Monthly Archives: May 2011

You stuck your head in the sand so no one would see you. Isn’t that what a friend once told you? One of those people who’d managed to make a smooth transition from his childhood to his adulthood and thus had made them both his own. Who laughed at stupid jokes, enjoyed the company of anyone, who seemed to float right through his life. The kind of person who could sleep anywhere. And he was right, wasn’t he, you were hiding your head in the sand, you saw it almost as clearly as him. Almost. Was that what they meant by lack of perspective, this almost?

Everything was already in place for the future, or rather out of place. Always almost out of touch, almost out of reach. Tired of being tired. Bored of being bored. Afraid of being afraid. Every accurate statement about yourself by definition kitschy, therefore by definition suspect. That was your future, wasn’t it, stretching out ahead of you…

You hated me, didn’t you? I was your future, I was what stretched out before you in silent meaningless judgement. And now? Now that the future is here, now that these words have finally come, which were out of reach then?

You knew they’d come, didn’t you? How much did you know? But that’s a pointless question, isn’t it? You already knew everything and nothing. You were your future, the future that was already gazing at you from afar. And me? Am I not your future come into its own, made slightly less alien, slightly more controllable, as you knew it would, eventually? You were old then, older than you should have been.

Some people stunt their lives by pre-empting them. I’d been born, there was no getting rid of me. To what degree were you complicit in my birth, didn’t you think it was your fault? Didn’t you think there was something fundamentally wrong with you? There was, of course, and you knew it. Why else would you hide, why else be afraid of everyone, afraid of every echo down that hall? The terror of knocks on the door, as if you were some subversive in a police state, how ridiculous! With me watching you every minute of every day. Ridiculous!

I passed judgement on you. Was that my function? I reached out to you, this disgusted you, just as you disgusted yourself. Your nerves were raw, no wonder you drank, no wonder you took everything you could get your hands on.

It soon started, didn’t it, the advice? How could it not? Everyone has something to say, everyone knows how to live. You almost preferred me, didn’t you, to all that advice that you forced yourself to take seriously yet couldn’t act on? From friends, teachers, strangers… Years were wasted like this, years are still wasted like this. Listening to you, you say. I only want to help, I say.

The closest we can get to a beginning is a kind of disaster. Is that too strong a word? A break. A black hole in your memory, and in mine. Do you remember the moment I was born? A series of moments, of footsteps. There was a concrete path in a courtyard full of thick green thistle. You said goodbye to your father and were left alone and all at once time slowed down, you started walking beside yourself and I was born. All at once your life changed, didn’t it? Became strange. On your way to an anonymous room, your assigned room on a hall full of strangers speaking a strange language.

You’d been a bad seed, hadn’t you? Wasn’t that why you were sent to boarding school on another continent? Was I your punishment? It seems that way, doesn’t it? Or perhaps you were my punishment, have you considered that?

There are states of mind in which time slows down as in a dream, just as survivors of car crashes report that seconds seemed to take ages. Though this was hardly a trauma.

In those moments began a year of cryptic silence. Your future was being laid out, something was already happening without your knowing it. Or did you know?

There remains an obscure part of you, something working through you that even I don’t understand. Forming or deforming you to some obscure end. Sometimes you think of it as a devil, sometimes an angel.

How often you’ve tried to imagine what your life would have become if those moments hadn’t happened, if you hadn’t suddenly dropped out of your own life, if I hadn’t appeared, hovering above you, within you. Something leaked out behind you as you walked back to your anonymous room. Perhaps these words themselves were born in those moments, only now to be written. I was born, your friend and enemy, and everything took on a double meaning.

There was a coast, you were always drawn to coasts, weren’t you? Like a P.S. Krøyer painting on a good day, an hour’s ride away on your grandfather’s ancient bike. But this was no longer the holiday beach of your childhood, was it? It was as if you could no longer see it clearly, as if you carried a mist with you, a little fog around your head that went where you went… In fact the coast was often misty, since you went there out of season. Yet you loved it, wasn’t it the first landscape you loved? The first, too, that struck you with its absolute indifference. Did you see the beauty in that or did that come later? No, much later.

Sharp dune scrub, cold northern winds and that special light you loved even then: icy grey in winter, pale blue in summer. There was a harbour for pleasure boats, the local fishing industry having died out. Further down the coastline what they called the plantation, a forest of stunted trees on sandy mossy ground with paths and snug coves where you sat and drank the beer you always carried around with you. No one for miles. You were always a great one for hiding, weren’t you?

Sitting hiding, waiting. And on Sunday nights, back to the hated place that you still prefer not to think about, that’s still a black hole in your memory, and in mine.

A bus picked you up on a black country road, Elsinore station smelled of piss, the cigarettes tasted bad mixed with beer. This curious feeling of sitting apart from where you are, didn’t it start on those nights?

And your hatred for me, wasn’t that where it started, on those nights? You turn me against myself, you make me cryptic. I hate you. Show yourself.

I was there all along, one step away, needing you as much as you needed me. But there was nothing you or I could do, not yet.

Fog of fear, fog of disgust.

You were young and stupid and you knew you were young and stupid. You tried, I’ll say that, your mind reached out to me, your enemy, tried to see yourself from the future, to pre-empt yourself. What else could you do? You felt the ‘not yet’ in your bones. That’s why you loved to hide, you were a great one for hiding with your beer, weren’t you? Afraid, disgusted. And where was I? Wasn’t I implicated, haven’t I always been? I need you too, I’m not what you thought I was.

To get older, was that what you were waiting for? To put yourself on hold, to make your life a holding pattern?

The fear grew and grew as the train neared the hated place. Inexorable. And this curious feeling of walking beside yourself, up the gravel road onto school grounds. Back to your room, back to another week of pointless classes.