Fortunately time helps, she lies.
It doesn’t, is all he says. Most likely it will always be with you; bear that in mind.
You’re right, most likely it will, she says. I suppose you know what you’re talking about. Someone has left something behind inside him. No coming of spring can ever make amends. The cows that emerge first spill out through the doors, over the yard and across the road. Stiff legs verge on breaking into a thousand pieces, clouds of bonemeal under their bellies; the field, soft, sprouting its grass. What is it for. And to think one day you would sit here again, on the ground, where the stable used to be. An empty space now, with the sky falling down upon it. The cows don’t pay their way. Do I, she wonders. She calls him in Copenhagen. She gets back on her feet and walks through the city, and he lingers on every corner. While another lingers in her thoughts. And in his. And she finds herself thinking there will be more and more threads, they will be shorter and shorter, and unable to join up. And more long sentences discovered to be false. More short ones making sense.
Come, the leaseholder shouts, dragging the sliding door aside.
Come, she tells him on the phone. But he must stay in Copenhagen, he is needed at work; and his new girlfriend isn’t happy about us seeing each other, he says. About you not letting go, but otherwise I would, and so on.
A time, inhabiting the body.
A time for that, and a time for something else. A troubled month, or just a troubled night. A magnetic night. An overfilled bed, alone. So now this is where you are once more. And the ribbons of snow are the fan the cows were then; tight French braids, some voices, at least three, weaving in and out; sentences becoming shorter and shorter.
THERE IS A sunrise, occupying a stretch of time. Light, softening the horizon. Doing something to sound.
Branches, graphic silhouettes.
A sky, becoming a sky. Someone loses a shoe on the pavement, a shoe picked up and handed back.
Sit still.
I win a prize for having written something down in order not to forget what it was.
I win a prize and am resigned to the fact that you will never be interested in me. I am resigned to the fact that you will never be anything but interested in me.
The branches are black already, but the light against which they are seen makes it more apparent. That I have woken up too early and am standing here in my parents’ house, watching a sunrise as it mimes a sunrise past.
Aarhus Bay: a morning there.
The skerries, Sankt Anna Skärgård: a morning there.
I do not miss you, for I have yet to understand that you are there to miss. In other words: that you are not here. And now, again, the branches, cutting up the picture. A light that spills into the sky from below. A tea bag, seeping into a napkin.
Humility in the face of the kind of order for which one is no match. The thought that all this is temporary. The stables are temporary. My mother is temporary. Us living together during that period of time, and you beginning to doubt. You speaking the words out loud, without intending to. My life, forever in flux. An image segueing into another. A permanent state of transition — only a transition. The fact of insisting on something until one becomes ready to insist on something else. The tulips looking like they’ve come from a shop, when you don’t have me to arrange them.
You are waiting for things to be different. You are waiting for this transition to be complete, of you learning to live in a place.
I can see, the way things are, that you cannot come. Because you are already here.
Or because you would want to stay.
BENEATH THE WINTER lies a wandering across the field. A walk through tall grass. Sandals, bare legs, dry meadow grass swept apart, to bow and break, and flatten like a tongue fallen out in my wake. A fleeting heel becomes an image trampled underfoot. Yellow cudweed, an island. And then: grass again, and self-seeded fir, hardly more than twigs, sticking out of the ground. That’s what they look like. But then this was before, I am ten years old and we have leased the land from the state. It’s August, and I don’t know if the willowherb can bloom at this time of year, but I remember the willowherb in flower, a curtain of troubled purple, strangling the brambles. That way round: the flowers strangling the brambles, and then in another image the brambles alone, blue fingers and red plastic bowls. It’s like the willowherb’s purple is the same as the fingers’, like the juice of the brambles reveals itself to be flowers, like the flowers have been pressed together into hard pellets, these berries, now ripe and sweet, and which too, well, reveal themselves. Eight kilos. And just as much sugar. And many more jars, and all the steam running down the windows. We see feet being lifted and placed in front of legs, and the grass as it bends and yeilds in front of us. Bare legs so briefly concealed from view, appearing again.
Walking across the field today, the creaking snow, walking there in summer. Yours being the eyes that see the soles of my feet. The landscape actually being you. You lying in a bed in Copenhagen, it being evening, and you lifting her hand from your chest once she has fallen asleep. Or just the thought of it. Or the thought of her walking through the same grass. Or turning round to see that no one has been there. I turn and look back. Between the woods and me lies the indiscreet snow, disclosing my path, disclosing something more besides. I don’t quite know what. You, perhaps. It could be you.
THE DAY DRAGS on. My mother sits down at a table, it’s mid-afternoon. Always some stack she needs to get through. That’s how it is with her, she works her way through her stacks, which grow while she sleeps, whenever she looks away. She monitors them well, but it’s no use.
Everyone must sleep, once in a while.
It’ll soon be dark, she says to me, meaning she wants me to go. I look up from my book, lifting one leg to gauge how tired they are. When you sit still you lose touch with your body. A humming noise comes from somewhere. I think about what it means to have grown up in a house ever pervaded by the sound of a clock. If it can make you ill. The church bells, ringing the sun up and down. If that’s why you move away. And because the thought never occurs to you that the sound might be stopped by means of some simple action. An electricity cable, who knows. I think to myself that the humming noise is perhaps simply the sound of a home, more like the sound of sand running away than that of the hands of a clock, fingers flicking through newspaper piles, the rustle of a bag of dry cat food, more the sound of a straw bale being dumped from a great height onto a concrete floor. A door opening, then closing again. And this continued movement is a counting down, that much home. So high up, and so close as hardly to be seen, hardly to be heard. For it has entered your flesh and being, and is now, simply, your eyes; to find that secret place where the mottled hen has begun to lay its eggs, to break those eggs into a bowl, to nudge aside such an angry fowl, or to have my mother do so instead. With big gloves on.
And the knowledge that these movements are a counting down and not a counting up, and that you will need to remove yourself from all of it.
One must establish a state of homelessness within the home in order to make room for oneself. And the eyes and the eggs and the brambles are there, and the sound of pellets of dry food clattering into metal bowls like a hail of buckshot, a shortness of breath.
My legs are no more tired than usual. They are always tired. If you pause to sense how they feel, then I suppose that’s how they are. I stretch myself, the soles of my feet bracing against the armrest of the sofa. I relax, and the cat mimics my movement. Do you want out, I ask her, and she lifts her head, peers out at the snow falling — and simply sees. But she cannot, for she has always something else to be getting on with. Before she can eat, before she can sleep, before she can pause to sense how she feels. There is no room for her in such a life. And yet there is nothing else.