Give Me Your Account Number

Day eighty-six, Turkey. I have very little left. The plans haven't held. The work I was going to do from the road is not coming in the way I imagined it.

„Give me your account number,“ says Tatjana. „I'll send you something. Whether you use it to go on or to come back is up to you.“

Just like that.

Tatjana Böselt runs a restaurant in Hiddenhausen and I know her from the business network we both belonged to. Good kitchen, warm room. Before I left, every visit there felt like a short holiday.

„You're not at peace with yourself, are you?“ she had asked me out of nowhere in the autumn of 2021, after one of our weekly breakfasts. I remember the question going through me like current.

„Er — yes. More or less. There's this dream I have.“

I have had it since I was twenty. In 2004 I made a first attempt by plane. In 2008 a second. I got as far as the Himalayas, three hundred kilometres from Kailash in a straight line.

What stopped me was not the mountains.

I flew home from India and put the dream away, and it stayed away for fourteen years, and it turns out that a dream you put away does not die. It waits.