Over the last two months my girlfriend was preparing her costume for the carnevale in Venice. She'll go as a [[Pierrot]], white, millstone collar and round black tassels, a white mask with a black border and a golden orange circular pattern. Pierrot is the sad clown who never gets what he wants and she started developing the concept back when she was feeling heartbroken, as the first project to do in a new year, a gap year to find out who she wants to be in the future: be in Venice for the carnival. When she presented the costume to me the other day the situation had somewhat changed and Pierrot is actually laughing happily, though the tears are never far away. I made a picture, two friends told her the costume is fantastic, I told her that I am proud of her ingenuity and my diary will be my witness that I am finally coming to grips with the role I can play in her life without giving up my own: the enabler and confidant of a restless and ingenious mind, present but firmly connected to the world at large, to balance out emotionally. The mask is particularly important. In 2011 one of our first trips together consisted in borrowing my granddads old green Mercedes and driving south. We participated in an open air representation of "Die Fledermaus" in Moerbisch, where a friend of mine who had taught me solfeggio, played the violin in the orchestra and gave me 2 tickets. It was cold and so we had to leave early, pestered by the security of the parking lot who thought I had stolen the car, insulting my friend by not honoring her gift to a point where we never spoke again. I was to move out of Vienna shortly and didn't know how to maintain friendships, give and take, include people in my life and open myself up to theirs. On we went to Venice, the car parked in Mestre. We tried some couple things in the dingy hotel room and somehow broke the shower, flooding the whole room. The next 2 days maybe we took to Santa Lucia and from there surely walked around town. Although I don't remember much, it is still a surprising amount which comes to me while writing down these thoughts. We went to the Guggenheim museum, made fun of Peggy's style and including her daughter or some other relative into her collection, we marveled at the balcony view of the grand canal and dreamed of becoming someone like this ourselves, rich, radiant and bathed in art. We went to Murano where I bought a perfume bottle for A, we went to the cemetary to see Stravinsky and the shoes on Nijinski's grave. We went to sit down somewhere on the canal grande, in the sun, saying how Venice really isn't a romantic city at all, just a tourist trap and it stinks. Those were the young people with opinions and dreams who 14 years later still talk about the city, at times in Italian, have been their 4 times, know the important artists and are finally moving to a life dedicated to art, although not sipping Select Spritzes on the canal grande. They also bought a Venetian mask, following the more romantic inclination of A, I of course would have proudly refused going on about lack of authenticity and consumerism. My girlfriend however had found a small shop, run by a very old woman with an extremely coarse voice, which back then made me think of the problems my aunt had, no English, a bit rough around the edges but very elegantly unpleasant as an old Italian lady can be. We bought the mask, went on to a nearby piazza to eat spaghetti al nero di seppie which I will never in my life order again and then drove home, via Duino, where Boltzmann ended his life and Rilke wrote his Elegies contemplating suffering from the act of self reflexion: Im Lieben unzulaenglich, im Entschliessen unsicher, dem Tode gegenueber unfaehig and then northwards through the Dolomites which a couple of years before, when my mother had taken me in her little red Suzuki to introduce me to Italy as the origin of European culture, had appeared to me under heavy rain as nordic giants battling out the fate at the end of the world, while Liszt was playing from a ripped CD-R. ... many of these thoughts just came up again while writing. Some tears. And I am grateful. The city is still there but this little boy trapped in his inner world of art and tragedy isn't. Or he grew and merged with other modes of living, has been seen by different minds and sees differently where things can lead you, when you start building your own roads.