Status Updates From Vinternoveller

“I thought about love. I walked to the store and saw a father teaching his son to ride a bicycle. Or old people who walked hand in hand through the city centre. All kinds of people were carrying on like this that spring, the fathers just ran and ran, gripping the racks on the bikes with their hands, I saw love everywhere. It was a delusion. Or maybe it was true. I don’t know for sure.”

“She reads books and her hair falls down over her eyes. She reads until it grows dark, leaning over the kitchen table. She understands everything. And forgives everything. But I don’t understand her. And I don’t know her.”

“Such random things. That they can change everything.”

“I want to be invisible. I don’t want to be who I am.”

“I have to be calm. I have to be a grown up. I’m the one she trusts, they say so at the health clinic and it’s true. I have to calm down.”

“I couldn’t really grasp that they were real. That they were mine.”

“He did, it was in the flat we had before and the sunlight sparkled on the dust in the air and I stood in the doorway of the bedroom and stared at them.”

“I had thought I would bake and there would be the smell of freshly baked bread in the hallway, I would smile at the parents at the kindergarten and always have something to do at the weekends, I would wash Alex’s gym clothes and hang them on a clotheshorse. And I dreamt of how Alex would lift Alexa high above him, in the bedroom, with yellow light coming through the window. I remember how once he did this.”

“I just can’t bear it, how that word means me, that it’s me who’s supposed to be Mommy, the one she’s calling for all the times she calls out, Mommy, can you untie this, Mommy, can I sleep with you, Mommy, what are you doing now?
I do such stupid things. I am not to be trusted. I never have been. I wanted to be, I did.”

“The night isn’t dangerous, you know. Night-time is exactly like daytime, just that it’s a little dark.”