Singles’ Awareness Day

Some trees are already blooming here in Berkeley.

I hadn’t really planned on celebrating Valentine’s Day this year – or, as I’ve come to know it for the past few years: Singles’ Awareness Day…

But during the day I got a cute card from the Indiana Jones of our department and a piece of heart-shaped chocolate from another co-worker.

The best thing, however, was waiting for me when I got home: Critical Companion had left this adorable picture on my computer next to a chocolate bar. I didn’t even see it until after we had shared our favorite butternut squash pizza from Addie’s for dinner… I didn’t get her anything but at least I paid for the pizza!

Yesterday I warned Radoslav that I might have to somewhat celebrate Valentine’s Day and give him something to which he replied: “That’s okay but I will wait for March 8^th to give you something.” March 8^th is – and I assume every comrade knows this – International Women’s Day and it is also the day on which to give women flowers and chocolate in Eastern Europe, not on February 14^th. At first I was upset and thought why on Earth should I make an effort for him now when he doesn’t want to reciprocate immediately and especially since I don’t even know who I will be on March 8^th? That’s an eternity of waiting away anyway. Yesterday I kept thinking who knows where this is going and what’s going to happen when he’s done with his qualifying exams and we’re supposedly predestined to start actually ‘dating’… And I realized that I keep looking for something which will put a neat end to all of this private uncertainty. That’s when it’s good for me that I have a lovely therapist to see each week and who will listen to all of these messy ideas in my head and bring clarity and logic and reason into my every effort at unleashing a self-detonating bomb upon my personal life. As a matter of fact things are not as bad as I would like them to seem – even if he didn’t give me flowers and take me out to dinner tonight – because on Sunday he came with me to Swedish service in the Norwegian church in San Francisco. After having slept for about four hours… But a promise is a promise, he said, and as I am myself one I appreciate обязательные люди. I made Radoslav into somewhat of a heretic when I demanded he go up to the priest – a beautiful blonde Swedish woman who wears her hair out and heels when serving mass – for a blessing during communion [as I know he won’t take communion in my protestant church for that would really make him a heretic]. I think he appreciated my church just as much as I enjoyed his church two weeks ago [and I’m thinking about going with him there again this Sunday; thus, my church-hopping habits are being rekindled: Swedish service one week, Serbian the next, and Norwegian after that… the only obvious service I don’t go to is American but I hope that’s простительно given that I am otherwise living an American life]. After church coffee we went for a walk in San Francisco; it was a beautiful sunny Sunday and warm enough in the afternoon to remove one’s coat after only a few minutes of walking. We had lunch together in Little Italy after which we went shopping – or rather Radoslav went shopping and I helped him find the proper items because after all men are rather clueless and sometimes I wonder how he – and also other men of his kind and generation – made it all the way into his thirties without an intelligent woman by his side to help him choose the right kind of underwear… It was a wonderful Sunday spent together concluded with a bit of PDA while waiting for the subway back to Berkeley. When we were standing embracing each other and I placed my head against his chest he said with surprise: «Ты такая маленькая!» What is a woman to say to such a thing? «А ты такой большой?» It is sort of like the scene from Lost in Translation when Scarlett Johansson says: “You’re too tall,” and Bill Murray answers: “Have you ever considered that you’re too small?” I guess everything is relative also in relationships between women and men. I like the fact that Radoslav is tall even though I hadn’t considered how tall he is before I invited him to some day join me for a bath [as of late I’ve become a big fan of taking long baths while reading by candle light] because this glorious invitation Critical Companion commented matter-of-factly: “I don’t think he will fit in our bath.” Comrades, I guess we’ll see how that grand plan works out. In my mind our bath is huge – but then again I don’t often reflect on the size of myself but take the scale of other things as something given and not at all relative to my own habitual perspective.

To make a long story short: I bought two packages of chocolate today – one I gave to Radoslav together with an ambiguous message written over two pink post-its and the other one I opened to hand out pieces to everyone I saw at work with the words: “Happy Valentine’s Day!”

It’s a silly invented holiday but then again all human traditions are.

Suddenly I can’t stop thinking about Lost in Translation. It is the movie that I think of as ‘having shaped my generation’ but maybe I think like that because it is the movie that shaped me [not that I am an expert on movies or anything]. When it came out in Sweden in the spring of 2004 – my last spring in the homecountry – I went to see it in the movie theater twice. I’ve never seen one movie in the theater twice [except I saw Mamma Mia! in Russia in Russian and in English in Sweden]. I went in the company of two different men and both of them came up – suprising reoccurrence of memories – in conversation during my therapy session today. Now I don’t remember with whom I went to see it first, with Leo [a pseudonym] or with Mr. T [not entirely a pseudonym]. I remember that the movie made a great impression on me – I listened to the soundtrack for months afterwards – and that I saw so much of myself in Charlotte even though I was not as old as the character yet but only the age of Scarlett Johansson at the time when she filmed it. I was eighteen years old. When I saw it I remembered sitting on the window sill looking out over New York when I was seventeen years old – much like Charlotte does in the movie – and knowing that my father who had brought me with him there was somewhere in this big city having an important meeting. For me at the time it was a movie more about a girl who was feeling lost than it was a movie about a young woman who meets an older man and forms an ambivalent relationship with him. I think the two men I went and saw it with imagined they were somehow this ‘older man’ and that I was their ‘younger woman’ and that this was a romantic moment in our relationship. But I knew all along that I had seen it with both of them – even though I now can’t remember who was first – and that to me this was not what the movie was about. It was to me a movie about a meeting with a foreign country and at the time I was getting ready to meet a foreign country for the first time myself. Traveling to various countries in Europe or going with my father to New York twice was not the same thing. Everything is different when you’re on your own. The therapist asked me why nothing happened with these two men, why they somehow slipped out of my life, why I couldn’t see myself having a relationship with either one? Leo was my friend – perhaps my best friend when I was that age – and he will always remain that one person in the world with whom I will never break and to or about whom I will never speak a bad word. But a boyfriend? It seemed impossible to me at the time. Not only because he was engaged to a girl in my class [and still is] but also because I was already on my way out; I was slowly moving away throughout that spring of 2004. Half of my heart was already in Russia – where it will always belong – and Leo’s function in my emotional education was another. Mr. T also had an important function in a kind of education for me: my intellectual education. He was [and will always be] much older than me; as he was a writer, I looked to him for answers about literature and writing and wanted him to guide me and softly show me how to do things with words. He is a man I will always respect as long as I live and treasure that time in the past which we were blessed to have together but ultimately I understood that I was too young for the kind of union he proposed – regrettably I was too young then to understand this; this realization came much later, when I was older of course – and that I needed to figure who I was before I could be with someone else. I had a life ahead of me to live and he could not be a part of it [though strangely enough it often appears as if he is still a part of it and that he will always be a part of my life and perhaps this is because in many ways he shaped me intellectually – in a way, he created me or even invented me to be truly blunt about things because before I met him there were so many ‘rooms’ I hadn’t entered into yet but he showed me these rooms in advance and that’s in a way how I came to know so much was left to be discovered by myself on my own terms]. It is sometimes strange when you think of how you must learn how to ‘own’ your own memories; to make them fit into your present context and present person and look back at them and see them for what they really are: separate rooms into which no one else may ever enter. No one else was with me the last time I went to ring his door bell – I remember the boots I wore that day and the sound they made against the asphalt as I walked up to his house and everytime I recall this detail I always think how insignificant this is and yet it is a part of what this memory has become to me – and thus no one else can remember it nor make sense of it for me. But even in a shared memory in which you weren’t the only one you can’t always trust the other people involved to construct the appropriate meaning out of this event for yourself. I think this is the case with childhood memories: even though your parents might think they possess the privileged perspective on the way we were this is often far from the truth because there are as many ‘true stories’ as there were people involved. Perhaps that is to repeat an old cliché but I think it should be taken into consideration. I know that Mr. T and I have and will always have different versions of our story and that’s okay because it happened to us at very different times in our lives: I was eighteen and it was in the beginning of my adult life – he some twenty years older and thus his perspective definetly not one of ‘a writer I knew in my youth’ but maybe as ‘a young woman I really liked once upon a time’ [I doubt he would phrase it like that but that’s where memory once again comes into play – we remember things differently and we remember different things].

It is fascinating that a relationship which started with reading each others’ words has continued in the exact same way for so many years now: when he searched for me, he searched for a female reader and that is essentially what he got and what he will always have in me. I have always read him and I will always read him. Sometimes I wish that he wouldn’t take what are only words so seriously but then again everyone has their own relationship with literature. When I told Mrs S the other day that I regard literature as play she said it is certainly not play to her. But words are all we have when it comes to literature – some words we like more than others and some words we repeat too often [as any word cloud will tell us on the interwebs] – and I think that at the ‘bottom of each day’ if you must write, write about and for yourself. The reader will eventually materialize herself – or perhaps she is already there but the writer failed to take notice. And even though you write about and for yourself literature cannot be merely a self-seeking endeavor – everybody owns the same words and yet they belong to no one. Literature is essentially a medium to communicate human experience. For all its flaws and contradictions and conflicts and strange features I think it might be about the best thing we ever invented as a species.

And blogging is of course the bastard child of that kind of writing.

Why must children of our time suffer the madness of adults?

I encountered this frog [?] on my way to campus this evening.

On my way back it was no longer there.

«В разные времена настоящее выглядит по-разному.

Если честно, Глебов ненавидел те времена,

потому что они были его детством.»

[Юрий Трифонов, «Дом на набережной»]

”In different times the present [the real] looks different.

Honestly Glebov hated those times

because they had been his childhood.”

[Yurii Trifonov, The House on the Embankment]

One must not read in bed unless one is can resist the temptation to put the book aside and close one’s eyes for a moment. I am not one of those people; when reading on Saturday afternoons I prefer to call that hour or so when I inevitably snooze a power nap. It makes the habit more legit, comrades. Today I fell asleep and I had a dream. It was a dream about memory – not surprisingly as I was reading a novel about memory, Trifonov’s «Дом на набережной» [“The House on the Embankment”]. In the dream I found myself walking through a familiar territory up to a house or some kind of brick building which contained a room in which I imagned myself once upon a time having lived in real life. Within the dream I struggled to understand when I had lived in this room and where this room had been located. I remembered all the rooms in which I had lived in Russia – the four rooms in Omsk, the two rooms in Yekaterinburg – but none of these rooms matched the room I was approaching. Only when I opened the door and recognized that another space was located right next to it – a large kind of platform made out of concrete with no visible walls – did I understand that I was not remembering a room from real life but visiting a room from a previous dream. I had that dream so many years ago now that I no longer recall what that dream was about. I remembered the space next to it and contemplated how strange it was that these two dream realms were right next to each other now – the other space belonged to an even more distant dream which I probably had as a child or perhaps a teenager. In the dream I saw one of my childhood friends and remembered how we once sat on a balcony with our barefeet dangling from the edge of the concrete platform – later I remembered that this scene had once happened when I was ten years old and that we had been spitting from the balcony down on the asphalt beneath us. In the memory I don’t recall what time of year it happened. When there was no snow without a doubt – but maybe in summer and not in spring? In the dream it happened in early spring and I recalled how euphoric those first not-cold days of spring can be in such a northern country as Sweden. I think I remembered her and saw her in my dream because Trifonov’s novel begins with how the narrator has a chance encounter with one of his childhood friends as an adult and this person chooses not to recognize him. Last summer I had a similar chance encounter with this particular childhood friend on the street in Gothenburg and she chose not to recognize me. After when I realized this connection between the novel I was reading and the dream I was having it puzzled me because after all she and I did not spend our childhood together in almost-post-socialist Sweden in an ideological climate comparable to that of the Stalin era of the 1930s and I did not renounce our common morals and shared ideals in a manner similar to that of the novel’s narrator. We grew up differently and became different people [this happens to most of us]; maybe in her mind this was an analogous denounciation – or perhaps it became equated to me in my mind as I cannot access her point of view anymore. Perhaps I remembered her because I conflated myself as a child in comparison with myself as an adult with the narrator as a child compared to the narrator as an adult. I have also been neither here nor there. In the dream it occurred to me that the scene on the balcony when I was ten had been transformed into a similar scene on a balcony during the first warm spring days when I was twenty. At first I thought that the person sitting next to me on the balcony was my friend at the time Cedric – even though it took place not during my first spring in Siberia as I first guessed but during the second – but then I understood that the person next to me was Diana. For several years I couldn’t remember Diana’s name. Even though she was a large part of my life for many months in Omsk I only stumbled upon her real name a few weeks back when I re-read my own novel Russian Dogs; had I not chosen to name a character after her, I would most likely never have recalled her name. Diana and I sat on the balcony in Omsk that spring of 2006 and talked about her future child – she was pregnant – which later stopped existing due to a miscarriage. For her – and about this, and about our months together – I wrote the poem “I Have” which I never included [I think?] in any of my poetry collections which I produced during my first tears in Russia. I suspect I never included it in any larger context because it didn’t make much sense next to all the other poems which were mainly about me or about literature or about both.

I Have

I have waited with you in hospitals

translated your voice at the police

walked through long corridors

answered your midnight calls.

I have talked to the KGB

soaked my shoes in mud

gotten lost in day light for you

done all I can for my neighbor.

I don’t know Diana anymore today; I don’t know who or where she is and I don’t know if she had as much trouble remembering my name as I had remembering hers. All I know is that she sat next to me on that concrete balcony on my second spring in Siberia and that we were both barefoot but she was the only one who was pregnant.

vänskapligt

The sunset from Sasha’s apartment on Shattuck tonight.

One way to make life good: two glasses and a bottle of wine on a balcony in the evening after the warmest day so far this year.

Yesterday and today I was blessed to end with two wonderful evenings in the company of two great – but very different – friends. Yesterday I worked from home during the day – I love those days when I get to be the master of my own time – and went into San Francisco in the afternoon to wander the stores with the prospect of finding a beautiful dress to send to my friend K. back in Sweden who was recently ordained in the Swedish church. I didn’t find a dress for her but a pair of cute kitten heels for myself in ruby red [only 12 dollars at Ross!]. In the evening I met up with the daikon at the Swedish church in San Francisco, who has become a good friend of mine during the year she’s been here and I’ve had the privileged to get to know her – and we walked through the city to the Mission with a mission of our own: to talk about everything at length and eventually find a worthy restaurant where we could eat a nice dinner together. Ultimately we found just the right Mexican place in the Mission where we shared first some grilled cactus – if you haven’t tried this I can highly recommend it, comrades – and later some delicious tortillas. We finished our adventurous Wednesday evening in the city – “It feels almost like we were abroad!” she laughed and I agreed [because there is something foreign about being two Swedish women walking around San Francisco at night] – by having ice-cream at what is supposedly the best ice-cream place ‘in the world’ by Dolores Park. Even though I perhaps didn’t really have the time to devote almost an entire day to a journey across the bay, it felt like I needed this special occasion. She’s a lovely individual and as she is twice my age she has shown me so many other ways in which one can be a Christian woman. Before I met her I never thought that you could round up a session of Bible study – which was what we did during all of last year once in a while – with a frank and honest discussion about sex. It didn’t occur to me before all the different ways one can be devoted as a Christian and still not neglect everything else about us that make us human beings – and sometimes even though we’re serious about our faith we might also deep inside sense a need to let our most giggly girly side come out. You know, comrades, that side of us which just wants to laugh and talk about men… She has taught me the importance of ‘come as you are’ in regards to Christianity; you don’t have to become someone else – perhaps only more of your self. When I’m with her, Christianity appears not only as a way of live but also as a fun and exciting and thriving religion. We’re happy Christian women together who eat ice-cream and have no inhibitions when it comes to talking about what really matters. I wish everyone could view the church experience in such a light, but then again I do realize that women like her are rare.

Today I spent the evening with my friend Sasha. We ate dinner on his balcony while watching the sun set and drank red wine after the sun had set. Then we sat down inside and read the play «Варшавская мелодия» [“The Warsaw Melody”] together. As it has only two roles – one female and one male – it is as if made for us to read it together. Sasha joined my department last spring when we read Chekhov’s «Вишневый сад» [“The Cherry Orchard”] together and he’s with us also this spring when we’re reading Gogol’s «Ревизор» [“The Inspector General”]. I’m lucky to have met him and made him my friend not only because he is a native speaker of Russian, but also because he has as much of an interest in theater as I do. I suspect few other men would be so inclined as to spend a few hours on a Thursday evening reading a Russian play with a woman but he was just as excited as I was about this entertaining prospect. We have a good chemistry between us when we read together; our voices sound almost perfect following each other in a text as well because his voice is deep and accurately masculine and sometimes can take on this coarse and almost harsh quality whereas mine is light and overtly feminine and I can master my intonations so as to make the words fragile as if in a whisper without actually lowering the tone of my voice. In other words, we’re an excellent fit for a play about love and passion between a man and a woman. It is especially fitting to read such a play with him because he is Boy C’s ex and this of course means that he’s not interested in women in that way. After we had read the play we sat for a long time outside on his balcony drinking wine – it was a surprisingly pleasant evening tonight, not too cold – and discussed love and passion in our own lives.

After these two lovely evenings of social activities it feels nice to know that I will have Friday night all to myself. Critical Companion has also other friends [oh no she didn’t!] and will be hanging out with them. I think I’ll curl up on the couch on my own and read Trifonov’s masterpiece of a novel «Дом на набережной» [The House on the Embankment]. I read it last summer for the first time and I’m blessed to be able to read it a second time for a seminar next week. Sometimes when I really think about what I do for work I get silly with happiness because after all I get to read Russian literature for a living. I should indeed consider this reality more often, comrades.

frigjort

Russia can be external – like this – but she can also be internal.

«Грозы с тяжелым градом,
Градом тяжелых слез.
Лучше, когда ты – рядом,
Лучше, когда – всерьез.

С Тютчевым в день рожденья,
С Тютчевым и с тобой,
С тенью своею, тенью
Нынче вступаю в бой.

Нынче прошу прощенья
В послегрозовый свет,
Все твои запрещенья
Я не нарушу, нет.

Дикое ослепленье
Солнечной правоты,
Мненье или сомненья –
Все это тоже ты.»

[В. Т. Шаламов,  «Грозы с тяжелым градом...»]

“Thunderstorms with heavy hail,
A hail of heavy tears.
Better when you’re – close,
Better when it’s – serious.

With Tyutchev on my birthday,
With Tyutchev and with you,
With my shadow, with a shadow
today I enter into battle.

Today I beg forgiveness
In the light after the storm
All of your prohibitions
I will not break, no.

The wild blinding
of solar righteousness,
Opinion or doubts –
All of this is also you.”

[V. T. Shalamov, “Thunderstorms with heavy hail…”]

Åska med tungt hagel,
ett hagel av tunga tårar.
Bättre när du är – intill,
bättre när det är – allvar.

Tiutjev på min födelsedag,
med Tiutjev och med dig,
med min skugga, med skuggan
tar jag striden nu.

Nu ber jag om förlåtelse
i  ljuset efter stormen,
alla dina förbud
ska jag ej bryta, nej.

Vilda förblindelser
av solens korrekthet,
mening eller tvivel –
även allt detta är du.

[V. T. Sjalamov, ”Åska med tungt hagel...”]

There those episodes from your life that you are proud of. Instances of courage and moments of honesty that signal a new stage of maturity. Today one of those episodes happened to me. In the morning I had a wonderful therapy session with my most compassionate therapist and related to her the turbulence of the past weekend. I ended with the words: “But I don’t think it’s about him.” She argued against my own rationalization and asked me to tell her more about this man – that is, Radoslav – and how our relationship came to be as it is now. I chronicled the most prominent features of our story – the innocent cups of coffee in Decemeber and the friendly e-mail correspondence while I was in Sweden and he still in Berkeley but left out the lovely tiramisu evening in January and the even more lovely peck on the cheek one late evening on Shattuck in February – and she said: “But I do think he is important to you.” This was not what I had expected; I had anticipated her to say that of course this is about something else entirely and that he should be removed from my life so that I can focus on the ‘real’ issues at stakes and deal with them. Instead, she communicated to me that he is a part of these ‘real’ issues. He does mean something to me. And in a weak moment of emotional delirium during Sunday I unfriended Radoslav not only on the ‘real’ Facebook but also on the Russian Facebook [since I’m friends with very few people on the latter, it was unfriending him on the former that actually signaled a crucial break]. Since I hadn’t imagined a therapy session that would prove another point than the one I thought I wanted to make, I hadn’t planned for how to move beyond myself and tell him I’m sorry. I was so stuck in thinking that this kind of relationship was not the kind I wanted or even the kind of relationship that people are supposed to be in – but there are truly no rules for how relationships may unfold – that I hadn’t even pondered the possibility to still have him after what I had done. I wanted a clean break; a definite ending to everything that would enable me to call it all a big mistake and get over it. I was so much of a stubborn little girl today – and the three days before this as well – that I almost couldn’t believe myself when I finally pulled myself together and knocked on the door to his office. “So you’ve cut me off?” he said smiling and crossing his arms as if to illustrate my behavior online. “I’m sorry,” I said. And that was the beginning of the bravest dialogue I’ve had so far with a man. During its course I realized that I overreacted, overanalyzed – did everything a bit too much. Only because this isn’t how I thought things would be. I had pictured a romantic relationship to be a living fairytale filled with candle light dinners and red roses and pillow talk. That wasn’t happening – and because none of that was happening I deemed myself a failure who had once again failed at having successful interactions with a member of the other sex. Not all relationships may be staged for an audience to watch and not everyone who means something to you can be a part of a public performance of happiness. I tried to explain to Critical Companion when I got home what happened between me and Radoslav today but I found that I couldn’t really say anything that would make sense to her because this relationship is a room into which no one else can enter. It’s not unfolding as I would like it to be unfolding; there are no romantic dinners and no intimate conversations to record or remember for other people to hear or even understand. This is something else. Even if I write that I told him – in a moment of terrifying vulnerability – that I don’t want him to play with me it would not make much sense to relate his answer because his answer only made sense to me at the time and this probably because it was not as much verbally expressed as it was expressed physically through the dynamics between us which have evolved for some time now and outside of a public space. I also told him that he’s important to me. “This is not the Balkan way we do these things,” he commented and I felt like everything about me was so fragile in that moment that I could not have been more vulnerable even if I tried. Then he quoted from the Bible and added a sentence which I will from now on respect: “But you have to wait. I have three weeks left before I pass my qualifying exams and only then can we take our relationship to another level.” Somewhere in the back of my head when I thought about this reality before today I kept interrupting my respect for him with that if it was real he would make time for me. The truth is that he has made time for me – only not in the way that can be easily explained to others without sounding like I’m making excuses for this Balkan man and putting myself last on the list of priorities again. I’m not sure what is going on. But I was so proud of myself in the brief moment when I clinged to his arm and said that if he doesn’t go now it will be hard for me to leave. “So that’s how it is?” he laughed and kissed me on the forehead. “Go serve your evening mass!” I said and pushed him in the direction that he was heading anyway. But since I said it in Russian – «Пошел служить литургию!» - the English translation of my words can’t really make justice to what it meant. To me – and perhaps also to him. I would like to imagine that my words contained just the right combination of tenderness and brutality. I haven’t said that Radoslav and I speak mainly Russian to each other? Once upon a time we both spent several years in Russia getting educated – he at the seminary and I at the university – our experiences from this country stand in for the common cultural background we lack. And then there’s the pure beauty of the Russian language and how important it is for me that I get to express myself – my Russian self – with him in this language for that woman is slightly different from the one available in Swedish and English.

I think I’m more vulnerable in Russian – and also more honest and direct.

I think I was so afraid not only of the possibility of a relationship – you know the kind when the other person likes you back and say “you’re important to me too” – but also of the possibility that this would be not what I had in mind. Things were supposed to be so much simpler. I was supposed to know him so much better by now; he would have been supposed to know me much more as well. I was not supposed to be the kind of woman to confess to sometimes behaving like a mad woman, but independent and mature and not as inclined to wear my heart of my sleeve. I hadn’t pictured it like this at all. I didn’t even know what I was getting myself into when I decided to allow him a slot in my life – I always knew that I would like to be with someone who took God as seriously as I do but I had never imagined what such a relationship might look like. It is not that I’m thinking gosh it will be hard not to have sex until the wedding night but rather God this man has some kind of hold on me and I’m superscared of what it means when someone has such a hold on me… Especially since there is nothing to tell! There is no story at all. This is not anything I’ve experienced before. When he didn’t answer my post-it with a text on Friday it didn’t even occur to me that he would have this [bright pink] post-it on his computer and smile when he looked at it [as Boy C duly informed me with a mild measurement of bewilderment]. The truth is that I have no idea what he thinks of me and how he thinks of me and when he thinks of me. Until today, this was my crush on Radoslav – not his crush on me and definetly not our crush on each other. I don’t know why he would want to be with me in a serious way – three weeks from now I will come to understand the meaning of this adverb in a new way – but perhaps I don’t have to know. I don’t think I must explain it or dress the experience in familiar terms. I wanted something different in a serious relationship with a man – and what I’m getting is indeed different. I never thought you could be so spiritually and emotionally attached to someone you don’t really know and that this person could start all of these new and scary thoughts in your head… Maybe I’m scared of that too. Maybe I’m nervous about sharing my religious beliefs with someone who actually understands them. It is so much easier to feel comfortable with your own spirituality when you’re not having a crush on a priest. Everything is a lot easier when you’re not faced with something that might be real. Something that demands you to work on yourself and figure things out and pray. I can’t just hijack his relationship with Jesus and run with it. I have to understand why getting what I wanted in the first place seems like such a terrible thing. Perhaps I was not prepared for a man to refriend me on Facebook and say that all he thought when he saw my fateful text that Saturday evening was “I’ll tell her everything that needs to be said when I see her.”

I said before that I don’t know if I’m standing at a crossroads in my life because I can’t imagine how the future will be different from the past and the present. I think that was a lie. I know very well how the future might become different – and because it requires time and effort and waiting I wasn’t comfortable with agreeing to it straight away. I’m not really the kind of person who waits – for anything. But for this I will wait; come what may. Sometimes when you come face to face with what could become your future life – as I did about ten days ago but I don’t want to get into details about what I saw that made me realize that I had a place in the church which I never thought of before – your immediate response is to mess everything up. Because it is too different. And not something to write home about.

Simply because now is incomprehensible without later.

And to tell people why I like him or why he is important and what exactly is making me do something as unprecedented as saying I’m sorry is actually pointless. I won’t even tell you what he looks like, comrades. That is also beside the point. I could tell you it feels like some sort of weird electricity whenever he touches me and that I sense this strange infinity of time when it happens but what’s the point? In this situation I feel like I’ve begun a new chapter but I’m scared of turning the page because to do so is to allow for a story I’m not writing myself anymore.

P.S. I found out – in the process of admitting to my depression [which is still with me don’t get any ideas a man can do a lot for a woman but not that much] – that I have the world’s sweetest readers. Thank you.

otympligt

Chinese and wine on Saturday with Mrs S at her place.

I read somewhere that what people miss the most when dying are their friends.

I believe this must be true.

It’s been a whirlwind of a weekend – not externally but internally. I wonder how much one is allowed to write on one’s blog about one’s life before crossing the generic boundaries of the format? I wonder if one is allowed to chronicle one’s own spiraling descent into an annoying depression in a public forum as this one? Or must everything be sunny always? Perhaps I can allow myself to unravel in a way now that I couldn’t before – before I had to keep things together and under wraps and direct my attention elsewhere so as not to see nor to write about what is actually going on with me – because I have taken the crucial first step: therapy. Depression isn’t something one wants to talk about when one is in one; it is always much more comfortable to discuss turbulent states of mind as a thing of the past. After this weekend it has become tangible to me that therapy was a good first step but not the only measurement that needs to be taken in order to continue to function. I need to go on medication. Perhaps depression has been lurking in the dark corners of my life for a while now, but only more recently have I come to discover that I am incapable of adequate emotional responses to anything that happens to me. Everything is a tragedy. Everything involving everything I do and am constitutes one big huge failure. And that’s not a happy place. I thought for a moment that I was turning things around, that I was taking back control and calling things by their proper names – alas, I was doing none of the above. Last night – after a lovely evening together with Mrs S during which she patiently listened to everything I had to say [which was not always coherent or even the kind of thing people should talk as openly about but then again we have close friends for this type of chaotic dialogue] – I thought I had once again ‘bounced back’ and that I would from now on be a happy-go-lucky person for all eternity. Instead, all it took for me to plunge back into suicidal thoughts was one text left unanswered. It has still not been answered and I don’t think it will ever receive an answer and onto this message without a reply I projected everything I am and everything I have – or, to be more honest, everything I lack. Of course nobody deserves to be the target of someone else’s madness – least of all the poor individual who didn’t know that by not even saying ‘thanks’ or ‘please stop texting me you’re being weird’ the person was shaking the ground I’m standing upon. This is but one example of the appallingly ascewed perspective I have taken on my life during the past couple of months. In my mind, everything around me is constantly crumbling into tiny pieces – like a frail wine glass being shattered perpetually against concrete floors – and the one thing I thought that I could hold onto proved to be an illusion and not a support but a crutch. If I weren’t me I wouldn’t want to be with me either; I’m not even sure I want to be with me being myself at the moment. Everything I do becomes a mess and I can’t even understand what I’m reading anymore because I’ve lost all sense of proper human response. I don’t understand anything. And reading – as well as understanding – is a crucial part of being a graduate student. I can’t do anything if I can’t read or understand. I can’t read when my mind keeps informing me of how much better everything would be if I weren’t here anymore. This is depression, comrades, and there is not much else you can do about it but hang on in there. And pray for a brighter day somewhere around the corner.

rörigt

The working week is over and that means time for fredagsmys!

Critical Companion eagerly glares at our favorite pizza – butternut squash from Addie’s – while I’m carefully documenting our ‘date night’ [as seen in the reflection in the window].

“Jag kan gå i timtals och bara läsa bokryggarna.

Det är en roman i sig.”

[from the blog of Mrs S – on which I am Zoya]

Let’s see – what I have spent this week doing? On Monday afternoon we started our theater project in the department – this semester we’ll be reading Gogol’s phenomenal play The Inspector General together – and on Tuesday morning I went to my first therapy session. This felt like a most ‘Bay Area Experience’: my therapist’s office is located in a typical Californian wooden house on a central street in Berkeley and propably used to be a residential building in the remote past. It has that special smell which all wooden houses in San Francisco [and its vicinity apparently] have; I don’t really know how to explain it – like a combination of wood warm from the heat of the sun for several years and the sweet stuffiness of timeworn houses with as deep-rooted carpets as the floors themselves. You’ll recognize it when you sense it. When I told Mrs S that I haven’t been in therapy since I left Sweden at the age of nineteen – and actually had my last session in the homeland while I was still eighteen – she commented that it is about time I go and get some stuff out of my system. It’s been almost eight years since I last sat down with a professional to talk about myself. I’m pleased with my therapist who – to my bewilderment – didn’t take any notes during the hour we [or rather I] spoke. It occurred to me that therapy is not only the place where you can make sense of yourself but also a space in which you construct your sense of self. The therapist can’t double-check any facts which you choose to convey with anyone else in your life to see if they’re plausible or even remotely correct; here you are the sole source of information and thus your only representation of truth as you know it. You are also your own representation of yourself and since I am yet to become an expert on therapy it is challenging to realize that the things I thought I wanted to discuss were not actually what I ended up discussing. A part of me – the most human part, I suspect – wanted a confirmation that I am not crazy. I think most people who decide it is time for therapy have a lurking suspicion in the back of their heads that they might be crazy – end of story. After having relieved myself of my most pressing issues – concerned with the obvious intrinsic state of affairs at the moment – I found myself answering the therapist’s follow-up questions in a way I hadn’t planned. Perhaps I understood that all of my pragmatic reasons for wanting therapy were a pretext for giving myself permission to make sense – with the help of a professional – of several other things I haven’t been able to touch upon yet even in privacy.

Going into yourself can be scary because the inside is a terrifying place of disgusting revelations; maybe that is why it is not on the outside.

I would like to say that I’m standing at a crossroads in my life now but this statement is only possible if that what lies ahead of me in the future is somehow different from what is behind and a part of the past. I would like to be able to say that I’m leaving certain things forever in the dark dungeons of memory and getting myself ready for ‘the next chapter’ but I’m not sure that’s entirely true. Instead I think the truth is that I’m currently standing in one and the same place without even the slightest idea of what my future might look like or how I might get myself there. I thought it would be much more emotionally draining to live in a continuous state of colossal stress – try having a conversation with your own dying father on skype and hearing that he’s doing ‘fine’ and getting your hopes up and thinking that it might all be a big mistake after all this cancer business and that of course he’s going to live to walk me down that imaginary altar one beautiful day – but instead I return to my own chaotic emotions and find them surprisingly stable. Or maybe they’re not stable at all. Maybe somehow my brain had a heart-to-heart with my body during which they both concurred that they can’t mourn already now a loss that will eventually materialize itself and then require an emotional response and so we’re saving up energy for what is yet to come. I don’t know. All I do know is that I’m not sure what I’m going through at the moment – all I’m certain of is that it is something.

Since most of my lovely readers don’t get as far as the second page of my blog entries I can allow myself to be more candid once my fingers now are warm against the keyboard. I think I have a problem with romantic relationships; the problem appears to be that I’m not sure if I want to – or even can – be in a romantic relationship with someone. It’s been so long since I was someone’s girlfriend that I have forgotten in what manner these things are conducted. Today on my way to the university – I must inform you, dear comrades, that I for some reason woke up in a dreadfully bad mood – it occurred to me that I can currently only remember bad experiences from the two relationships of importance that I have been in previously. For a moment it seemed as if things were going in a good direction and then I was paralyzed by the idea of somehow ‘messing this one up’ [I have a tendency to mess things up, especially when these same things are going well] only because all that I can clearly and distinctly remember from my two past relationships right now are those insensitive comments about my body that these two men allowed themselves to utter at sensitive moments in our union. In my own opinion I have never been fat; yet both of these men took it upon themselves to communicate to me that I was ‘fat’ at different points in our relationships. I hope I’m not the only woman in the world incapable of vocalizing an adequate response to such comments. Thus, at the beginning of each new relationship with a man I become increasingly aware of how my body is being perceived from his perspective. My next article in Göteborgs-Posten will be about Sartre and while I was writing it earlier this week I realized that I can’t convey everything about him in some 4000 signs. One of the fine qualities in Sartre that I have come to treasure the most is his relationship with my body: it is exclusively celebratory and delicately appreciative. In my article I could but hint at this – as well as hint at how ‘real boyfriends’ often use their emotional influence to convince me that I should consider myself ‘lucky’ that they are choosing to be with me because few other men would put up with having a woman as unattractive. On the other hand I do understand that it is challenging for a man to be with a woman for whom other men constantly hold up doors – Critical Companion was not the first of my female friends to comment on how pleasant it is to be next to me in public because doors magically open and heavy things are magically carried by someone else – and who gets a lot of attention simply because of the way she [I should write ‘I’ here but I’m practicing humility] looks. I often wonder what type of man I attract – I only figured out what type of woman I had been to my former more handsome half M. when I was introduced to his consequtive girlfriends. Only then it became obvious not only that he has an enormous weakness for beautiful women [not all men suffer from this I think] but also that he is entirely blind to his own fallacy and doesn’t understand why he must be with women who are surrounded by other men at all times and who are reluctant to inform him of their status in her life. I can understand these women because I am one of them [and isn’t that an insensitively blunt statement when what one should be doing is relentlessly undermine the reality of one’s physical appearance?]. I can also understand him because it seems that I have so far only been with men with a weakness for beautiful women. The problem with men of this type – in my experience – is that A. they consider themselves physically inferior to their female partner and thus become preoccupied with their own appearance [which makes me bored out of my mind because if I wanted a ‘pretty boy’ I would be with a pretty boy in the first place but I don’t because I know my own kind as represented in the opposite sex extremely well by now and I know handsome men have a tendency not to cultivate their intellect or even social skills since so much is given to them gratis in this life – thus, men who want to look good become as boring as the beautiful men they wish to imitate (“rundgång” as Mrs S would put it)]; and B. they feel some kind of instinctive need to bring down the self-esteem of their female partner so that she will no longer know if she is attractive to other men and think that she must treasure what she has and that sole male individual on the planet who will be with her despite her imperfections [I need only remember M.’s stubborn policy of never giving me any compliments during the two years we were together – he was not even shy about claiming this to be for my ‘own good’ so that I wouldn’t get any lofty ideas about myself]. Both of these traits in men with a weakness for beautiful women are highly unattractive. It is not that I don’t want to be with a man who thinks I am beautiful – I presume everyone wants this – but I tend to fall for men of less handsome appearance because I wish to save myself [perhaps the both of us] from such a fruitless endeavor.

Let’s just look the way we look is my policy. Our bodies will not always remain the same – they will change and, in the case of the woman, bear children and eventually grow old – but let’s instead focus on figuring out the inside [yes, that scary inside].

In Sartre’s version of the world [and of our relationship] he chooses to view me as stunningly gorgeous because he doesn’t have anything at stake in the way I look – only he might get to see me naked once in a while and he acknowledges the importance of making a woman feel comfortable without her clothes for that to happen again. Now when I recall my last month together with my more handsome half M. I can’t even begin to fathom why he thought it was so strange that I no longer wanted to be intimate with him after he had been telling me for months that I was fat. Now when I look back at pictures of myself at that time – the twenty-three year old me was a striking young woman in every connotation of this expression – I can’t even begin to fathom that I believed him. I think that I have a problem with romantic relationships because I have yet to be in a good romantic relationship; quite possibly I have also not been a good girlfriend at all times – but at least I have never told a man he was fat [even when he was]. So I guess that ‘at the bottom of each day’ [my English is sometimes funny when it is oral] I don’t know if I can allow for myself to form an emotional attachment to anyone because there is nothing in my past experience which tells me that such attachments are beneficial – rather the opposite. It doesn’t matter that I myself personally think that Victoria’s Secret could call me up any given day to ask me to stand in for some supermodel [and thus lend the catalogue a touch of ‘real women’], the man I’m with needs to be of the same opinion. And say so out loud.

Thus, preoccupation with physical appearance for me is a deal-breaker.

“The One That Got Away”

As deep as the woods come in this part of the country.

The One That Got Away

a short story by

L. J. Lundblad

January 2012

“Everything will be okay in the end and if it’s not okay it is not the end.”

[unknown]

The spring of that year I began wishing every plane I boarded would crash. Up until that point, I was the embodiment of a success story. As a child I had been a good girl with good grades who eventually graduated from a good school to attend a good university where I acquired more good grades and also eventually graduated. I then became a good doctoral candidate with a good research topic and good academic prospects. In addition to the general goodness in my life I was also good-looking.

It seemed nothing bad could ever happen to me.

Until the day I published a bad paper.

The bad contents of the bad paper cost me my good reputation, my good connections, and my good sanity. Could it be a case of “bad papers happen to good people”? If only! When it was brought to my attention that my paper was bad, other things that weren’t good came to my attention, one after the other. After this failure I began to see how several other failures had been hidden from me by the general goodness of things.

Even though I was aging rapidly – funny how a progressing youth does that to people – I had failed to take precautions and find a suitable mate of the opposite sex with whom to reproduce. Instead I dedicated precious downtime to brief relations with both professors and students; up until the spring of that year I had not recognized the badness contained within this flirtatious tendency. There were plenty of other things I hadn’t done. I hadn’t written a novel even though I was supposedly destined as a teenager to become a good writer of fiction. I hadn’t traveled to Italy. I hadn’t even settled for a hairstyle of significance despite being well into my late twenties. I hadn’t climbed a single mountain. I hadn’t even gone skinny-dipping in the rain.

Every element of my life had been channeled toward being good. After it became a generally acknowledged truth that I was bad, I arrived at an understanding of how I had neglected everything else in order to attain that which was now impossible – that is, a good career as a good professor of a good subject at a good university.

Not badness but rather the understanding of badness led me to throw myself from a famous bridge one windy evening in late April. It was the culmination of failure: instead of waking up at the pearly gates I woke up in a hospital three days later to hear the riveting story of how I had been saved unconscious from the cold water by a courageous surfer and brought barely alive to the emergency room. “So it goes,” said the kind nurse and I could do nothing but agree with her. I took the bus home from the hospital, withdrew from my academic position, shipped the bare essentials of my belongings back home and hoped for the best – that is, I hoped the plane would crash.

Back home nothing and nobody awaited my untimely return: with two complete and one incomplete degrees in a field of knowledge useless and pointless outside the world of academia, I was predestined for unemployment. I was too old to pretend I hadn’t done anything with my life up until this point and too proud to invent other plausible occupations. Back home everyone else were married with children and houses and cars and mortgages and I was the absurd black sheep who had been away too long doing my own thing to be allowed a meager slot in everyone else’s busy lives.

The beautiful young woman who gave inspiring talks at conferences wearing a red dress was but a memory. All that was left of her were a list of irrelevant publications and a wardrobe of formal attire not appropriate for the rugged environment in which I found myself at the beginning of May that year.

I relocated to a cottage in the countryside for the summer while I licked my wounds and contemplated how not to fail at a suicide that wasn’t academic. Finding myself in the deep woods of western Sweden – as deep as they come in this part of the country – my first step to marking my new territory was cutting off my long blonde braid and taking long contemplative walks in rubber boots. Among the numerous things I hadn’t done while dedicating myself to scholarly ends was get a driver’s license. Instead, I traveled the rural surroundings on bike wearing nothing but a bikini top and shorts on warm days. I learned how to chop wood for the fire place. I repainted the upstairs bedroom in a color I wasn’t comfortable with (bright orange). For a week I painted pictorial scenes from the countryside and stumbled upon the realization that I was not a painter. The week after I read nothing but detective novels and ate nothing but blueberries with vanilla yogurt. Once I began talking to myself, I realized that I should perhaps think outside also this box and thus did something as unprecedented as sign up for the position of usher during service at the local church.

My clerical stint could have resulted in only catching up on local gossip while sipping church coffee with the elderly, had I not been approached by the only other person my age there – the priest.

“I know who you are,” he said, “I saw your picture in an article in the paper once.”

“You have to be more specific,” I said, “I’ve been in lots of articles. Some of them I’ve written myself.”

“This one was from about four years ago… and you didn’t write it. It was an interview, I think. I remember seeing your last name and recognizing it as belonging to one of the members of the congregation and thinking that must be a local girl. I was new on the job back then.”

“Was it a good article?”

“It wasn’t bad. You seemed to be an impressive person, with all that success at what you’re doing and stuff…” the young priest smiled. “I suppose that’s why they interviewed you for the paper. You’re working at some fancy university, right?”

“I was,” I said, not smiling.

“My name is Patrick,” he held out his hand.

“My name is Tekla,” I said and we shook hands. “But you probably knew that.”

“You look even better than you did in the paper.”

“Thanks.”

“Are you home for the break?” he asked.

I shrugged my shoulders. “It’s going to be a long break. I’m probably going to become one of those old ladies drinking their church coffee here one day.”

Patrick the priest appeared confused. “I’m sure that’s not true? You’ll get out of this village and become a famous professor one day, right?”

I shook my head. “I left the university world and I’m not coming back. I used to think I’d be a good scholar one day but now I’m thinking I’ll master the bad lands instead.”

“Why?”

“It’s a long story, Patrick. Not the kind of story you tell during church coffee.”

Patrick looked at me without understanding and I left him standing outside the picturesque little church in his green shirt with the diminutive white priest collar peeking out in the shape of a square. I glanced back at him one last time to wave before getting on my bike and thought that it was unfortunate I could not say to myself that it would be the last I saw of him because as he was the priest and I was an usher, we’d be seeing each other every Sunday until his retirement – or relocation. Or both. Or maybe until the authorities came to take me away to where all the other former academics and current crazy people are kept. He waved back at me, standing looking both handsome with his broad shoulders and repulsive with his failed attempt at facial hair.

On a cloudy afternoon three days later I was taking one of my now customary contemplative long walks in rubber boots without an umbrella and got caught in a sudden outburst of rain. About an hour away on foot from my safe haven the cottage, I sat down under a pine tree and wrote senseless messages to myself in the muddy ground with the tips of my rubber boots. I could have been sitting there to this day – or to the end of that rainy evening because I didn’t feel like walking back and get my wool sweater soaked in the mercilessly cold summer rain – if not a man in a green cloak with a black umbrella in his hand had come across me and my scribblings in the ground. He bent down and looked at me with an oversized smile which I didn’t understand at the time but nevertheless reciprocated.

“Caught in the rain, huh?” the man said and laughed.

I nodded.

“Long way to walk back to where you came from, huh?” he continued his monologue.

I nodded.

“My farm’s just around the corner. Come on. Don’t sit there and catch your cold and get your boots all muddy. I’ve got a nice warm fire going at my house.”

I got up and contemplated expressing gratitude but it was premature.

“Come in under the umbrella,” the man offered and I obeyed. “You’re Tekla, aren’t you, huh? I heard Patrick the priest say something about a new female scholar in the vicinity. And who else but an academic goes for a stroll in the woods when the skies look like they’re about to burst any minute now, huh?”

“I’m Tekla. Who are you?” I asked and glanced slightly up at the man walking next to me under the umbrella.

“I’m a farmer,” said the man as if defying a proper presentation.

“And your name is?”

“Erik,” he answered.

We walked up to Erik’s house and he invited me to step over the threshold. A quick observation of his living arrangement rendered it palpable that Erik and I had nothing in common: where there should have been respectable collections of the classics on the bookshelves there were disorganized magazines, movies of questionable quality, and outrageously profane yet quite quaint porcelain sculptures. Inside it was, however, dry and warm and unpredictably cozy. He removed his green cloak to reveal a sturdy masculine frame of the kind that is only cultivated by physical labor. It was somewhat concealed by an awkward plaid flannel shirt – in my version of the world this attire is predominantly worn for the semiotics of irony – accompanied by a presumptuously unkempt beard and unabashedly dirty jeans. He offered me a glass of whiskey which I did not decline while continuing to study the curious palimpsest of unpretentious ornaments on his walls. Somewhere in the kitchen a calendar from five years ago with a blatantly patriotic photograph of the royal family hung for everyone to draw their own pejorative conclusion. A faint smell of damp fur lingered in the air.

“Carina is out for the moment,” he said and filled me in: “My dog.”

“So you’re a farmer?” I began a polite exchange of professional musings.

Erik nodded. “Born a farmer, raised a farmer, and now a grown farmer.”

“I see,” I said.

“I have cows.”

“That’s interesting.”

“Not really,” said Erik and sipped his whiskey. “There’s not much else a country boy who flunked out of school at the age of sixteen can do around here for a living. My father retired a few years back and I inherited the farm from him and that’s what I’ve been doing ever since.”

“Besides getting married and having lots of babies?” I asked and sipped my whiskey.

“Not a lot of women around these days who’d go for the simple life with a good old farm boy.”

 I thought Erik would smile coyly after this line. He didn’t.

“But you, Tekla, or so I’ve heard, is some kind of big shot university person,” he said and smiled though not coyly.

“Perhaps I used to be something of the kind but now I’m just another washed up disillusioned female with an assortment of extravagant degrees who is too old to get hitched to anyone normal and too young to figure out something better to do with her life. For the time being I’m merely living on memories – or, to be more exact, on the royalties from a successful academic book I published when I was still under the misconception of my own scholarly grandeur.”

“Huh,” said Erik and paused as if in serious contemplation of my words before continuing: “You’re pretty cute for a washed up female with a published book and everything.”

“Maybe that was the problem.”

“But I’m sure you got to do all kinds of fun stuff?” he looked at me as if trying to figure out if I was on the verge of supplying our pleasant dialogue with wonder tales from my years at large in the universe. “And go all kinds of places?”

“I’ve been some places.”

“I haven’t been nowhere.”

“That doesn’t mean I have done anything, though. There is a lot I haven’t done. I haven’t even gone skinny-dipping,” I concluded with a grim expression of worldly disenchantment as my lips once again approached the edge of the glass. “Not even once.”

“We can do that right now if you’re up for it,” Erik generously offered to be of service.

“We don’t know each other.”

“I know I wouldn’t mind seeing you naked,” he said and laughed as if it had been a joke.

“Get in line,” I laughed.

“So that’s how it’s going to be?”

“How old are you anyway?”

Erik still laughed when he said: “Old enough to know when I’ve come across the kind of woman I wouldn’t mind going skinny-dipping with.”

“This will never amount to anything,” I concluded sternly. “You like me because of the way I look and when I look at you all I see is this robust rural fellow who has rough big hands and nothing possibly in common with me whatsoever. What in the world would we talk about?”

“Who said anything about talking?” Erik moved slightly closer to me on the couch where we were sitting in front of the fireplace.

“You don’t understand. I’m an eloquent woman of refined taste who demands…”

“When in Rome…” said Erik and put his right arm around me. “We should get you out of this wool sweater anyhow. You’ll catch a cold sitting around in wet clothes for so long.”

I shrugged my shoulders. “I don’t have anything underneath.”

“I know you don’t.”

That rainy afternoon in the wilderness ended as anticipated after the kind of conversation conducted between us: with Erik and I running barefoot through the wet grass down to the shore of a lake located conveniently enough close to his property. Later on the same evening I sat with dripping wet hair wrapped in a blanket on the wooden floor in front of Eric’s fireplace with another glass of whiskey in my hand and a farmer in the nude next to me. Supposedly a bad story like this should end with a good conclusion of the sort found in proper love stories: “Erik and I soon realized that we weren’t so different after all and decided to unite not only our bodies but also our souls in the sacred union of heterosexuality.” But at the end of my summer that year – during which I, contrary to coherent narrative strategies, divided my time between Erik the farmer and Patrick the priest – I realized something else entirely.

On my way to claim another doctorial position at another university two things occurred to me: 1. that I didn’t wish the plane would crash; and 2. that I was the one who got away not once but twice. Or three times if you count the departing scenes with these two rural men as separate events. I will allow for the reader to use her own good judgment in this matter.