This short story is a (longer) work of fiction, not a short blog post. You can also download the e-reader version here.

Question: what is it like to live on the slope of a volcano?

Answer: the volcano doesn't mind.

The mountain house we viewed was a dream. We had ventured far from the crowded downtown area where we lived in a cramped shoe box, hoping to establish a solid base for the next phase of our new relationship, which, to be honest, had been shaky from the start. A gap in age and East-West culture threatened to pull us apart; surely a house in the middle of nowhere would bring us together. The secluded villa revealed itself at the end of a meandering private road: a massive, utilitarian block of weathered white tile and aluminum window frames, surrounded by jungle. Its three floors were stacked precariously on an artificial terrace on the steep mountain slope overlooking the valley below where Taipei sweltered under the hot sun and a blanket of smog. The overgrown garden harbored a large pomelo tree. The living room was twenty feet high, with massive, tall windows and a spectacular view of the city and the mountains in the far distance. The price was suspiciously low, but then we saw the master bedroom with its full-length balcony and a shiny parquet floor like a roller disco, large enough for ten beds. We signed on the spot.

The rear view of the house revealed the two wind-swept peaks of Datun Mountain towering above us. Their gentle flattened tops looked worn down by centuries of typhoons and torrential rains but were actually the remnants of the rim of a volcanic crater. Datun was one of the seven volcanic peaks that formed a fire-crafted ring around the city of Taipei.

As a Dutchman, I have no intuitive sense of volcanoes: they are just mountains that deliver free hot water. I knew from the Discovery Channel that volcanoes can have an imposing temper, but these rare brutes were easy to recognize. Like mean street dogs, they growl and bark in warning, they looked angry and smelled bad, locals stay away from them. As far as I knew, most regular volcanoes were more like aging Golden Retrievers: sedate, sometimes a little gassy, but generally harmless. Our Datun seemed like a gentle giant: a lazy, jungle-covered friend watching over our house. My girl was from the South, where there is less geothermal activity, so between our blissed ignorance of geology and our eagerness not to let this amazing opportunity slip away, we took it. We were in love. What was the worst that could happen?

The first night we slept on yoga mats on the floor while our furniture was in transit. We made love. Her goddess silhouette was outlined against the ridiculously cinematic skyline of Taipei in the valley beyond the huge windows, endless towers with blinking red lights reaching into the azure sky. The scream of a night bird from the jungle below startled us, then made us laugh. Still naked, we stepped out on the moonlit balcony, alone in the world. A large bat floated by, imperious black against blue, gone in an instant. I never felt further away from where I had come from, yet never more at home than at this moment.

At sunrise, we walked out into our garden and watched the city far below shudder into life. A cool breeze rolled up the slope. A persistent smell of fart hit me like a foul mountain spirit, so real you could almost taste it.

"Did you…" I asked hesitatingly. Our life in the small apartment in the city had promulgated a few rules for bathroom use: no knocking, no talking through closed doors, an obligatory ten-minute grace period after use. We were both what I would call "poop shy", and since our new castle had four full bathrooms, we were both looking forward to a lifetime of voiding our bowels in complete isolation, floors apart. Sheer bliss. Now this. She threw me a withering look. "Well, it wasn't me" I countered weakly.

But then the morning wind wafted up some more fart, which enveloped the house with the smell of a thousand rotten eggs, mixed with fireworks. We went up to the rooftop terrace and quickly spotted the source: a valley far below, gray and barren, where large clouds of steam erupted from bubbling mud holes crusted with patches of bright yellow sulfur to a low rumbling sound like distant artillery fire. "I'm sure we'll get used to it," I said optimistically.

Strangely enough, we did. The human nose apparently can only take so much. After two days, it became bearable. After a week, we did not even notice it anymore. We could comfortably eat our breakfast on the roof terrace amidst a stink that would make a skunk respectfully jump to attention. At sunset, we ritually toasted our new friend Datun Mountain behind us with cocktails on the rooftop.

A month later, on a peaceful midweek evening, it happened: a loud bang, as if a truck had slammed into the house. Recently hung paintings flipped off their hooks and our startled cat inflated into a furry ball under the sideboard. What the hell?

An earthquake. Not the standard Taiwanese ones to which I had gotten used to, which in Taipei usually manifests themselves as a gentle, mildly disconcerting swaying of tall buildings. This was a violent, single hammer-blow. We checked our phones. In Taiwan, there is a government app for everything: tsunamis, typhoons, floods, the impending war with China and earthquakes. No big warnings. The government pedantically listed it as a "small regional earthquake of no significance". Go and tell that to our cat hissing under the sideboard, I thought, my heart still racing. The app's map showed the epicenter as a small red dot right next to our house. A minor tremor, barely noticeable, except for those who happen to live right on top of it. But then: who in his right mind would go and live right on a fault line?

As the hot summer lingered into October and then slowly faded, we adjusted. We fought, made love, tried to tame our jungle garden and drank too much on our rooftop garden, but then a change crept up on us, imperceptibly at first. During our early morning hikes, to escape the worst of the morning sulfur breeze, we noticed more and more how the house was perched on the lower end of a very steep slope of a muddy, dense jungle, covered in large boulders, reaching all the way up to the wind-swept summits of Mount Datun. Basically, we lived at the bottom of a giant geological slip-n-slide: one mountain sneeze and we would end up in the stinky valley below, covered by a mile of mud and rock. Were we… safe?

Taiwan is a small island – the size of Holland (or West Virginia, if you will) but it has over one hundred peaks of more than 10,000 feet. It is located right off one of Earth's most active fault lines, the so-called Ring of Fire. Its capital Taipei, with its three million inhabitants, sits on top of a gigantic magma chamber which is either the remains of an apocalyptic event eons ago, or a delivery room for the next impending doomsday next week, depending on who you ask. Taiwan has countless hot springs and fumaroles, all surrounded by state-of-the-art monitoring equipment that measure every flatus and eructation to determine whether the next Big One is imminent. Experts agree it is a matter of "when" and not "if", but geologists have a habit of living on a time scale where "soon" can mean next year or ten thousand years from now. It could also be in the next minute, they always add with a sense of glee.

Both curious and slightly worried, I called the geological department of Taipei and was finally connected to a kind geologist with bad English. "Is the Datun volcano dormant or active?" I asked him. He sighed audibly. "Ah… Datun", he said wistfully, as if I had asked him about an adulterous ex-wife he still longed for. "Datun is special. Not easy to understand." "But dormant, right?" I prompted. A long pause. "We say Active Dormant", he said finally. I tried to imagine what active sleeping looked like for a mountain. Tossing and turning? Sleepwalking?  "So active or dormant? Which one is it?" This time, his answer was unequivocal: "Yes."

Moving back into the cramped, smog-covered city was not an option anymore. Wed loved the space, the view, the isolation. We made our peace with fate and surrendered to living on a volcano. We embraced Datun, with all its smells and rumblings, as our neighbor and our true landlord. On hot summer nights, we stood on the roof terrace and looked out with a mixture of pity and glee at the city sweltering under its hot blanket. The old pomelo tree defied all expectations and yielded a bumper crop of large but inedible, fibrous yellow citrus balls that we would sling into the jungle below for fun. Dinner guests, who ventured the long trek up the steep mountain, would usually require a moment to recover from the acrid smell before their appetite returned, but we hardly noticed it anymore. Sometimes, after a typhoon, the torrential rains would swamp the hot rocks in the valley below and you could taste the brimstone on your tongue, like eating sparklers. Life was good.

After the first-year honeymoon, reality started to bite, with the same tenacity as the industrial-sized mosquitoes that came to dine on us every evening. Living in the jungle is one thing; living with the jungle is quite another. Poisonous snakes, giant centipedes big enough to hunt mice, Japanese hornets and even an insolent Macaque monkey became regular visitors to our house. Black mold with an insatiable appetite for leather and canvas invaded our closets and ate our shoes, bags and jackets. As the winter rains came, blanketing the mountain view with rolling silver clouds for weeks on end, out home was starting to smell like a bad retirement home: fart, mothballs, mould, disinfectant, bleach and the sickly-sweet floral overtones of bug spray. Weekends were spent on repainting rooms, scrubbing clothes and rescuing our garden from the invasive jungle creeping in from all sides, winter or not. We dangled our ruined leather shoes from damp clotheslines. We were cold – bitterly cold, because the house had no heating and our puny electric heaters were no match for the high-ceilinged rooms.

 We had no money, which is cute and romantic if you live in a downtown shoebox, but downright embarrassing when you live in a three-story villa. The house was mostly empty, its promise of a grand life never filled. Our startup company was hanging on for dear life, making us enough to live on, but not enough to live the life the house implied. In the spring, to furnish the cavernous eight rooms, we would ride our second-hand scooter at night to the nearby affluent neighborhoods of Beitou, the city at the foot of our mountain, and go dumpster-diving, dragging our treasures back up the steep hill. Summer came and we slept on the roof under a canopy of stars to save on electricity for the air conditioner, turning poverty into a romantic sleepover under the watchful eye of our friend, the active dormant volcano. We also fought a lot– over money, of course, and the messy divorce I had brought into our lives. We worried about our future, because surely, this could not be it – camping in a moldy box full of second-hand furniture in a forest miles away from the city where things were moving and happening.

Determined to dig in, I shipped a container full of childhood memorabilia and personal items over from my home country, an expensive folly we could ill afford. As I unboxed my uprooted treasures, I realized how futile it all was. My photo albums, my books, letters and drawings; all remnants of a remote past life I could never share with her. It was the detritus of a life that did not even belong to me anymore. I had traveled too far without truly letting go, and now I was clinging to a volcano and to a box full of souvenirs at the same time, trying to belong where I obviously did not.

The house was beginning to feel like an additional problem instead of the solution we hoped it would be. Reality had come back to haunt us, exposing the gap in age and culture that we had romantically mislabeled as "interesting", but which no mountain castle could fix. Tired of the repainting and fixing the leaks, we became vagrants in our own castle; moving from one leaky room to the next. Somewhere in that process, we started to move apart as well, each picking different rooms, dragging our few possessions with us. When our cat meowed in confusion about where to sleep at night, finding us in different rooms, we would sometime drift back together for a moment, crying and clutching each other like shipwrecked lovers in a sea of tears.

As the summer drifted past, a rift formed between us, a real fault line that threatened to shake things apart, not with a gentle swaying of a Taipei earthquake, but with the sharp bang of a hammer's blow. At first, we decided we needed more "space", which is the panacea for any broken relationship. This was the perfect house for drifting apart, with plenty of space to be lonely. We retreated to our own rooms on separate floors, like hotel guests merely passing through, each with a different destinations.

The rumbling volcano, the humid jungle, the oppressive heat, the sea salt from the ocean beyond the mountain and the corrosive sulfur from below slowly ate away at everything. Our lumbering wheezing air conditioner finally broke free of its corroded brackets and crashed two floors down, spilling a sludge of rust, crumbling plastic and decaying insects. My childhood books were gradually eaten by fungus and bugs. Metal toys and childhood collectibles slowly oxidized beyond recognition, crumbling in my hands. The love of my life started to firmly close her bedroom door, the click of the lock loudly telling that I could pick any room in the house except this one. The cat's confusion on where to sleep turned into a desperate wailing at night in front of closed doors. My past and present were disintegrating before my eyes.

When our lease came up after three years, we said goodbye to it all: to love, to happiness and to the volcano, our stinking, rumbling friend. My love moved back to the deep south with the cat. Alone in the vast empty house during the final weeks, I spent the remaining days dropping off the furniture we had so lovingly carried up the hill to a downhill charity.

I found a new home in the exact opposite direction, a cheap flat way out on the north coast, as far away as I could get from my love and our castle without leaving the island.

I now live near the beach, miles away from the city and the Datun volcano, which I can still see from my window in the hazy distance. Summers bring the smell of waffles and fries from the coffee shops on the beach promenade, winters are mild, wet and deserted. The area is less seismically active, but I am within walking distance of two aging nuclear reactors located in what is often called Typhoon Alley, the storm-blasted corridor between Taiwan and Japan, so there is that.

Sometimes I climb onto the small roof top of my house in the evening by myself to watch the sun sink gloriously into the Taiwan strait. On the opposite side, the rosy glow touches the twin peaks of the distant Datun mountain, its steep jungle slopes already shrouded in darkness. Take a deep breath, my old friend, I think, and please sleep some more.