Christine was away on a business trip. The first time in three years and four months they had been apart. Vincent asked Christine how much writing space she’d grant him today to express the way he felt about her. He often did that. He needed some boundaries or he would float off into an endless romantic fever dream.

She granted him ‘half a page in word, Verdana, 12’. Christine was half Palestinian, half Austrian and Vincent, one hundred percent French, knew her mental health had been a mine field since October last year.

He sent her: Spilling my love for you on half a page

You’re the big bath towel over my shoulder right after stepping out of the shower and right before the cold air can hit me. You’re that first mouthful of French fries with home-made mayonaise after I haven’t had them in a year. You’re that feeling when you wake up in the morning and you realize you still have three hours left before you have to get up and you can dive deeper into the covers and every part of your body feels like it’s anchored in just the right spot. You’re that first time one realizes people were capable of making something as beautiful as the Sixteenth Chapel. You are the smell of freshly baked croissants in the morning and the taste of summer slipping through the open windows. You are that first night of spring when it’s warm enough to go out in just a T-shirt. You’re the first evening of the year one can have dinner outside and the lengthening of the days fills you with a sense of opportunity and new life. Our potential turns my body into an arcade with a thousand pinball machines with players competing as to who can hit the balls the loudest. When you put your hand anywhere on my body I feel like I am an electrical music instrument that’s finally being plugged into its power source. When I rub my hand over your stomach I no longer know where my body ends or begins and for a second get afraid I will cause you physical harm with the voracious ferociousness of my desire for you. I have been sucked into you and only come out to return the favor and swallow you whole and suck you into me and then the reverse again. You’re the first time I discovered Playmobil cowboys and Indians as a kid. You’re the first time I heard the theme to the movie The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. Seeing you wear my black and red ‘I don’t get tired in bed, I can read all night’ T-shirt makes me realize what it truly means to be a man who loves a woman. You look, feel, move, taste and talk like you were breastfed on sexy girliness potion. The vulnerability you so easily facilitate turns me into a steady rain of white-pink-red marshmallows showering you with my love every moment of every day. So many of them you can snowboard everywhere you wish to go on a thick coat of marshmallow paste. Am so hooked on you that if you were cocaine literally every person in South-America would have to retool as a cocaine farmer to keep up the supply. You’re that incisive rollercoaster feeling of the soft-heavy-soft-heavy build-up of a grunge song. You’re all that times a billion. You give me the most all encompassing happiness, joie de vivre and rocket fuel aliveness I have ever felt. The only feeling even better than that is knowing I have made you over the moon happy today and every day. You do to my mind what Louis de Funès did for French film. If Jacques Dutronc had met you in his twenties all his songs would be about you. Your way with words, the carpet bombing way you penetrate and stimulate all my senses, your fast and versatile sense of humor, your cheeky playfullness painting the most outstretched smiles on my grateful face. You have found my start button. How could I not wish to plunge deep inside you with all that I am and turn every second of your existence into a celebration of who you are?

She wrote back that for two minutes she had stopped agonizing about her family in Gaza. She liked everything about it, except for the use of the words ‘carpet bombing.’ Vincent apologized for that. She forgave him. ‘I know you didn’t intend it that way.’

At that point Christine had already lost four cousins to Israeli bombs, two aunts and three uncles. Luckily all her siblings had left Gaza. One lived in Jordan with her husband, one ran her own surfer school in Malta, one had a small restaurant on a small German island in the Baltic Sea. She herself had settled down in Vienna, where her parents still lived, and had a relatively well-paid job at the Freud museum. A job she combined with her own business, selling beauty products via Instagram. That’s why she was in The Netherlands. To team up with some very clever Dutch traders.

The worst hit was her mother. She had way more memories of Gaza than she or her siblings had. Her father had never been to Gaza. He was Austrian. They had met at university. Love at first sight. The same thing Christine was experiencing with Vincent. He had spotted her at the library of the Freud museum and he didn’t even have to say anything. She burst out laughing the moment she saw the way he was staring at her. She could hear herself saying: ‘We a have Freud café too. You can stare at me over coffee.’ He had been so stunned by her beauty all he had produced was a squeaky ‘ok.’   

Christine was on a very light pill to lower her anxiety now. The doctor said she wouldn’t have any side effects. That was not exactly true. Christine had never been so thirsty. She was drinking four, maybe five liters of water a day now. Her anxiety was less, but it was far from gone.

She asked Vincent to copy what he had written by hand. Christine loved Vincent’s handwriting and as soon as she got back home she wanted to put the love letter in a wooden chest where she kept everything Vincent wrote her. He wrote her a letter or a poem a day, so after more than three years the chest was half full.

Poems written on the back of supermarket receipts, napkins, postcards, candy wrappers, beer coasters collected from bars for the express purpose of writing her, quite a few of them written on fancy letter paper he got from a specialized shop.

She thanked him for the letter, said she could feel it was a particularly passionate one today and got ready to go to sleep in her hotel room in Amsterdam.

The next day Christine was on an early flight back to Vienna.

Her mother had hung herself.

Why?

Hard to say. Empty nest syndrome? All the news of relatives, old friends, neighbours, people looking just like her or her children being displaced, maimed, starved killed and being blamed for their own deaths?

The lack of social warmth in Europe she often complained about?

Old age kicking in? Her beauty fading?

Joint pain from gout that had been tormenting her for half a decade? The boring diet she had to stick to in order to avoid painful flare ups?

A combination of all that?

Christine never recovered from the death of her mum. She always thought that if Israel and the rest of the so called civilized world had looked for a real solution instead of just slaughtering her people her mum would never have taken her own life.

After losing her mum Christine refused to have children. Not even with Vincent. It was a hard pill for Vincent to swallow. He had already imagined her exquisite beauty and majestic elegance passed on to their children.

‘This world is too rotten to put children in. It would be a crime.’

Vincent never tried to sway her, he could feel her mind was made up.

He doubled down on his poetry and letters for her.

The wooden chest filled up, then another and then another.

In a sense all those words of love, passion and dedication were the children they gave birth to.

No matter how much Vincent tried though, nothing ever filled the hole the passing of Christine’s mum left.

He wanted nothing but bliss for his queen and so it’s fair to say the suicide of Christine’s mother broke him too.

One day, during a rather too expensive holiday Vincent had saved for the whole year, Christine had been silent and moody all day.

As the sun was setting she stared out at the sea and said:

‘Violence against any human anywhere is violence against us all.’

Christine died first.

At 62.

Breast cancer.

Vincent spent his entire retirement advocating for peace.

Even at 78 he was the most active member of an organisation that organized pedagogical trips to Gaza and The West Bank. He was the most knowledgeable guide on 14 different trips.

The only thing he was really proud of at the time of his death – accute kidney faillure – was that he had truly loved a woman, all the way, every day of his life, from the moment he had spotted her adding three copies of ‘How the French invented love’ by Marilyn Yalom to the book shelves at the Freud museum.