Cochem and the Lorelei
It’s always a love story when there’s a castle involved. I’ve known this since I was just a kid, and because of that, I avoided castles for as long as I could. When I decided to ignore the advice of a fortune-teller last summer, and went off in pursuit of a woman who reminded me of someone else, just to get over someone else before that, I knew I’d made the right decision. Now I even think that the fortune-teller knew I would ignore the advice, that this was also in the cards. But her name was…her name was…in this story, we’ll call her Lorelei.
We’d met about a month before I became entranced, and nearly crazy, but when we met, it was one of those stories that sounds even sweeter in retrospect, and at the time, it was also something that I knew would change the way I experience heat and flame. She found me in a cafe, I was wet and no longer interested in the usual things that please other people in the world. She must have had a soft spot for gloom, because she was sitting next to me and talking about places like Cochem, hotels close to castles where you could hear stories written on the whispers of the Rhine, and she also told me some secrets about how to transcribe music from the beyond.
She was so charming, and so spooky, that I fell under a spell. At the time it was almost like drowning, but now I see it as the feeling you get before you wake up. There were moments in there that turned into nights, and after a rain storm passed, she said she was passing through, too, and I didn’t know what she meant. A month later, I was trying not to sleep because every time I closed my eyes I would dream about her. She said that somewhere between the south of Slovenia and the narrow part of the Rhine I would meet her double, her shadow, that might know the gesture to unlock my heart. One night, at the edge of near madness, I whispered her name to myself one last time, Lorelei, and I’m still too melancholic to know for sure if the river answered.
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