Get over it, they say. Move on. To what, exactly? It’s a question of finding one’s way back. Not so you can work yourself into fulfilment and move on to bigger and better things, but so you can see who you were all along. Who were you? Not exactly yourself. But more than who you thought you were, and what others thought. You were a clearing.

   You were a clearing, in your immense stupidity, your cowardice and your work. You were the shape that being took in you. All you are is something that being took hold in.

   She broke up with me on the street outside the government office, after I’d got my residence permit. Even at that moment there was something indifferent in me. That was also being taking shape in me, which I couldn’t hide from. I called my mother, as one does when one is in trouble, and got lucky, in a sense. My parents had a flat in Copenhagen they were renting out, and they were about to renew the tenant’s contract. I had all my things shipped over from storage in England, went to the government office to register as a Dane again, sat in my new flat and drank.

   Drinking dulls the call of the clearing, its urgency. You can sink into your own private world.

   That year is hazy to me. It was almost funny: I ended up in a building full of students next to the North Harbour, a mini-Dubai that represents everything I hate. There was constant construction noise. My mother told me I should be grateful: those flats were sought after, people would kill to have one of those.