by
Ia Genberg
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[...] The day prior we’d locked eyes across a crowded lecture hall. Now she was seated at the short end of a large table, wearing jeans and a collarless black button-up. Our wrists began to consort on the table and electrified the event until the wee hours when everyone else had gone home. The Monday that followed we broke up with our significant others in two separate but still interlinked scenes, and the week after we moved into an apartment in Hägersten that a classmate had received in inheritance and was now renting out. I was twenty-seven, Johanna twenty-four. We installed ourselves in each other in a manner that only happens with people who are certain of a long life together, as if we’d received a guarantee that only death would tear us apart. We merged our books and belongings without difference or distinction, and we didn’t need to specify that everything we bought (a standing mixer, balcony furniture, a Lars Norén collection titled De döda pjäserna) was for communal usage. There was no future plan, no future theater play, no trip, no party, no move that didn’t include both of us, and as time went on, the references and experiences we had in common multiplied until they filled our lives to the brim. She was my main character. My life was Johanna; the conversations we had, the place on Earth we shared. I would never again be as sure of anyone as I was of her, as sure that I truly had someone. Not even years later, when I met the dark eyes of my newborn daughter for the first time, would I be as sure that I had someone.
[...] We were making lasagna, my daughter was asleep in the stroller in the hall. I turned on the oven and got a large onion from the pantry, cut the root and the beginnings of a green sprout on the other side. And right then I experienced one of those rare moments where everything is laid out perfectly in front of you: the fact that this was my third writing workshop and I was still stuck; my understanding but puzzled friends; how I’d let others support me; how I’d taken out student loans and bank loans and gotten side jobs in a vain effort to find my way back to that room. I peeled the onion and discarded the rustling skins in the sink, got a cutting board, cleaved the onion in half, and got to work making thin slices. It was suddenly clear to me that this room inside of me had been shuttered a long time ago, at the end of the last century. A simple realization, like seeing the weather through the window: it’s raining. The next insight came on the heels of the first and was just as simple, as crystalline: all my writing efforts were a vain attempt to reach for something that was forever lost. The onion was half-sliced, the decision half-made. The third insight presented itself as an image, an expanse that stretched out before me, void of nagging ambition, of any need for ideas. No plans, no vanity. No constant failure. I gave up; I was free. The words for “forgiveness” and “freedom” are the same in several languages; an obvious point perhaps, but in this moment I realized that “letting go” could be said in the same breath. The slices lay perfect in front of me. Sally looked over. “Is that the onion?” She took the cutting board and brushed it all into the frying pan. “Or are you crying?”
[...] in announcing one of the last songs he said, “This is for the lonely lady in black,” and pointed straight at me. I raised my hand and waved a little in response. Our relationship had begun.
Sally and I often had nights like this when we just went out on the town; it could be just the two of us or we might make some calls to people who would join us as the night progressed, not looking for beer or music or conversation with all these strangers we kept running into but rather the feeling of a certain kind of freedom, and if we’d been other people who lived elsewhere we might have gone fishing in search of that same feeling, we might have jumped naked into the ocean and ended the night next to each other on a rocky beach, gazing at the horizon. [...]
cute
So that Saturday then, it was in Vaxholm at a venue with a winterized veranda that looked onto the quay, Zomby Woof was the second of four bands and stepped off the stage right before nine, after which he wove his way to my table by the window. I was solo, sober, alert as if the rest of my life hinged on these moments; I tried to achieve a state of wakefulness that was more than awake, a sort of absolute tension, senses wide-open. I felt void of history, as if I came from nowhere, as if the twentieth century had not happened in me for thirty years already and was now coming to an end, and when we stood up a couple of hours later we had not touched more than this: his index finger had at one point caressed the back of my hand. A few millimeters of skin touching for no more than a fraction of a second, but today, more than twenty years later, I can still recall the way it reverberated, how my blood no longer fit in my veins, the way my life no longer fit in me, the way it spilled over and stuck to everything else, already in the cab home and then at his apartment, several hours, a one-bedroom in Örnsberg with a narrow bed in a corner where our laughter ceased and was replaced by a gravity so demanding that it scared me, because it was no longer about pleasure but about something more fundamental, a room in me where everything was spacious and available, my childhood, my people, the connections between everything. “Desire” seemed like “desire” until I disappeared inside of it and stayed in there. It made a different kind of desire appear, an agreement about temporary magic, when places in us that could not touch did touch. To be permitted authenticity in the midst of this act, with not a single thought in my head, without imitation, to be permitted to wreck my life in peace once more. I was so close to myself in situations like this, right at the edge, but to find him there, in my own flesh, the fact that I was an introvert and still found him there, as if we’d always waited for each other and the sweat and the flame that became ours so fast.
[...] Markus, Sally’s childhood friend who was already at that point a famous director, as well as Paul who was sitting across from Markus and made a point of pretending not to know who he was. We had the entirety of the twentieth century behind us and an unknown millennium in front of us, an epic split, and still we gave ourselves to small things, corrupt feelings. Paul who said, “What’s your name again? Rasmus?” and Markus who corrected him, offended, and Anna, a journalist, who said, “I know who you are, I’ve seen a ton of your stuff,” and told us about an amazing play she’d seen that Markus had not directed, and Markus who corrected this, too, and shortly thereafter got out his phone and started making calls to find another party. [...]
lmao
Five months into the new millennium I had reason to go looking for Alejandro. It was said to be the warmest spring in decades and I’d moved into an apartment that for the first time was mine alone, a one-bedroom in Gubbängen with an east-facing balcony where I could read the morning newspaper in the sun. It was only April when the hagberry blossomed, the caul that breaks every year, and an ardent scent suffused the city’s green spaces like a stubborn ache, a quiet organic fullness that was new and yet familiar, a slower place in time, with a different center. [...]
[...] The coffee was done and he moved the pot to the table while I unbuttoned my coat and sat down. “Okay,” he said when he saw my belly, “okay, I can see why you want to get hold of him.” The coffee was disgusting, but I drank some anyway while we talked, Jens was going on tour with another band the following week and added my number to his phone in case he’d hear from Alejandro against all odds. “Well, good luck then,” he said as I was leaving. He made a sweeping gesture, “You know, with everything.”
lol
We live so many lives within our lives—smaller lives with people who come and go, friends who disappear, children who grow up—and I never know which of these lives is meant to serve as the frame. But whenever I’m in the grips of a fever or infatuation there is no confusion; my “self” recedes and gives space to a nameless joy, a unified whole that preserves all the details, inseparable and distinct, next to one another. Afterward I always remember this state as one of grace. That might be one way of describing the whole, people filing in and out of my face in no particular order. No “beginning” and no “end,” no chronology, only each and every moment and what transpires therein. At this point, now that I’ve started writing, there’s one person I can’t escape. Birgitte. I used to think that a sharper sense of being alive was to be found in the forest, that I would be able to walk my way to it between the tall pines, that I would find it while sitting alone on a tree stump with the sun in my eyes, or while gazing out on the sea from some rocks on the shore; that I could only be fully awake among the silent elements. But it turned out that I already had everything right here, in the details around me, that it’s simply a question of being attentive in looking at all of it, of letting myself go and directing my attention outward, and I mean truly outward. That’s where this sharper sense of being alive is found, in the alert gaze on another. It was how I came to understand Birgitte, by observing her attentively.
[...] Birgitte wasn’t particularly adorable anymore, but everything that appealed to these men’s instincts to help, shore up, guide, and understand, was still there. I no longer lived at home and didn’t see her a lot during this period, but my sister was there and she told me about the men she bumped into in the kitchen eating filmjölk in the mornings, the men she encountered when they rang the doorbell late at night with flowers in hand. Birgitte was able to pick and choose, though that’s probably not how she experienced it, and some men stayed for a month while others had to slouch off as the night wore on, the flowers they’d brought left in a vase on the kitchen table. In hindsight it might look like she had the upper hand, suitors competing for her favor, but of course their protection had terms. There were clauses to their goodwill. Her anxiety could seem so crazy, so deranged and psychiatric and primitive, but outside our family, meaning the family made up by her, my sister, me, and our dad, she was able to tame it into the range of what’s considered normal. This lifelong undertaking, the effort to make her instability seem normal, was her life’s great struggle, the great stipulation for being touched by the love of others. [...]