Why I worry about you

Andrea the Hunter has, once more, disappeared.
I know, Andrea is like that, every once in a while it just seems he has left the Earth for some other place, and no one knows how to reach him or where exactly he might be.
Judging from the sound I get when I call his cell phone (to which he doesn’t answer), I am able to say he’s in Thailand, although he didn’t tell me he was leaving. The latter is not weird at all: he often decides to leave Europe and takes off just a few hours later, without even packing: once he’s there, he only needs to buy a pair of Bermuda and a few t-shirts, so why bother packing? He usually just heads to the airport and get a place on the first fly for Bangkok.

I know what you are thinking: “Why the hell then should I worry about him?”

Things haven’t always been like this. There was a time when Andrea would come and go, and disappear even more often than he does nowadays, and I just knew sooner or later he would call or email me, telling me plenty of funny stories about all the crazy things he had been doing.

In 2004, he left for Thailand in early October. On his last night in Milan, we went out, drank, exchanged stories and hung out, then I kissed him goodbye and let him go. We traded mails twice a week more or less, and usually I had a blast reading his messages.
On December 23 I got a mail in which he complained about the bad weather (he was on the east coast), so I answered suggesting him to go to Phi Phi Island, I wished him a Merry Christmas, turned off my laptop and headed home to spend the 24 and the 25 with my family.
On the morning of December 26, I woke up very early to go back to Milan to the office. While driving to the station, at 5AM, I turned on the radio and learnt that the Tsunami had hit the Thai West Coast. They specifically talked about Phi Phi island as one of the places that had been more violently hit.
I immediately tried to call Andrea, but obviously thai cell phones did not work. The next step was to get in touch with his Italian “girlfriend”, who didn’t even know he was in Thailand.
I was still calm when I called Eivind, our mutual best friend who lived in Norway. Eivind told me he had Andrea’s last mail on December 24, where he said he was leaving for the west coast. And then, I started to panic.
Together with Evind, we called all the information centres about people lost on the Tsunami, we call Andrea’s mother who was in Finland (and didn’t appear much concerned), we tried everything.
During these days, a little voice inside me was whispering at my ear “If anything happened to him it’s your fault, you’re the one who advised his to go west, if he had remained on the east coast he would be safe”

On January 5, my phone rang in the middle of the night: it was Andrea. The Tsunami had reached him while he was boarding on a ship to PhiPhi Island. The ship rose, crashed on one side but did not sink, he had a broken arm (but later on he told me some people on the same boat had died), but he had managed not to lose his papers. In the following days, without any way to communicate with the rest of the world, without any access to hospitals, he fled towards the east coast, where he finally could be medicated in some kind of hospital. Only ten days after the Tsunami some phones started to work, and then he called.

A week later he managed to find a place on a plane from Bangkok to Amsterdam, from where a connection flight took him to Milan. I went to the airport to fetch him, it was snowing outside, and he arrived with dirty Bermudas and a t-shirt, his left arm plastered, and no luggage but his wallet. That night I took him at my place, helped him showering, fed him and then let him sleep in my bed while I took the couch. He slept for 20 hours, and in the meanwhile I went out to buy him a pair of jeans, a clean shirt and a sweater. On the next day he took the train to go home where his sister and his aunt were waiting for him.