August, and then soon after: autumn, winter; the wind gusting, her skirt a sail on the sea, the rumble of a blaze. So cold you’re not sure if it’s actually hot.
There were two rooms, besides the kitchen and the bathroom, which was down in the courtyard. Two rooms. She dumped a blue IKEA bag in the corner, could hear them coming up the stairs. With packing boxes. The bed. She stood still in the corner with her mouth open and her hands at her sides: so this is happening now. The kind of thought that occurs when suddenly you find yourself waking up somewhere else instead of where you went to sleep.
She sat in the window, got up again. Felt happy, filled with excitement. Another of those moments where you sense everything that is to come, and everything that has gone before: an unmistakable feeling of something ceasing to exist, with a beginning.
Not everything survives. Or rather, nothing does.
And then that window, stiff and vertical, hysterically opened onto the courtyard. Linden trees. In the autumn, when they are pruned back: crowns docked like tails, half-seeing eyes that blink at a sky forever turning gray. Winter, a stunted squall that will pass. The clouds shift without pause in autumn, and she gets up from the table, sits down at the table, gets up, writes and does not write, in one seamless movement, puts the kettle on, drinks from a cup with brown concentric rings at the bottom, cuts some sprigs in the yard, they weep, the sky likewise; she forgets the water as it boils, she writes some pages, all in one seamless movement, a movement that does not belong to her.
Her feeling of guilt is a constant storm that brews inside her; a sickness waiting for a cause. A moment’s fatigue, weakness, resentment. And the fever is upon her. Then she must run, she must convince her body that everything is all right, at rest, at work. Writing: she is continually in doubt as to its validity.
When what feels necessary isn’t necessarily valid. Where, then, to deposit oneself but in a body deceitful.
She slept badly. It was like that.
That feeling that made her laugh when the blind fell down, when she took on the apartment; that same feeling came back to her when again she could not sleep.
The fatality of time and again believing the world is determined by something. Something outside of itself. Or just determined, in whatever way at all. Timing. Believing you can see patterns in the world is the same as imagining you can reach out of a window, hold out your hand, and wait a couple of seconds until a leaf, a feeble, tattered leaf, settles there gently, surely in your palm. The same as expecting you can fall asleep, in such a world.
And yet it happens all the time: people fall asleep. You see connections. Or you think you see connections; and for a moment you might feel you belong.
That something like a home exists.
Only it’s not as simple as that; there are moments of collapse, life consists of little else.
A face brought down, revealed to be one’s own.
Sensing how the sand on the beach in front of the hotel at Svinkløv is retrieved by the sea as each wave retreats. The current they warn you against, and which the body recognizes before the mind; an urge to succumb.
And that would be it.
What such an urge might mean.
She misses having a home, it’s a condition.
Eventually she falls asleep and dreams about a man who says in English: My hands are dirty, you don’t want to meet me.
The world laughing in your face like that. The writing laughs with it, that line of dialogue. It all gets entangled in the writing. What was, and what is, or perhaps may come. Sentences and lines of dialogue.
A desire to be older, revealing itself to be a desire not to lose one’s childhood. Not to lose anything, whatever it might be, to maintain a hold in the flow of all things, to stand firm there and preserve. In some form, to keep hold of it all, and not leave anything behind in that burning house. Wherever you go, you leave behind you a trail of disaster, no matter what the circumstance, that’s how it is. A trail of collapse, something falling outside of all recollection, all that is not remembered by anyone and is forgotten by the world. She is not quite sure, but the feeling grows stronger, she sees it in him: a kind of reverse will to live; a nostalgic reluctance toward surrendering oneself to the world that exists. That kind of panic in the tissue, a fear of forgetting. She writes so as not to forget things, or else she writes in order to forget things and invent other things more worthy of remembrance. Perhaps that’s what writing is: you start moving about in the world like a sleepwalker in the night, looking for something more real, a truth there; and then all of a sudden it’s sleep that you sacrifice, then suddenly the family, then everything that is valuable and means something. Dreams while awake, ideas, pulling everything with them like waves returning, returning to the sea, faces washed away, washed clean of all humanity. Or the opposite: invoking a humanity all too exaggerated: too much human in too small a space, that pealing reality when your entire being wants that someone else.
She thought the right thing to do was perhaps to find a life first, and only then look for a way of working that fit in with that life. That it should happen in that order, instead of carrying on the way things were; searching for a way of living that fit in with her work.
IT DOESN’T LOOK like him at all, and yet: it’s him, she knows it is. As full of life as a bonfire in spring, at the beginning of March, the same look on his face, no less: confident. They visit her parents, they are still going out, they walk in the hills and she cannot forget that he tells her about a girl he used to know. Every month she ran short of money. And then, he says, when the money ran out she collected her last coins, searching coat pockets and rummaging at the bottom of bags, and then she would go to the florist’s on Bruunsgade and buy flowers. Cut flowers. With the very last of her funds. How many lilies can I get for this, she would ask. How many daffodils for forty-two kroner.
He laughs, and is then silent again.
The sun beats down, she grabs at some foxtail and grass. That’s what I want, she thinks. To live alone in a city, with no money, and buy cut flowers. That kind of recklessness, that’s what I want.
He was too frail for this world; but it was she who was made to be the symbol; you are too frail for this world, he could say, drawing her toward him and hugging her. Or else in anger:
you’re never here.
You’re never here. Never present.
You could start to doubt which of them was never there: one of them, at least, always one of the two; somewhere else.
You’re always rushing about, it’s your family that put that into you, he says.
She looks up from a book. Yes, is all she says. You see, that’s exactly what I mean, he says, throwing his hands in the air, his face, like his shirt, at once open and more closed than ever before.
What do you mean.
You don’t hear anything, you’re somewhere else.
She puts the book down in her lap. I’m here, she whispers.
We live parallel lives, he says. Every morning you’re out running, we can’t even wake up together, we can’t even go to sleep together. We eat at different times, we live without each other.
She gives a shrug.
It’s not true, she could say. But it is, true, most of it, true and yet not the whole picture by any means.
You’ll run yourself into the ground like that; it’s hardly surprising you’re finding it hard to keep yourself together.