not wake, for I never slept. You have gone home to Frederiksberg, where you now live. You have a room in a large apartment, and you sleep in the same T-shirt as when you slept with me. You are deceased, and yet you are there, alive and well.
Without me. There in that way.
The morning slips in with the sun, that’s how I think of it; that the morning begins somewhere beyond the ice-cream kiosk and the fishermen on the far spit on the other side of Langelinie, that it enters the city, passes through Østerbro. The sky is poorly sealed, the sun thin and liquid. It pours into the streets from the bottom end, pushing cars and people in toward Rådhuspladsen, out across Amager, Islands Brygge.
I don’t know what you thought you had done that evening, unburdened your heart, I suppose, but then it was all so much heavier than before, your heart included; that’s how it must be. You think something will last, and then you endure, and somehow—live with.
I imagine there to be someone, but then no one is there.
I felt sure of a mother, always, but perhaps she, too, is to be struck off.
I climb into the bed, pull the duvet over my legs and put my arm around her. Now I have returned to the landscape I thought would always be there.
Is it still snowing, my mother asks me.
I nod. Yes, it’s still snowing.
Did you feed the birds.
Yes, I fed the birds.
I SIT IN a corner of the living room, yet in its midst. I can sit like this, here on the white sofa, and all the time I am somewhere else. My mother walks past again, a shadow falls across the room, it’s mid-afternoon. The shadows play on the walls and everything else around. The gardens are asleep; there is unease because everything outside is shrouded in winter and cannot breathe. The snow has fallen, upon all that is alive and all that is dead; the snow makes it all the same. All that is buried suffocates and rots, or grows and expands beneath the blanket of white; a membrane becoming thinner and thinner, a skin pulled taught. The snow creaks, the vice that grips the plants, the shrubs, the tree stumps. My mother looks out the window, disturbed by a feeling of having lost contact with some part of her body, like an arm that’s fallen asleep. She picks at me with her eyes, pinches me to bring me back. All the time: the sense that her daughter lives in another world. The calamity that resides in that. Being alone, or at least without.
Shut out of one’s own house.
A room within the family, a room within its narrative, a former colony now suddenly standing alone, and yet still reverberating with narrative.
She cannot understand how I can do it; but then she doesn’t really know what it is I’m doing.
She leans forward over the sofa, places a hand on my knee, retracting it almost at once, as though it were unexpectedly wet, as though it were on fire. Winter, phosphorescent and unreal, a whimper of wind. Dressed landscapes. The snow remembers every wandering, traces left that cannot be wiped away; the snow remembers; the body does. But this winter perhaps is different. This winter, the snow perpetually blown into drifts; it snowed again, and again it snowed. It’s impossible to remember anything, and yet one cannot doubt that something was left behind beneath the snow, something that would be found again in the spring. Beneath the layers of remembered footprints, traces forgotten, yet as recollections to remain, a latent illness that may return at any time. Awkwardly in spring, awkwardly in a broken face.
I look up at my mother.
Yes, I think, this face is broken. Like if you dig with too much abandon, if you dig like a person possessed or don’t know when to stop. My mother’s face, my grandmother’s, and now this third, strange and yet familiar, which is what else but my own. A feeling of having returned too late, of rattling a locked door and knowing your things are inside. So we share this too, this puzzle of arrival, eternally postponed arrival at something that is—well, what, exactly; still, perhaps.
WHEN I THINK back on the days in the summer house they seem oddly architectural. As though in recollection they share something in common with structures and exact drawings. They are not allowed to be simply days. Remembered, they become the days when.
The days surrounding.
These are the days before, these are the days after; they fall like thick hair on each side of a broken face: how long have you known, I ask. My mother phones; I am still in bed, only then I sit up.
I’m not breathing.
How long have I known, she repeats, buying time.
There’s a feeling of sitting in the back seat and being in my parents’ hands. Planetary coercion. The grubby sky that hangs above the fields. The trees stand clustered like animals in the pasture.
I’ve known for almost a week, she says.
I nod.
I’m sorry. She apologizes. She didn’t want to get in the way of my work. She thought it best to wait. I think about what she imagines I’m working on. Do the others know, I whisper.
Are you there, she asks. I clear my throat. Do the others know, I ask. Again. I think about my sisters.
Yes, she says.
So I’m the last, I think: So they all know, I say.
I sense that she nods. I picture her biting her lip so as not to cry. I bite my own lip so as not to cry—and I cry. Aren’t you upset, aren’t you afraid, I whimper.
Yes, she whimpers back, yes, but I’ve cried and cried, I’ve no tears left, she lies. Maybe she thinks the distance makes me blind, makes us blind.
We’ve wasted so much time, I think. And the two of us, I say. We’ve spent so much time on . . . I come to a halt.
On what, exactly. Don’t you think this puts everything into perspective, I ask her.
I’m not breathing.
Again there’s no answer; there is noise and light.
Yes, she says at last, I suppose so, but I’m still just as . . . disappointed.
I wipe my nose on the duvet cover. Okay, I say.
Are you coming home soon, she asks. She’s standing in the kitchen doorway, looking at the birds that keep the air moving so nature won’t freeze up.
Of course I’m coming home, I answer. I’m not breathing.
The question is if the mother who is telling you she is ill in actual fact is the disease itself. If a person can survive that sort of thing: death entering the stage, a burglary in the home that is life, theft of everything you knew. When you lose your mother, not because she dies, but because she becomes death, the disease that is death.
The conversation does not end with our saying goodbye and hanging up; it’s as though we simply become quieter, as though we’re standing in an open field, walking backward, away from each other, speaking with increasingly greater physical distance between us, and eventually we can’t hear each other anymore, we put down our phones, each on its own surface. The sound of my mother’s phone on the sideboard and the sound of my own phone on the dining table.
She
