our assumption should be disproved.
If it turns out we know just a fragment of the world.
Constant motion, collapsing buildings and meticulous work in stone. The unfamiliar as a wall we must forever scrabble to remove in order to find our humanity there and perhaps even love someone. Pass on one or two images, share them with someone else, a you. That kind of motion into the world. An escapism in reverse, a tower I build to be more able to see what is there.
You, for instance.
A desire to see you.
THE SNOW CAP creaks. the floors beneath me, too, feet remembering. You can trust the body. The body remembers like a hundred horses.
The apple tree is a kind of reconciliation.
I decide to go back home, but then I stay anyway. The days are like those that come after the death of a close friend. I was told the news, only then I forgot, and now I grieve, my grieving body, without any recollection of what caused the grief.
Who.
I stop and put down the wheelbarrow in front of me; who, who is it I miss. My nose is running, a dribble dissecting the oval of my face. Her father draws an oval in the air. That’s your face, he says, an oval.
But her face is streaked with mucus.
The light falls in stripes.
The panes are laced with snow, movements inside her parents’ house framed, embroidered. No one is dead. The wounded are legion.
THEY EAT TOGETHER, it is summer, and she has opened the windows of the apartment wide. She wants to eat in the park, but he doesn’t feel like it; it’s too much hassle, it’s only food, he says, and she says it’s only five minutes by bike. Extinguished in asphalt; the tossing heads of heifers exasperated by flies, shaking loose the brain.
There is not a breath of air inside the apartment, which smells like bottled summer; the sun vanishes behind the building opposite. The apartments are preserving jars, eyes; plums molder, voices, a partial vacuum, merely, keeping everything in place, home. They’ve had new balconies put in, the railings aren’t there yet, children can still fall out. She stands in the afternoon sunlight, imagining catastrophes again.
Soon, dinner is the only coming together. He goes to bed when she gets up. She snuggles up beside him and falls asleep, a couple of hours before he wakes; I miss you, he lies, I miss you, he confides.
I’VE BEEN HERE before, she says.
Impossible, he says.
SHE THINKS: THE summer is nearly gone. She thinks about what she was doing while it was there, she didn’t even see it, didn’t see it happen. He thinks about how hectic it is—has been. They stand there, feet scuffing at the gravel of the parking area in front of her parents’ house. Or: he has woken up and lies, watching her sleep. Her half-open eyes. He reaches out and extends his index and middle fingers. His arm is trembling. It is four o’clock, just before his fingertips reach her eyelids. Don’t wake, don’t wake, quiet, quiet, quiet, quiet.
She has the same effect as streams that ripple over stones, through landscapes with lakes. Fledgling birds. He draws her eyelids down with his fingers, wanting them to reach the moist edge, the horizon above the lash. He wants to shut her down for the night. Tally her up. That’s what death is: unsentimental.
But they aren’t children.
Have never been.
WHEN SHE’S IN that mood, she thinks of it as an insult, this sick urge to translate, in everything, bypassing art and writing. The need to understand. An insult, like asking Jesus to work as a circus hand, seeing him pass the paraphernalia to the magician when it’s time for his bravura piece: water to wine, with the aid of only deception and berries. A circus hand.
Ta-da.
The craft of it.
What’s the point. Gallows humor, greasepaint and flight: pretense, everything. And the hostages you take with you, cage in with your words, images and references, the world’s eternal guessing games and sick urge to translate.
Where something comes from.
As if there were an agenda, as if it wasn’t enough to be delivered to have that power. Delivered to have power over what none of us has any power over. As if, and this is what she may think, as if people even understand what it means. To have power. To possess words and speak about the world, to evoke something that is something else and yet exactly the same: a self-contained life. Whether it means anything, whether there’s a difference.
But then all of a sudden it makes sense, all of a sudden that’s the only thing there is: difference. That surprising leap, no matter the body, no matter the place, simply a feeling of this being: fatal. A span between breathing and drawing a face in charcoal. Shading the areas where the light doesn’t fall. A vegetable garden, the planning of it, a face, planning that, and watching both grow from out of your hands, outgrowing you. Writing some words down on paper and hoping they keep that tension inside. A gluttony, imperceptibly becoming necessary.
She is not breathing.
So she is no longer in that spiteful mood of emptying. When all you do is get angry and hollow.
So maybe you can keep yourself together after all.
So maybe you can exist a bit longer, or not a second more.
That kind of leap, that kind of balancing on tall, narrow walls between city courtyards, on the dykes facing the sea, she thinks to herself, that kind. And: that’s how it has to be; a real body, writing, everything else an insult, and imagining anything else as purer than is pretense. Thought. Whiter. Purer. More important. Choices like that don’t exist: between one thing and another. She’s not sure what she wants to be; and the worst part is she still hasn’t the slightest doubt that she would be easier to love. That way.
Without her self.
Purer, more pure, more: woman. More person, or just more an actual person. A white, West-European man, maybe even she could be, only as a woman, of course, not quite as valuable on paper, but worth a bit more in the belt. That would be where she could hang. First on her mother’s skirts, later on a man’s belt, a dangling head with empty lips, red eyes; take what you want, here’s person enough.
YOU’RE HOLDING SOMEONE’S hand, she says.
Silence then, on the other end of the phone. It’s as if the room closes in on her, she can feel it, a room whose walls are wool, shrinking as it starts to rain, and the rain is boiling water.
Do you know your voice is different when you’re in Sweden, she asks him.
No, I don’t.
She walked late through the city, along Søndergade, Bruunsgade, past Ingerslevs Boulevard and on up to Marselis Boulevard. Semi-trucks thundering along the roads; she has the feeling she needs to lift her skirt as she crosses Marselis Boulevard. Relentless traffic, a river that can only be crossed in that way. She’s been looking forward to their talk, or has thought about it, pushing it ahead of her like a heavy cart.
I miss you being here, she says, and plugs a charger into the
