[...] January’s entries were about the winter sales and some guy named Per I thought might be interested in me. In February it was a guy called Tor and a Mulberry bag I’d managed to get half-price and a pair of shoes I should have bought half a size bigger. I appeared to have seen a lot of films I didn’t like, spent time with female friends who bored me and eaten a lot of rubbish. In between I had been to editorial meetings at Romerikes Blad and scribbled down my thoughts about people, but not once about issues; I had spent my Easter break somewhere hot so that when I came home I’d have a tan for this Tor who I didn’t know if I liked, I couldn’t remember him now, nor was he mentioned again after Easter. The names were interchangeable, as were the dates, there was no sense of progression, no coherence, no joy, only frustration; shopping, sunbathing, gossiping, eating – I might as well have written ‘she’ instead of ‘I’. And had anything changed, had growing older made any difference?

[...] My guilty conscience hadn’t eased despite the Kosta Boda vase. Should I buy a new diary and write something else? Invent substance and key events or write an entry about the Kosta Boda vase, I really am coming down with something, I thought, so I drove home and went to bed to sleep it off.

[...] Who profited from dead letters being turned into living ones? Financially it made no sense. Then again not everything can be measured in money. And what if profit was the most important criterion? What if people who got their once-dead-now- living letters became so happy they didn’t buy anything for ages? Forget it, I thought, I left the loo, closing the door behind me, what else can you do when your house is on fire, I was freezing cold and burning hot at the same time.

Do others feel the same way, I lay there wondering. Do other people have sex like this? I thought he had done it for my sake, I had a feeling he was doing it for my sake, that he wanted to be good enough, did he sense that I was missing something? Why didn’t I just say no, why didn’t I laugh, why didn’t he laugh, why did we stay awkwardly not speaking, failing to find the words, silent in a rut we couldn’t escape?

At night I sat in front of my laptop, working on a story about a PR consultant in crisis. He looked like Rolf, I called him Bjarne. Bjarne was struggling to come up with a good name for a fish restaurant in a neighbourhood with many other fish restaurants, all of which were vying to be the most real, the oldest and most authentic. There was The Genuine Old Fish Stall, and The Really Genuine Old Fish Stall, and The Genuinely Old Fish Stall with Genuinely Old and Real Fishermen Living in the Basement. Bjarne’s initial proposal was The New Fish Restaurant Where the Genuinely Old Fishermen Have Moved In, but his boss, Børge, thought that was going too far, and Bjarne took offence and snapped that when he sat his exam at the School of Life, he got top marks.

Rolf was still unwell so I took over the postal directive. Every time the head of Postkom had a meeting, he would call and update me. He was visiting several of Labour’s county branches prior to their annual conferences to fan the flames of opposition. If they subsequently voted against the directive, he would visit them again or call to find out which arguments had won the day. He would then pass that information on to me. Thus he spent his days travelling and on the phone, and from his iPhone he commented on my ideas for the petition and one cold January day it was ready. I posted the petition on www.postdirektivet.no and less than an hour later the signatures started pouring in. I checked several times a day and every time there were new names, on some days several hundred, the bush telegraph, I thought, it’s spreading like wildfire, there’s a good reason for these clichés, from now on I wouldn’t ridicule them unless they were being used as empty phrases, not if they were meant sincerely. To say what you mean, that’s what it’s all about! The first thing I did when I got up in the morning was to visit www.postdirektivet.no and check and every day there would be more, and the January darkness was no longer quite so dark and the cold loosened its grip and the queue of traffic on Mosseveien wasn’t as slow as usual, and who knew perhaps opponents of the postal directive were inside those cars.

I took the copy of the letter, thanked him, bowed and promised to stand my ground. The taxi arrived with Kai behind the wheel, in my hotel room I read the letter again. Self-acceptance, was that what I was struggling with, was that what I was longing for? To accept myself as I truly was, my childhood, my story, my mum, my sister, my job history, my shortcomings and my apathy, the whole package. And that was just for starters. And then take responsibility for myself and my actions and my growth. Not blame them on external circumstances, though these obviously played a part. Not blame society, though it obviously provided the framework for my activities and my being, I had choices, the choices were queuing up from when I got up in the morning till I went to bed at night, I had a choice right now whether or not to call Stein and tell him about Helga Brun.

I stood by the window in my hotel room and convinced myself that behind the storm, which was brewing outside, I could make out Mount Bæskades, while I reassessed my own story which I hadn’t understood was unbearable until Dag died. At that point I had already discovered my old diary from 2000 and was teetering on the edge, then Dag died and nudged me, I fell and I hurt myself, but I got up again and now I was here. A mere mortal, but perhaps that was enough? Might life be a serious business that required something of you, a daunting enterprise? The thought, however, wasn’t oppressive but liberating because it’s good to have a purpose, to be given a purpose, it’s a declaration of trust because you don’t entrust a task to someone you don’t respect. It was almost as if I, too, was standing on the bottom step of a dark basement staircase and could see dawn creep under the door at the top, and I was filled with great faith that I would make it all the way up and step out into the bright ground floor.

‘I feel as if my life is too banal for my despair. That our relationship is too trivial and not passionate enough for our despair. What do we do with our despair if our lives are too small to contain it? Deny our despair and ignore our beating hearts, remain at odds with ourselves and fight ourselves, or accept that there’s so much we’ll never understand intellectually and try to live with things which don’t add up, that what’s most important might be something we can only just sense, and teach our brains to illuminate our hearts and help us live with contradictions that can’t be cancelled out and become open to the idea that being a mere mortal is enough, more than enough in most respects, and once we’re alive, try to live with gratitude and passion rather than shame and paralysis.’

I stopped, I felt the kind of relief you experience after you have thrown up.

I continued making calls into the evening and had an epiphany like Rudolf Karena Hansen had when he started looking for Helga Brun. I gained an understanding of situations I previously hadn’t known about, I heard stories about people I wouldn’t otherwise have heard, I saw connections where I had never seen connections before, and I almost felt I belonged.