This is the running joke--i.e., the Hans Story--that has existed between Sophie and me for quite a few months. It exists after the break, and it's coming to a close (and p.s, enjoy):
Towards the end of 2011, after another move had left me feeling listless—this time to a home in the suburbs of Cleveland, to a house I owned yet did not feel fully welcomed—I decided to reach out to Hans, among others, sending an email to his old inbox, even though we had not communicated in over ten years. Within a few days he responded, and from then we would talk with some regularity, each response a rest from the otherwise lukewarm gruel of undifferentiated form reports and pleading, passive phone calls. I’d learned that his father had died, that Hans was living in the inherited bungalow among brackish pits and dried thistle of the Valles Caldera (Hans’s words), that his reluctance to continue in the house grew with each forty-minute drive for basic groceries and wine. Still, I learned that this was his nature’s call, as he called it, that through the wildness of his immediate environment he might alleviate any last regrets he’d had over his father’s death (as he put it, his reaction was to otherwise brush it off, to be lackadaisical until his father was well in the grave.) We corresponded mostly in generalities, the emails comforting in the way that only the carnation gauze of nostalgia can be. And the more I used him, the more I found the camphor and fluorescent hue of the general office to be not so important.
It wasn’t until the spring of the following year, when Hans’s emails grew darker, the tone shifting from platitudes to a more matter-of-fact self loathing, that I decided to visit him, to use some time I’d accrued to fly out to Albuquerque. And under the pretense that it might break up his monotony, Hans agreed.
Which is to say that, in this regard, we found ourselves in concert.
Really, I'm only posting this for your love.
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