her, his paces decided as always, Mac didn't keep staring on or drown the silence of her existence in long-drawn wails. She tied her hair back and vanished into the unreal brightness of the tropical day.

But waiting by a deserted highway, I heard tears that never came trickle down her face. Somewhere, far away, a tropical jungle would be battered and lashed by incessant torrential rain. Or maybe it wouldn't rain for a thousand years forth.

Alex was by my side now, his face lit up with the jubilation of life, and the freshness of every breath he spewed out into space. He gave me his arm and I picked myself up, shaking the dust off my jeans. The sun behind our backs; the night, the road and eternal life spilling out of the horizon.