I meet love.

I meet a man I couldn’t imagine being more wonderful. Handsome, clever, well-educated. Full of love for art, culture, cinema and language. What follows is a time of wonderful, intense encounters: intellectual, sexual AND emotional. This is new to me in this form and with this intensity.

We love each other. And yet we meet at the wrong time, in what is actually the right place. On 15 October, he leaves Vienna. The decision was made before we met. Vienna, MY Vienna, wasn’t good to him. He has everything. Except snow-white skin. It hurts me that he experienced racism here.

I can’t cope with this amount of happiness and this lousy timing. Two more days. Him with me on my fucking 50th birthday. My world would look completely different. I’d probably have simply flown away with him for the weekend.

It all touches on my idea of Europe, too. I want a Europe that actively shapes immigration and gives people a genuine chance. Not because it would be easy or that everything about it is great. But because we need it ourselves. And because those of us who won the birth lottery owe more to the Global South than we’re willing to admit.