Jan´s accident Part IV: Time with David, holding on in dark times

Start here with part 1!

Today is the day I can see Jan again! I´m super nervous and full of adrenaline again. I chose to tell my team that I will run the Online summit. I can improvise with my little netbook and phone and it will be good to have something to focus on that will make ten thousands of health seeking people benefit and that gives me some daily routine.

I´m orienting in this mysterious guesthouse. It is a beautiful place, marble everywhere and old, handmade furniture. Extravagant decoration. Just my room is a dark, tiny whole under the roof. I have a hard time keeping my stuff in order which is really not like me. I don´t really care in that moment. It fits my inner state.

I give myself small creative projects. Buying healthy gifts for Jan to support his mental stability and physical healing. I get Vitamin D and Vitamin C to prevent inflammation and support collagen regrowth for his bone and the damaged tendons and skin, also secondary damage from the surgery. In the standard medical system the focus unfortunately only lies on outer interventions, not on supporting the self healing mechanisms of the body. Some earplugs and melatonin for both of us, because our sleep is completely messed up, and sleep is just super important for rapid healing. I also feel migraine-like neurological symptoms and fatigue from the stress myself, not just from the events, but from the whole year. Using my own Vagal Nerve Stimulation device. I have to wind down or else I will risk adrenal burnout again. I´m sweating like crazy all the time.

I´m also writing some beautiful, encouraging love letters to Jan. I have also asked all our friends from the island via messenger, also some of Jan´s old friends and family from Finland, to write a few lines what they love and appreciate about Jan. When I am feeling like in a funeral already… Why wait to tell good things about someone and give flowers until funerals? Let´s give this gift to each other during our lifetime.

Finally, I am walking to the hospital. They are organizing it in such an uptight way. I have to fill out a form in which it tells me the dates and time in which I can come to visit. Every three days for 15min in a timeslot they give me. I´m feeling intimidated, but also some healthy anger is brewing in me. At least I don´t have to make the test. I cannot imagine being touched in that way, especially not in this oversensitized state, it would bring up too much of my own medical childhoodtrauma with a lifelong systemic autoimmune disease.

Finally, I enter the room, see Jan again. I take off this stupid mask, hug and kiss and just hold him. My body starts shivering all over, finally some long held trauma can start to fall off. Tears can float. We just hold each other and look into each other´s eyes.

Then we get the next hit. The old men in the other bed in the room starts speaking in a very annoyed way with us. Some deep unfelt fear of death is creeping through his voice, thrown as hostility towards us. How I can take of my mask, his wife also didn´t touch him and was just sitting in the chair in the corner when she visited him. If we don´t behave, he will ring for the nurses and I can never come in again. We are struck like from a lightning belt. I just look at him in disbelief with my eyes full of tears. Anger rises but I put on my mask again. That would be horrible to be sent out again and not allowed in anymore. The guy keeps talking and now he got Jan angry (it is not easy to manage that!) and he tells the guy that now it is enough, that we are doing what he says and that Jan was also not talking to them when his wife was visiting. We feel super uncomfortable, lost and trapped. It´s quite a contrast to our naked free jungle life.

I obey, but there is something in me that tells me that the last word is not spoken in that matter and my time for rebellion and freedom will come again. I give Jan his gifts and lots of words of encouragement. I´m so sorry for his poor leg in that big metal construction. When I leave, and of course I give him a real goodbye kiss, the old men in the neighbor bed is starting to apologize. I now realize how deeply uncomfortable he is, as he has calmed down and really seen us (I spent more than the „allowed“ 15min in the room, enough time to settle down for everybody) and realized what he has done to us, how he let projections drive his behavior. I just nod calmly and friendly to him and wish him a good recovery, and I mean it. I just see a very lonely, very scared old man who is in fact also longing for the level of closeness that Jan and I have.

The next days are a rollercoaster of feelings, always waiting for news from Jan, and also my father, talking more with my mom again, spending a wonderful time with David. Some days I still have to be alone and I am completely shut down, other days we are getting closer, sharing many things from the heart, processing together, many aspects of our lives.

David´s wife has been an opera singer, she must have been a very wonderful woman and they have built up a beautiful community together in Paris and supported lots of young artists in their studio for free. David keeps up their lifework, it keeps him alive and in the present moment. David is keeping surprising me with amazing activities. What is going on? I feel like he is reading my deepest needs and wishes or like the universe has sent him to me like a complex early Christmas gift, like Jan has already been for me. I can really feel that I am guided and there is an allseeing and allknowing entity that loves me and really wants me to be happy. That no wish is too big, too mundane.

We are visiting the theater, musical events, are going kayaking, to massage, art exhibitions. David even invites me to restaurants and a shopping tour. I really have to let a lot of resistance and mistrust in the goodness flow through me. I still have so much to heal around men. What a merciful teaching I am allowed to experience here. Why do I always keep and keep going in my ivory tower until the breaking point and why am I keeping myself so short, why is it so hard to fulfill my own longings of the heart? Am I just here on this planet for working? Yes, this has been going on for many years, I can´t blame this only on the Covidsituation and the emigration. Yes, I was scared and paralyzed to leave the safe nest I had found on Graciosa even though I felt needs of seeing something else building up. Working is also a way for me to feel like I am in control. But also yes, I had a hard complete life with limited resources and paralyzing fears, but now it is really time to wake up and allow a new era. If we don´t own our wishes they will start to fly around in an uncontrolled way. They will be heard and manifested eventually in one way or the other… And then the fear again. Why is it not possible to experience this together with Jan? What does that mean?

We visit the organic vegetarian Shop and Café from BioAzorica in Praia da Vitória (back then the only Bioshop in the whole Azores, they also have a restaurant in Angra do Heroísmo in the botanical garden, Casa do Jardim) and after that the place where they get their vegetables from, the producer BioFontinhas and meet the fascinating and enthusiastic owner Avelíno Ormonde. I am thinking to myself that Jan really has to meet this man one day, they could be twin brothers from their energy and their way of thinking! Avelíno gives me a recommendation about organic chicken food for our Quinta and a very nice restaurant that uses his salads and veggies, which David and I visit for lunch.

I enjoy seeing Jan again after three days. There is still no change to this stupid rule, at least nobody is saying a word when I stay way longer then the 15min. Jan is already looking better, he has started walking around with the crutches. But he is strictly forbidden to leave the storey. We get no real information, are not treated like customers, I feel more like cattle or machine parts that are waiting for repair. The food for Jan is not too bad, but without fat and salt, so I buy salt and butter for him and fresh fruits. I must admit that I was fighting heavy guilt to immerse myself in so much enjoyment with David, but Jan is just encouraging me to be happy and take good care of my needs. If there were any demons coming up for him, he was bravely processing them on his own. The second surgery is delayed again and again. We just hear rumors, that a nurse has Corona, the surgeon himself has Corona… Nobody is sitting with us and explaining us the procedures, how things are developing with Jan´s leg.

Jan and I are talking via videocall everyday. Every morning the only thing I can think of, before I can do anything else, is to get a life sign of him. It feels so good to just talk and talk, not being active in any way all the time. We are connecting on a completely new level.

The days are just flowing into each other. Were we supposed to come here for only 3 days? Its over a week now. Our friend from Graciosa, Giulio, had moved into our Quinta to take good care, also of the garden. He finally managed to recover the string trimmer out of the deepest underbrush, hanging from a big rock, in the backside of our land. It is a mystery to him and to me, how Jan managed to work there and creep all the way with this big wound to the place where I had found him. The pieces of the blade are untraceable…

I didn´t bring many clothes so I just start to wear the ones I had brought for Jan. It´s somehow a nice break to live off from very little after becoming a farmowner one year ago.

I do some online work. My health summit is running very well and I make interesting new acquaintances. I had been too overfocused on just one person the last half year. I realize how unhealthy this was getting. Also a very nice young couple moves into the guesthouse. I spend some time with them, it also heals something in my heart after the breakup with some friends.

I feel winter coming. The days are getting shorter, the weather colder. Things are getting darker and more challenging on the same time. Suddenly they close the hospital completely! I was so looking forward to meet Jan again after three days and when I want to enter, they don´t let me… Now they even have a security guard in front of the elevator. I´m really freaking out. On the street people are suddenly honking at me and with really panicked gestures want me to put on a mask. The News are increasing their brainwashing from the continent. Pure cruel arbitrariness.

I meet the owner of the guesthouse, Goreti. A very special, older lady, super sweet, somehow like from some strange movie. Her husband died from cancer a few years ago and David starts helping her fixing several things on the house. She really likes us both, invites us for dinner, washes my clothes. She has lots of cats, a guinea pig, a turtle, a single goldfish in a round glass, dogs…

On the new moon I make a bike tour on my own, Goreti has borrowed me a bike. David is also biking, he just naturally takes distance on days where I just cannot connect with anybody, when I am like in a fog. In some very calm natural place I just lay on the ground and sleep for over an hour. I feel on a deep level refreshed and renewed when I wake up again.

I have to make peace with that I cannot go back home again. I will definitely not go without Jan. I will stay as close to him as any possible. What I have experienced in spring was just too extreme. Not just my husband was shut out of the Azores for almost 4 months, I heard of many other families who were separated for over half a year, merciless. I have witnessed several friends from my island having a parent die in the hospital here on Terceira and nobody of the family was allowed to be at their side in their last moments and no funeral. Even though there were almost no severe cases in the Azores. They were deeply traumatized by this experience. I was so deeply scared.

The days keep floating by, I have to live with complete uncertainty. I´m feeling so sorry for Jan. David has to leave, his holidays are over. We sit in the evening outside on a bench in front of the guesthouse and speak a long time. We are so grateful for each other´s company. Such a mercy that the universe made our paths cross. This experience has changed us both forever. We are both sure that we wouldn´t have done all these fun experiences on our own. It was already so brave of David to travel alone for the first time, despite all the emotions and the loneliness it brought up. We were both guiding lights for each other to opening up to the joy of life again. We have done a lot to inspire each other again. I so wish him all the best on his healing journey. There is still a mountain of heavy stuff he has to face when he is back home. We are in contact ever since. Here you find the first part of the novel David is writing since 2012, which is mostly playing in Japan. The events of the fourth book will take place on Terceira and are very influenced by our time together.

Part 5