Josefine Klougart - One of Us Is Sleeping

To enter inside the grief and remain there. One might think that the backward step into the nostalgic is a harmless one, and for that reason that one can only be free of distress, without body. And yet I cannot think of anything more perturbing. To walk backward over the edge, divested of one’s body, to plummet without, and die as such bodiless. I will insist on being a distressed person within the world, continually coaxing nostalgia into my being, the struggle that is. To proceed backward and forward at the same time. Nostalgia comes of a fear of death, of simply not living enough, possessing emotions of sufficient depth. I wish only to try and see the emotions that are there; to remain in grief, and go back only in order to be here. Inside my own body, a ghastly face.

I DON’T GET it, he says. I mean, if you still don’t want me.

Are you having second thoughts, she asks.

I’ve always had second thoughts, he says; I never left you.

Okay, she says, picking up her bag from beside her chair. She thinks about her, whether he is seeing her now, or if it was just fascination, the way he said.

Okay, he says, acquiescing, collecting himself like a shattered glass, walking through the city in that way. Picking up shards as he goes, dripping through the streets, gashing himself relentlessly.

She thinks to herself that it is perhaps not a fascination with another person, more a dream of something else, something existing that can do that to a person, render one’s body free of distress . That such a wish can destroy so much.

She loves him more than ever before, slowly relinquishing their being together.

SAY SOMETHING, TELL me something, he says.

Have you seen the snowdrops over there, she says, with a nod toward the trees in the park.

And there, in the flowerbeds, he says. So many signs of spring now, you dream of them at night and in the day they make you ill. She nods. She understands what he’s talking about.

And in summer it’s the heat, she says.

You dream of it at night. .

. . and in the day it makes you ill, he joins in.

Exactly.

She asks him: Do you know that feeling. . like there’s a predominance of things you remember that will hardly leave you alone. In the spring. Because it reminds you of so many things. Other springs. Other people you used to love, she thinks to herself, he thinks to himself.

He looks at her and she cannot gauge the look in his eyes, cannot tell if he is angry or impassive. And then she knows what it is. A spectrum of colors contracting into a beam of cold light. A look that could cut glass.

Yes, he says, inquiringly. Is it something you want to talk about. Is that what you want. Is that really what you want. That’s what he thinks, she knows he does.

She lowers her gaze. They are seated on a damp bench, her skirt is wet, her jacket, unlike his coat, not long enough to protect her thighs. She sits there, and tells him too much. The jealousy, what it does to her.

What is it you miss, she asks herself. Seated there, four, maybe five useless thoughts in her head. I was never even happy when we were together. What’s different now. Everything’s the same, only worse. Because both of them are older now; we are older now. It only makes things worse to have grown older and wiser and still be making the same mistakes. The dawning realization that it will never be any different.

He gets to his feet, scuffs at the ground. She wants to go back to the apartment. I’m going home, we can talk another day.

I OFTEN HAVE such thoughts, of being able to go home. Snow has fallen again. Not much, but all the windows are edged in white, the rooftops upholstered. That kind of wrapping up of bodies and objects. I have no desk at which to work, still no desk. I think it might make a difference. If I had a desk to work at. Then I could get to my feet and leave it, on a Friday afternoon, for instance. Today, I could get to my feet and let the books be a job. Go home to something else. To something other .

Whatever that would be.

I feel guilty about not having a proper job, but every time I try one, every time I have a job, all I can think about is going home.

A proper education. A proper person. As if some people are more legitimate than others, or as if you only get to be a legitimate person in time, by choosing a path and doing something. In which case children, for example, wouldn’t really count. Women neither, perhaps, in theory, at least not on an equal footing. And the unemployed, the homeless, they wouldn’t either.

The age in which we think we live. I always have this feeling: it’s different than the one we think.

My body works constructing the images, bodies working like pistons. Hands working like pistons. Melting snow with traces of rust in old window frames is real. I arrive at a reading, only then to leave again, unable to bear being present. I leave early, like everyone else I feel like the only survivor in a plane crash. To be outside of something, the whole time, excluded.

WE AGREE ON a casual meeting, and your face tries to convince me our seeing each other is innocent, rather funny, in fact. When something is presented in that way, I think: it is neither. Not innocent, not funny. There is nothing innocent about concealing something from a person of whom one is fond. It’s not about feeling, or the absence of feeling. Love, or the absence of love. It’s about saying I love you in one room — and it being true. And the next minute, in another room, to another person, saying the same thing, quite as truthfully. I love you . Not to superimpose the two images, or declarations of love; not to see the image become blurred and nauseating, the way it does. Devoid. To be able to erect a wall down the middle of oneself, down the middle of one’s language, so the two utterances are accorded their own chambers, there to rest unchallenged, by anything but absence. Parallel lives and nothing but open doors, possibilities.

What to be done with possibilities.

And this, recurring — I wouldn’t want. I wouldn’t want to hurt anyone.

No matter how much you narrow your eyes you will see a different reality than the one they see; the maddest of enterprises. And it has nothing to do with love or the absence of love. Children, removing goldfish from their bowls, dabbing them dry and putting them to bed under the sheets. The desire to see vistas, open landscapes; fir trees felled, though bearing lofty nests with speckled eggs inside, close to the trunk, vertical meters of collapsing life.

A person can suffocate from not being able to see far, you tell me, though meaning: I want to see something else .

I’m not sure, but I think it was here that the thought first came to me. That those who leave us will be our judges in the end.

I DECIDED TO wheel my bike home, for once having the feeling that everything in the world was going too fast. The flagstones barely had time to lay themselves down beneath my feet. I remember having to focus in order to believe they would be there for me. Sound, too, can have that kind of delay, I thought. Emotions, too, perhaps. A bit like thirst: you don’t know you’re thirsty until you start to drink.

Later, some months later, I’m sitting outside the same unlikely apartment buildings, on the same bathing jetty at Islands Brygge, wondering if I ever was in love with you. The first winter and the first summer. Whether I actually came to love you. I don’t suppose I did. But always I had the feeling you could save me.

You probably still can, in a way. If I changed — if I became another instead of the tedium of more and more myself.

I may be sentimental, but I’m not half as nostalgic as you.