got the apartment in Copenhagen, when you come back.
I sit quite still, hearing my mother explain it’s just for a bit: why not stay here for the time being, so as not to be alone. Being alone is no good, she lies.
I stare.
There’s no sense in being alone, best to stay here, at home, for a while.
Yes, I say: now that I’ve been deserted and think I’m going to die. They laugh, and I smile. The days are impossible. Not being home, not being away. Trying to live somewhere, a place, to find a way back. The uncertainty that grips him now—so dismal, a reminder that nothing is ever the way you leave it. That time actually messes things about while you’re gone. The purple beech dying, elm sickness, the Eternit roofing; plastic bags lifted up by the wind and settling in the hedgerow by the slope; the electric fencing falling down because the wire broke, and nothing can keep the rotten poles upright anymore; now the snow has come, now everything’s in boots of snow, the trees have drifts at their ankles, houses clutching the land, snow clambering up the houses. Above the clouds is a sky that cannot be seen. A few cracks one afternoon, but then they too are clawed back. An unfamiliar car pulling in, then pulling away around the bend. A longhaired cat from down in Vrinners, however long it might survive, up here.
My father is resting on the sofa opposite. He lifts his foot and wriggles his toes in my mother’s face. She laughs. I wonder where it comes from, her laughter. There would be several possibilities, I think to myself. She shoves his foot away: no thanks, keep your smelly feet to yourself. And you; the laughter inside you can only be from one place, for you have so few chambers, none superfluous: a chamber for what is fatal, another for, what should we call it, the feeling when things can be that simple, that pleasing. It sounds so easy, just two chambers, the fear and the joy, and yet it’s so impossible to deal with. I keep mistaking the two signatures, mixing them up all the time.
Only then I don’t mistake them at all.
Death and love; death and sickness and the anesthetic in one compartment, love in the other. And then all the time love comes creeping in across the fields, in sentences like: take care.
There’s something heart-wrenching about people when they possess consciousness, at least, their eyes full of it—eyes that grow fat upon the clearness of the thought: that there is nothing else, and guess who comes out on top.
Amputees.
It’s like there’s not enough protection.
Take care, I can whisper.
And you know what it is I need you for, what you must help me postpone. You become distant again, but that’s only natural. There’s nothing odd about a heart without atria not working properly; anything else would be alarming. You are a construction built not to endure, but to demonstrate, without uncertainty, that this is no way to survive.
The fact that you survive nevertheless, another day, another day.
IF I SURVIVE you, I told myself, you will become a monument. If I don’t, the monument will be me.
IN THE VILLAGE where I grew up, the houses weep in the mornings. Smoke that cannot be told apart from fog rises in columns from the rooftops. Sagging structures, lopsided farm buildings long since abandoned, gutters drooping like tired eyelids.
Cycling past the houses one morning in September. Hearing an early apple, a scabby Ingrid Marie, drop onto a heavy lawn, hollow earth. The will to remain standing, a feeling of I want this.
My dead man’s utterly impossible infatuation must be exposed as impossible.
And the houses are upright today, upright tomorrow. The village will not be moved, not for anything.
Farm buildings endure. The farmhouses themselves.
There is a strength inside those who inhabit such dismal places; the need to preserve. In the storm they draught-proof their windows and tie down tarps.
Of the two of us, one is forever in doubt.
I WAKE UP. The room is no longer cold, but the bed is clammy and damp. It keeps hold of its dankness. The room faces out back and is used only when we girls are home, seldom now.
My younger sister is always busy, we all are.
A rush and bustle handed down through generations. Sit down here awhile. Work unfinished. The cold of the sheets and admonishment. I don’t really know what it is to feel welcome. I know what it is to belong. Except then I become unsure.
I feel, though with a delay.
Always ahead.
I meet you and immediately I see everything. A pair of scissors catching just right on a length of cloth, the blade finding its direction through the texture that is the fabric’s skeleton; the cloth opens and is a fruit whose flesh is white. Such moments I live for, though never discover until later. Like when you sit there thinking it’s too late, now, to think of whether to stay a second longer.
What if you stayed too long.
What if you stayed forever and never went farther away than that you could responsibly allow yourself to take a taxi home.
When such things happen, thoughts that arrive too late, they consume you and refuse to let go of your pale body, my pale body—trembling with something like doubt. I know nothing, and yet I have seen everything. The realization that resides in that; that there are eyes that see, and eyes that do not know.
A wish to be recognized as the person you are, to find such eyes, a human gaze.
Cross-eyed days in which you hope. Most days are like that, most eyes.
I am tired and wish to see clearly, a gaze that is knives and scissors, an incision into what really is. That’s how I want to see, and how I want to be seen. It’ll be a mess, a filthy mess. Disorder everywhere, disappointment as far as the eye can see. But you. And me, who sees you. Maybe it’s more than enough, maybe it’s all you can ask for.
THE APPLE TREE stands in a corner of the garden, this winter, and already back when. I have been with my parents a couple of days. The snow rumbled in soundlessly. Upholstered everything in frost, storm brigades of white, consuming landscapes, swallowing everything, augmenting itself, stripping what lay in its path. Winter everywhere, a feeling of all this is mine. I wake up in my old room. I know every knot in the pinewood, my own birthmarks, and yours that I used to know. It’s strange how the body’s memory will and won’t by turn. Gathering blackberries in a bowl, sticky fingers curled around the bunches of fruit, occasional berries punctured, some still green, forgotten by the sun, most simply ripe; dark pearls dropping from their stalks, into a hand that both catches and picks, a hand that can do whatever it wants, and at the same time: I have forgotten the feel of your body. I don’t even know what it looks like anymore. The picture won’t come together. We have become strangers to each other. There are clothes I remember better than you. Perhaps I’ve never known what you looked like. When you’re standing there midstream. The smallest and largest things a blur of movement. Constantly somewhere else, directions and plans, and looking over your shoulder. All the time, transition. Getting there—soon.
The way I always had this noise in my ears, something like: you’ll take care of it. And: I’d really been hoping.
Now I no longer know you. We’ve both forgotten
