Josefine Klougart - One of Us Is Sleeping

Who is it who finds their way home in the dark, who is it I embrace in the night. Myself as a mother, later, my mother as a child I must care for, and now try to rouse as I wander through the rooms, through the city with the stroller, in early morning — wanting only sleep.

You love my family, and they’ve missed you. You are more at home with them than with your own parents, I think to myself. I consider leaving you my family. Dubious donations, purchased origins, if that’s even possible, if anyone can it would be you.

THE SUN CRAWLS up the walls, spring in mid-winter. Trees clamber toward a blue sky. I force the months out of my writing. They are nothing but decor and pretense.

Who knows what October will say, when it all boils down.

Who knows what November is. Tired light, tired darkness, seeping in, or not. The wetness of wet wool, I can endure. October, November, December take me nowhere.

WE GO FOR a walk, though you are not made to walk. It’s not just a question of your body. It’s more basic than that, a general lack of endurance. As soon as we come to the fields all you want is to turn back and go home, kick off your shoes; as soon as we see the hill of Agri Bavnehøj, that’s where it starts; I sense the way your movements angle left. That veering away in you. Homeward, always in the direction of the settled that will not present itself. I realize there is a forbidding feeling of impaired recognition at work. We are familiar to the point of sickness. We are strangers. In love with something that was.

The houses weep in winter.

Horses cry.

The foundations are ravaged by frost, water pipes burst like blood vessels. A trickling of life, and of spring, but the damage is there, inside the mind, behind the walls.

I’ve forgotten my gloves. I hold my hands up in front of my mouth and blow some warmth into them; you take off your own gloves and offer them to me. You say nothing, not a word, in fact. I accept only one, putting your bare hand in mine and burying both inside the pocket of your coat. Not a word. We are like one of those watercolors folded up wet, two figures joined in the middle, drawing color from each other as we walk. We have pulse. We are. We awake in the mornings, both of us, with something on our lips, the feeling of something important that needs to be said. You and I. I try to say it, perhaps not to you. But at least, to do something.

You. I no longer know if you’re even trying. If you tried. Ever.

When evening comes I am emptied, while you are more than filled, and kick off your shoes in all your fullness.

Where have you been, you’ll suddenly ask.

Or else you say: You’re always going somewhere, or coming back. Look at me. What’s the hurry with you, what’s so important it can’t wait. And I’ll shrug.

What is the hurry. But it’s evening and I don’t know. It has been uttered, only not to the right person, not to you, anyway.

There is a smell of something burnt, oil drums in gardens, the widower burning off cardboard and plastic. It is that time of year, that time of day. We have been out for hours. Fathers in the mudroom. The concept of mudrooms. A day in winter, an exhalation, then an inhalation, no longer than that. The day is like drinking water, there is nothing left in the mouth besides a natural order.

No thirst, simply order.

I’m tired, I say. You nod. We haven’t slept enough, you add. Only my fatigue has nothing to do with sleep or no sleep. But then it’s you who says: I’m tired.

THERE WAS A winter, nearly three years ago now. Three years, you say, your whole body shaking, not just your head. Such realizations come to you these days; realizations that threaten to whisk you away. You are a web — each of your corners is fastened to reality, though quite invisible. There is no reality left in your body. It’s as if your conceptions of the world have taken over. Floating freely in your own web, until encountering a seam, the harsh impact of reality, the bow of a ship against the quay, vessels splitting down the middle, conceptions taking in water. This is you these days.

I still want to save you, but I know you would hate me for it, and so I refrain. I wander about myself, collecting for your charity; I will rattle if someone picks me up. But no one does; I am not the kind of a person others want to pick up. I am too heavy.

WHEN HE LEFT her it was winter. They lay on the bed in her new apartment. Amid the city, half sleeping, winter, the kind of listless calm in which you can suddenly say anything at all without it coming as a shock.

Don’t chew your lip like that, he told her. She went on reading. Stop it, he said, and slapped her hand, and then she couldn’t help but look up.

Okay, she said.

There was a hum from the kitchen, the washing machine spinning sheets and dish towels and facecloths, the vibrations in their teeth. They had lived in Copenhagen six months in their separate apartments. In order not to miss out on that . They had left everything behind in Aarhus, that was how it felt: Copenhagen being temporary. They would be going back. They had finished university, and were ready — but for what. To fail, to be canceled.

Two of his friends helped her move. Only what you need, he said, and kissed her on the cheek, though only to make up for there being so much, that was the feeling she got. But then maybe it was a reproach. That comment, that kiss, placed on her skin like a cold mollusk, his fingers, and yet something in his eyes that genuinely relished seeing her like that: leaving something behind.

I’ll take it, she had said to the landlord, and a blind fell down in the window at that very moment. She could hardly stop laughing, or else she began to cry, it’s hard to say, both, probably. Things can start like that, too. When reality seems staged, that sort of timing: or when what’s staged turns out to be reality. You should be careful what you write, it might turn out true. It will never be anything but.

August, and then soon after: autumn, winter; the wind gusting, her skirt a sail on the sea, the rumble of a blaze. So cold you’re not sure if it’s actually hot.

There were two rooms, besides the kitchen and the bathroom, which was down in the courtyard. Two rooms. She dumped a blue IKEA bag in the corner, could hear them coming up the stairs. With packing boxes. The bed. She stood still in the corner with her mouth open and her hands at her sides: so this is happening now. The kind of thought that occurs when suddenly you find yourself waking up somewhere else instead of where you went to sleep.

She sat in the window, got up again. Felt happy, filled with excitement. Another of those moments where you sense everything that is to come, and everything that has gone before: an unmistakable feeling of something ceasing to exist, with a beginning.

Not everything survives. Or rather, nothing does.

And then that window, stiff and vertical, hysterically opened onto the courtyard. Linden trees. In the autumn, when they are pruned back: crowns docked like tails, half-seeing eyes that blink at a sky forever turning gray. Winter, a stunted squall that will pass. The clouds shift without pause in autumn, and she gets up from the table, sits down at the table, gets up, writes and does not write, in one seamless movement, puts the kettle on, drinks from a cup with brown concentric rings at the bottom, cuts some sprigs in the yard, they weep, the sky likewise; she forgets the water as it boils, she writes some pages, all in one seamless movement, a movement that does not belong to her.

Her feeling of guilt is a constant storm that brews inside her; a sickness waiting for a cause. A moment’s fatigue, weakness, resentment. And the fever is upon her. Then she must run, she must convince her body that everything is all right, at rest, at work. Writing: she is continually in doubt as to its validity .