- Confucius, chinese inside-out balls and a kiss...

As usual, she trembled; she always did that whenever he touched her. This wasn’t a real “touching” just hold hands, or the occasional caress that went a little far than the just friends stuff. Maybe out of the “appropriate”. She never complaint, she only trembled. He gave her a kiss that went more than the usual touching lips. They went to have a nightcap next door to her place. He was never going to understand what was happening in her mind, she is not really a crystal person; there is so much that she hides.
He keep learning from her, but it all was superficial, every time he tried to get deeper, she will move away, it was just like the famous “Toreros” in Spain. They perfected to a form of art evading the bull, which was the art that people praised; it is a practice, though brutal and inhumane in many senses, that was the nearest thing to real life. He was the bull trying to get more from her, trying to get inside her, know her at a point that her DNA was no more a secret. She was proving to be a master of the fight; no way she was gong to get caught.
Last kiss goodbye and then he went alone, to his small world, empty, cold, but filled with his memories and this time he had some physical object that she gave him, things that he can cherish and touch whenever he had a need for her skin and the elusive contact of her lips. She said that every part of his B’day gift was a representation of a place he had lived. So that meant she had been listening to him all this time. One object was especially interesting and of course, became his instant favorite. He will touch it, cold but it will warm inside his hands. I t was made of stone, a perfect definition of Ann. Concentric spheres, one inside the other, Chinese philosophic view of the world, there is a finite number of worlds that live inside the one we present outside, each one of them is completely free in movements, as long as it follows the rules : has to contain the more deeper ones and has to keep the space limitation of only moving inside the external one.
He thought that it was probably not intended this way, but it came to explain many things of her behavior. He felt the urge of having her next to him, just to hug her, be there for her. Today was a revelation, he took a decision. It didn’t matter what happen between them, he will always be there for her. He will not allow anything or anybody to hurt her again, he will try to uncover her inner spheres and bring them out into the open. According to Chinese, the best of every human being was at your birth, yes, you guess it right, and that is the first small one, completely non-carved, sparkling, perfect. Time is the carver, it start building difference between all of us, it starts leaving scars, small, big ones, witness of its pass. Like rolling through the snow or mud, you start getting a thicker cover. Must people will just keep going through it without understanding that it is not in the outside (you cant change the size of the outside) but inside…
Time goes, and you start looking for your inner piece. Emotions, spiritual, gets you inside, material bring you back to the outside. The best tool to carve inside and start looking for the core of you is meditation.
Every human has to find its own way to meditation, some use music, some use breathing, yoga, tai chi, arts crafts, drugs and the most common search for your inner is alcohol.
He doesn’t drink that much, and drugs were out of question. He had done it all at the right time. Most of it before or during college.
Ann seems to be connected through musical notes, she likes music even he has never seen her listening to it. Maybe at her desk, from time to time, but never outside. Now that he thinks of it, she has never turn on the radio during their numerous escapades around Toronto, and he had never seen her touch the Bose system at his apartment.
But definitely she knows a lot about it. Does she? Question to parking lot with so many others, that still today he has not been able to get answers for.
Music seems to be a connection to a world that she really breathes. And she takes care of building relationships into it, mostly what she will call “underground” music that it is in his mind a way of telling the world that you are not yet famous, but you may be one day.
He decided it was not time to go to sleep, hell, it was his birthday, he deserve it.. He has work very hard all his life. He took his iPod and went directly to his favourite songs, of course, all his songs are about life and how people get hurt during love, or falls in love , it is always about some kind of conflict between two and around emotions that are not expressed in full motion. From Toni Braxton, Bryan Adams, and that is just the beginning, if he starts going into his Mexican boleros and some other romantic stuff, that the younger singers have taken as part of their heritage and bring to new generations.
He is a classic romantic, a looser in his own terms, for him, romantics can only loose, and there is no way to win. Even you get hurt or you hurt somebody, it is the worst piece of human games, you can start being a dominant in the relationship and then suddenly, without even noticing it, became the victim. And of course, there is no limitation of the number of times this game can go on and on. He loved doing this: rationalize what in due true has no way to be rational. Heart matters are nothing that can be explained with DNA or algorithms. That is his passion, numbers, he feels so comfortable with them, and they are so predictable.
The heart is never predictable, you are supposed to be free and let your heart roam around until it find the soul that will go with you for ever. But you have to play so many times the game; you become “tainted” like the bulls of his infancy. You can never bring twice a bull to the Fiesta. The animal is sacrificed and will never go back again, he prepares all his life for just one time. Love should be like that; you get you chance at it, and then no more.
But of course, things are never the way it makes sense from a rational perspective. Human beings are part of the equation and that makes things impossible, they actually had created a full-blown science out of it: chaos theory.
And, he realized that all those thoughts were just to make a case in his head; it will not happen this time, he could manage the relationship with Anne.
The problem is, love is like any other drug. When you are addicted, when you are a “romantic” you need to be very careful. A never again, will not fly. Unless you are so busy that your mind can’t get you there, then you have to be moving. Constant movement means no possibility of building relationship that will drag you into the realm of romantics. And really romantics were not the danger : it was the predators. Predators are all those men and women that take advantage, conscious or not, of the romantics. They enjoyed watching them do stupid things, like master playing with their marionettes and when they are tired of them , they just exchange them for new ones.
Now music was getting into Cat Stevens, Rolling Stones and of course The Beatles… he was tired, left it where it was and decided he was not going to solve a fundamental problem of human beings (at least his problem and some other people he had talk to) in one night.
Next day came very fast, parties all over the place for him, his B’day is big thing. He went to New York that weekend, spend time with his daughters and have some fun with old friends. He could not keep her out of his mind. Something will have to be done.

It was time for him to do something, so he went and got her a new computer. She moving by herself has left her without a connection to the WEB. Her face when she saw the iMac could have won any contest. They set it up and went into getting her to regain her way around Mac’s. Too many years of PC have slower her understanding of the magic word of Apple. He also got her an iPod. That was a complete gear for her soul.

It was the end of the year, Christmas was coming and the new years parties. He was gone with the family almost all December, skiing, not that far away from her, but he enjoy so much when family comes from down south. They love the snow, mostly because they can have fun with it and they don’t have to live with it for many months.

He took her out of her mind, and he bet she did the same. Not a lot of messages going back and forward, he didn’t have access to a full service on the web, just the bb, and he tended to spend most of his time at the top of the mountain or going down as fast as possible. He learnt to ski in California, northern, he used to spend lots of time in San Francisco. During winter, he learned that during winter the moment it started raining in San Fran, it was time to hit the road all the way to Tahoe. Snow was perfect. He learn from the pro’s and very soon he was doing it like a natural. It was easy for him, at a very young age he learn how to do water-ski, and even this is different in essence it conveys the same skills. His legs were always the strongest part of his body. He was never too good with anything that had to do with his arms, and especially he had to remind himself several times that after the accident many years ago, during his honey moon, when a speed boat drag him for several miles, with a rope around his left arm and all his tendons were severed. At a small town in a Mexican northwest resort, a great intern doctor, doing his social service, went over doing one of the greatest jobs seen, he tied almost everything so perfect that when he went back to the big city and ask to be checked by all kind of specialists, none of them said they could have done or do anything better.
He kept skiing, did some Tennis later, and finally end up in the golf thing: business plus a bonus. Golf was the only sport where it is ok to talk, smoke and drink. It played perfect to his strengths and sins. While the drinking piece he could go without it, the talking and smoking came perfect. Also he was a walker, that is why he loved big cities. Places he could walk. He didn’t like Texas and California for that matter, he couldn’t walk any place. He was probably the only person that actually was thinking on buying a place downtown LA so he can walk to work everyday.
This year there was not enough snow during December, so skiing was bad, but then in the mountains, with his daughters, family from hometown and other friends, it went really fast. Small commute for one day to sign the famous suit: me against the government.

January came and things became hectic for him. It really started with a sense that he was wasting his time, that he was not going anywhere, not that it really mater for him. Hi slife was being wasted in an environment that wouldn’t produce the next generation of anything, much less something that he could be proud of.
Politics has become so frustrating that he decided to go for all or nothing.
He was brought to this company, with a “super” team of other 5 top executives, to fix the company. It was a weird process. They contact him 4 years ago and told him about a very large corporation that decided that the only way to get themselves out of their current paradigm that predicted they will disappear in less than 10 years if they didn’t change their course. Very typical corporations that cant turn the ship without external help. Sometimes you need the famous “tug boats” to turn the largest ship when it comes to change directions.
So here he came to do this “once in a lifetime” trip. Back to the cold north, with its marvelous people, its small town community and where nobody seemed to be local, everybody came from some other place in the world.
And things were amazing for almost one year, then his boss left and environment start a deteriorating process that by this January was almost unbearable. He was supposed to go every year to the largest show in Vegas, Consumer electronics. He has done it every year since its inception, it is kind of tradition. This year he was forced to cancel, but for the first time he was happy. He was going to be able to spend some time with she.
She was unaware as him that he was falling in love, step by step, by the book. It was feeling so good… he has not done this in long time, so he is afraid, but she makes it seem so natural, everything is so comfortable. She doesn’t ask for anything, neither he. They just seem to build an impenetrable cocoon around them when they are together, nothing seems to be able to penetrate it and less disrupts it.