A Journal of a Non-Traveler

This was just another hot day in Konstanz. The air felt unusually stuffy as if the green parks around Bodensee could not produce enough oxygen for myriads of tourists who flooded the town. It was a long 9-hours working day at the souvenir and clothes store, where I now was peeping through the long but a narrow window of the attic. The little grey band on my wrist said, „Konstanzer Seenachtfest, free entrance.”
Sitting, or rather hanging from the windowsill, with my nose flattened on the glass, I was all in the black sky. The festival, my Chefin (as my female boss liked to be called) was telling me all about ever since I came in May, was about to start. My senses were already a bit dizzy after a long day, two glasses of sparkling and enchanting prosecco, drunk at the terrace to pass the time between selling the last jacket and climbing the windowsill to be waiting for the firework of the summer. And here it was. At first one or two blows, to get the first “wows” from the crowd overflowed from the pedestrian streets into the waters of the lake. The first shy flowers in the sky were followed by the falling stars and more flowers which bloomed or maybe died to please a drunk crowd lost in the perception of the beauty, which we were all too earthly to comprehend. And then there was music, the fire sparkled and illumed the night sky, while the music filled the air. Was it an illusion? No it wasn’t. The flowers followed the hand of an invisible conductor and danced like little swans carried by the notes above the lake.
And then there was e hand of my Chefin, touching mine. Did I hear the hidden tears in her voice as she said that it was the schönest thing she had ever seen? Was she feeling lonely and regretting her crazy life and not having a girl, her baby daughter girl, the one she never had, and the one she tried to find in every one of us working at the store. The enchanted air was now getting fresh and filled with prosecco coming from the glasses. The last blows of the canon brought the mystery to an end. Relief was what I felt. The senses were stretched to their uttermost and one more strike seemed to break them as a string of an overtuned guitar. Was I about to faint because of the hot working day, too many sips of prosecco, or realizing that a second ago I almost told my Chefin, that I wished I was her daughter.