rennie ♡’s Reviews > Winter Stories > Status Update

“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.”

“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.”

“I sat and looked out the window. All you could see from there was asphalt and low-rise buildings, but back then I liked asphalt, and low-rises and parked cars, I was so deeply in love, I liked everything, the snow and the tires on the cars, a tabby cat that slipped between them. And I thought: this is the only place I want to be.”