I came on the train and arrived late. The whole house smelled of soapsuds, of celebration, and something like hysterical expectation. The way it smelled on the morning of a birthday.
My mother is exhausted, but alive.
This is the kind of assessment we make these days. My father is more exhausted than alive, though fleetingly lit with joy on seeing me. He is so proud I can only give in. The problem with families arises immediately: a sense of annoyance, punctuated by guilt on the same account. The emotions you feel not being the same as the ones you had anticipated feeling. Anger at not simply being able to love. How hard does that have to be. To love those who are there for you, those who once more will tell you: we’ll always be here for you.
The frightening suspicions you can get. The thought of having been mixed up at birth, of not properly belonging here, where I so obviously belong, the place I come running to whenever the world tightens its grip around my throat. The span between the feeling of being loved without condition and being loved on condition of all manner of things. The intangibility of that.
Just because someone is willing to die for you doesn’t mean the grave lies gaping and in wait of its first opportunity. To bury one’s parents is an impossibility, they are pillars before your eyes, they speak out of your mouth, and no matter how far away you remove yourself you will always be able to find your way home. Whatever that may be. A place in the world, or perhaps completely outside of it.
The fear of squandering it all and returning to nothing, an empty pit. A site of something that was. Because you turned into another, behind your family’s back, behind your own.
Who is it who finds their way home in the dark, who is it I embrace in the night. Myself as a mother, later, my mother as a child I must care for, and now try to rouse as I wander through the rooms, through the city with the stroller, in early morning — wanting only sleep.
You love my family, and they’ve missed you. You are more at home with them than with your own parents, I think to myself. I consider leaving you my family. Dubious donations, purchased origins, if that’s even possible, if anyone can it would be you.
THE SUN CRAWLS up the walls, spring in mid-winter. Trees clamber toward a blue sky. I force the months out of my writing. They are nothing but decor and pretense.
Who knows what October will say, when it all boils down.
Who knows what November is. Tired light, tired darkness, seeping in, or not. The wetness of wet wool, I can endure. October, November, December take me nowhere.
WE GO FOR a walk, though you are not made to walk. It’s not just a question of your body. It’s more basic than that, a general lack of endurance. As soon as we come to the fields all you want is to turn back and go home, kick off your shoes; as soon as we see the hill of Agri Bavnehøj, that’s where it starts; I sense the way your movements angle left. That veering away in you. Homeward, always in the direction of the settled that will not present itself. I realize there is a forbidding feeling of impaired recognition at work. We are familiar to the point of sickness. We are strangers. In love with something that was.
The houses weep in winter.
Horses cry.
The foundations are ravaged by frost, water pipes burst like blood vessels. A trickling of life, and of spring, but the damage is there, inside the mind, behind the walls.
I’ve forgotten my gloves. I hold my hands up in front of my mouth and blow some warmth into them; you take off your own gloves and offer them to me. You say nothing, not a word, in fact. I accept only one, putting your bare hand in mine and burying both inside the pocket of your coat. Not a word. We are like one of those watercolors folded up wet, two figures joined in the middle, drawing color from each other as we walk. We have pulse. We are. We awake in the mornings, both of us, with something on our lips, the feeling of something important that needs to be said. You and I. I try to say it, perhaps not to you. But at least, to do something.
You. I no longer know if you’re even trying. If you tried. Ever.
When evening comes I am emptied, while you are more than filled, and kick off your shoes in all your fullness.
Where have you been, you’ll suddenly ask.
Or else you say: You’re always going somewhere, or coming back. Look at me. What’s the hurry with you, what’s so important it can’t wait. And I’ll shrug.
What is the hurry. But it’s evening and I don’t know. It has been uttered, only not to the right person, not to you, anyway.
There is a smell of something burnt, oil drums in gardens, the widower burning off cardboard and plastic. It is that time of year, that time of day. We have been out for hours. Fathers in the mudroom. The concept of mudrooms. A day in winter, an exhalation, then an inhalation, no longer than that. The day is like drinking water, there is nothing left in the mouth besides a natural order.
No thirst, simply order.
I’m tired, I say. You nod. We haven’t slept enough, you add. Only my fatigue has nothing to do with sleep or no sleep. But then it’s you who says: I’m tired.
THERE WAS A winter, nearly three years ago now. Three years, you say, your whole body shaking, not just your head. Such realizations come to you these days; realizations that threaten to whisk you away. You are a web — each of your corners is fastened to reality, though quite invisible. There is no reality left in your body. It’s as if your conceptions of the world have taken over. Floating freely in your own web, until encountering a seam, the harsh impact of reality, the bow of a ship against the quay, vessels splitting down the middle, conceptions taking in water. This is you these days.
I still want to save you, but I know you would hate me for it, and so I refrain. I wander about myself, collecting for your charity; I will rattle if someone picks me up. But no one does; I am not the kind of a person others want to pick up. I am too heavy.
A FUNERAL
WHEN HE LEFT her it was winter. They lay on the bed in her new apartment. Amid the city, half sleeping, winter, the kind of listless calm in which you can suddenly say anything at all without it coming as a shock.
Don’t chew your lip like that, he told her. She went on reading. Stop it, he said, and slapped her hand, and then she couldn’t help but look up.
Okay, she said.
There was a hum from the kitchen, the washing machine spinning sheets and dish towels and facecloths, the vibrations in their teeth. They had lived in Copenhagen six months in their separate apartments. In order not to miss out on that. They had left everything behind in Aarhus, that was how it felt: Copenhagen being temporary. They would be going back. They had finished university, and were ready — but for what. To fail, to be canceled.
Two of his friends helped her move. Only what you need, he said, and kissed her on the cheek, though only to make up for there being so much, that was the feeling she got. But then maybe it was a reproach. That comment, that kiss, placed on her skin like a cold mollusk, his fingers, and yet something in his eyes that genuinely relished seeing her like that: leaving something behind.
I’ll take it, she had said to the landlord, and a blind fell down in the window at that very moment. She could hardly stop laughing, or else she began to cry, it’s hard to say, both, probably. Things can start like that, too. When reality seems staged, that sort of timing: or when what’s staged turns out to be reality. You should be careful what you write, it might turn out true. It will never be anything but.