I SUPPOSE I had grown used to you, your being here; the sound of my own heart, the sound of a bush beating at the window all night, all day.
ONLY THEN IT wasn’t you who had fallen asleep, and me lying sleepless; but the sound of me alone in a bed, and you turning in your sleep, beside a body that cannot find rest, a single movement that connects us all; me, waking as you turn, another woman getting up. It’s not you, you will say; I just can’t handle intimacy right now. I need—
Space, I say.
It’s never one person leaving another; you leave each other, I think to myself. It takes place, a single movement; you have become one body, and this body falls apart. There is no blame to apportion, but accounts to be settled, and no one to send the bill to. All that I possess is yours. That kind of feeling.
The debts left by love. A single movement and you lose all, and must borrow everything. And thus it must all be carried about: everything that is yours, and all that you have lent out. A body like that.
SHE CAN’T REMEMBER beginning to love him, and she can’t remember stopping. The feeling doesn’t move like that, forward or backward. It exists, like a darkness that surrounds us, surrounding me. A desire for light, twenty-four hours a day.
Traversing the land to clamber up on Stabelhøj Hill.
The sky increasing in size, a sail unfolding above, the further one walks into the landscape. The cows are returning home, emerging from the pastures; it’s that time of day, and their swaying udders are heavy and sore, pressed between their legs, weeping milk; the swarming flies that crawl upon the air, that find a settling place in the corner of an eye, a groin. The calves say nothing, they are knees that bend, and stiff hind legs, stilts brushing the tautness of the udder. Jets of milk spatter the earth upon every glance, liquid lingering a moment, pearls of purest white in the couch grass, then absorbed by the clay-like soil, beneath clovers of only three leaves. The veins of the mottled udders: blue. A woodland in which to become lost, a landscape that is not dark, not only. One could contend that all pathways are luminous. A lattice of trellis-work visible, holding a miscellany of wishes in place. You nudge me, to make me turn onto my side.
That’s better, you say.
It’s as if our bodies have melted together in that position, all other bodies to come are perfect casts of: this. Too much or too little body. I can’t remember when we became more than two in this bed. But suddenly we were more, and I was someone else. Are you asleep, you ask.
IT’S RAINING, AS if there were a fire to put out, a steady downpour throughout the day, a recalcitrant blaze that will not succumb. When was rain ever a solution to anything.
THE FLIES ARE busy. They scurry across the walls of the kitchen, hasten across my sister’s hand. She lets the hot water run in the sink, on the empty bottles with their stoppers.
Her hand, a surface of skin gripped by flies, is at rest on the counter.
Her other hand is reddened by hot steam. She holds them up to the light in front of her, the way you do with bottles of red wine, to see how much is left. She lets out a sigh, and stirs the pot on the cooker. The third sister has put her foot on the counter and is mending her laddered tights with garish nail varnish. From a tiny point of origin on the back of her footballer’s calf, the ladder plunges toward the heel. Heavy drops of rain draw green streaks down the gray of the panes. The dripping from the tips of all the ferns after the rain. She closes her eyes and continues stirring briskly, so that her sister will not notice her and realize her disgust at the entire scene, the tableau of footballer’s calf, nail varnish, kitchen. Beneath her brittle ribs lies a conscience. On the cooker, she has shapely legs in one pot, elderflowers in the other. She always feels guilty about something.
DISTANCE HAS SHORTENED everywhere, no longer as far from one place to another since they cleared the trees. I go left, down through the wood that is no more. I think of you, decide to call you, but then to wait until later. That feeling I have: of always holding you off. I wonder whether the sentence can be inverted: if you have always held me off. And I — whether I took something in advance that ended up being canceled. I follow the stream, through the snow. I can’t be on my own anymore, and I’ve only just started. It has nothing to do with strength, or lack of strength. It’s about what makes sense. A friend writes me a letter, on this day of all days, he writes that you can’t love a person who cannot love. I know he’s thinking: because it ruins you. I’m not sure who I’m thinking about. Dead man. New man.
One kind of gravity colliding with another, that’s what it is. Being home, and being nowhere at all. Being somewhere you know, without recognizing a thing. I walk the path into the woods. The hills are older, the woodland has advanced all the way up to the vertex; bald, sandy earth.
Does it mean anything, me walking here.
Maybe it means: you are walking here. No more than that. I want to call you, but I want never to call you again. The feeling that wells in me is of a celebration canceled. A number of people want to love me but are not allowed. A number of people cannot, or lack the courage. It doesn’t matter. All there is here is this acute lack of home. The trees are bare, oak, I think. Yes, oak. A low carpet of self-seeded evergreen advancing to the trunks. They look frightened, as though, being caught red-handed on the point of some shameless deed, they lost their crowns in panic. You use me for thinking. I don’t know what use I make of you, apart perhaps from survival. There is no one in the twilight here to notice that the trees and their crowns don’t match. Evergreen and deciduous are different. And still I don’t doubt that is what has happened: panic arisen among the trees, and sudden autumn. Leaf fall, a carpet of needles around the lower trunks, the feet of the oak.
BECAUSE LANGUAGE IS not innocent, but fire and weaponry. One wages war with words, risking all the time to fall into bed with the enemy. I’m not sure now, but that’s what I thought when I got up and saw a boat come though the canal, towing the morning behind it on a rope. I’m not sure either if there is any pleasure in not being compelled to do something. And more generally: pleasure surely has little to do with such a thing as freedom.
SHE WAKES UP at his feet. Stares straight into them. She is lying on her side, and his feet are towers toppled in front of her collapsed eyes.
Her face is twisted askew and is made of dry clay.
Her face, fallen.
So big were his feet, then. So cold the room. He must have opened a window in the night. She remembers nothing of it. What she remembers is them not being able to reach, neither of them could reach. And then this: that he once lifted her up so that she might line the frames with shards of glass. To keep someone away, keep someone out.
The balloons are tired and shrunken after the party.
How distant it seems now: the celebration. And how unreal in this honest light.
He blocks out the sun with his foot. His feet have always been big, it strikes her now. Probably he is of another opinion. They see things differently, though mostly they are one body, one thought.
Look, she says.
He turns his heavy head toward her, a mechanical action, and she sees him against the light, a mane of hair edged by a nimbus.