introduce the text with: i wrote this text a week ago

in a week i will read this before a crowd and at the “age is just a number” line a bunch of people might clock out. which is what i expect them to do, leaving me with a smaller audience where i don’t have to imagine anyone naked or toothless in case i get nervous.

A place where i never get nervous is the cemetery. The cemetery, full of motherly and fatherly dust. mother, father, sister, brother, that’s all that anyone is in there. we start being daughters before we even know who we are. We spend most of our lives trying to figure that out, only to be buried as daughters and sons, mothers and fathers, sisters and brothers, husbands and wives. 

on these sunny autumn days, i drop off my child to school and hurry to the cemetery, like going to a theme park for deep feelings. i make my way to the bench on corner of the lake where the sun hits at that early morning hour. as i walk hurriedly through the rows of tombstones, i hear the voice in my head saying “respect the dead respect them honour them walk slowerrrr read their names walk slower show some respect hihihihihi koch his name was koch honour the dead don't hurry don’t laugh respect the dead read their names and greet them respect their dust klitgaard his name was klitgaard hihi”

i soak up the sun and i think of my father, buried somewhere far, all bones. im going to be the same age as him in a month.

Age is just a number.

He was fortytwo, now he is all bones, and his bones are not forty two, they must be sixty seven.

is age just a number?

He was a beautiful boy, a handsome balding young dad, then a star, then he became slippery, like a fish, and also invisible at times, until one day he turned into a small shell before he became a ghost, and he was suited for this form, he had the alone gene. 

When i was a kid, and we had guests, he would often disappear in the bedroom, I’d snoop in on him and find him reading a book. I felt so lucky when he invited me to his world, everything he gave me was a gift, 

everything I tried to build up consciously about myself, as a person, was with him in mind. How could he die? I trusted him so completely, this was an unimaginable breach. 

He died but I waited for him to come back, like ha, a joke, ups, a mistake. He died, I knew that, but if he came in through the door it wouldn't have surprised me at all.

Before he was buried, before the long procession to the cemetery, pushed gently to stay within its sad dragging pace, accompanied by a small pack of mint-green butterflies, he was taken to the Cathedral where he married my mother and where i was baptized. Inside this church, sixteen and a half years after I was carefully brought in to get my head wet, I was sitting on the first row of benches, in front of the coffin that people approached for their last goodbyes. 

Sometimes they felt like saying things to me as well, the standard death courtesy, but I, who never had that accommodating gene, just sat there with bare feelings, a sadness without a word to carry it and a tense, stone-like language of the body. I remember a distant family member, the daughter of my godparents, probably a teenager too at that time, was crying a lot as she approached the dead body of my father to give him a kiss on the head. right then a thick, viscous crying booger came out of her nose and rested on his bald head for the duration of the goodbye, leaving with her as she stepped away. 

I stared blankly, aware of the comedy but unable to find laughter anywhere.

At home, with my father, the ghost, my mother, a living ghost, mirrors covered in white sheets by some relative with good organization skills ordering everyone around, “let’s be practical, oh, he was so young, god always takes the best ones young”. Are those the grown-ups raising me? I didn't want to be there, everybody moaning or pitying me or telling me what to do, but no one really talking to me.

I remember feeling, for the first time, I can never call my dad again, I can never talk to him again, really feeling it. There was no worse moment than when that thought settled in and I felt it whole, real, forever. I was like a tree with a broken vein system, some nutrients were not traveling anymore, there was no one to mediate the world with me, to help me step out into it like a human. The whole mushroom system had been cut off. 

I don't know if my dad dying set me up for a life of chasing love or if i would have done it anyway.

but I know that what i often called inlove was a freakout of my mind, a parallel state of obsession, that took over when communication was chaotic, when things were withheld, when i had to do with a person whose emotional maturity was similar to that of a shoe. 

My dads shoe size was also 42.

age is just a number

age IS a number 

42 is the number of repeat stitches in the horse pattern sweater i am making for my child

42 is not the answer that comes from a brilliant computer after millions of years 

but maybe 42 is the question

my question 

And finding my way to the middle could hold an answer

I am so tired of the extremes. 

so I TAKE NOTES. STUDY HARD.

Chasing love was the means of transportation

The wheels on the bus have fallen off
my choice of freedom is secondary to the child’s wellbeing
and my love for the child has been growing the mushroom system back, 

the field is grassy green.

romantic love can only appear on this field if it is in lightness on both sides, 

my lightness sourced from under ground, 

the feeling that even though something is incredibly nice, 

i do not need it as proof of my existence, 

i do not NEED it in any way, 

i am grateful and joyous to experience it, 

but i am also whole without it.

the way to the middle had to go via the extremes, i’ve been there so much, it’s timely.

So i’m Reading Euclid’s geometry

A point is that which has no part

A line is breadthless length

A a circle is one line around a centre, and every straight line from the centre to the edge is equal.

there are arrows of time pointing in all directions

DONT FOLLOW ANY OF THEM!

Making mistakes and not fixing them with a hammer

Babysitting my friends baby 

being moved by his trust in the world

His bareness to it not translating into fear

my old mother

mother time

father death

Being human

Being alive

sitting with the joy and the sadness

not pretending only one exists

i won’t just stand here

looking

Till i’m old enough

till i’m old

till i’m too old 

NO

my child says to me, pointing at a creature with wings, “your dad is here, hes a butterfly.”

a middle-aged temporal horizon shift, i look quickly the other way, not to who i am or could have been but to who I won't be, to my own death and dying. Can I look at death and dying with lightness, so i can LIVE?

My friend invites me to the Philip Glass Ensemble concert. 

During Glassworks, I imagine i would like to die to this music, i am moved, i cry. 

When the two pianos have a go at it, i imagine it as some alternative reckoning, a custom made judgement day, like they would be the clerks accounting my deeds at such speed it sounds like godly piano music.

the piccolo and the clarinet are clerks too, smoking heavenly cigarettes in the background.

Thinking about this the days after, at ease for having had this image, 

for having pictured this, an ending, 

not placed in time but in music, in lightness, 

when all of a sudden i decide they must play Mississippi John Hurt Boys You're Welcome at my funeral, for GIGGLES and for all the time i spent believing in their potential, making choices based on clouds, oh boys. 

No thanks, I don't want a medal. Ive meddled enough. 

Now i want to middle. 

I'm trying to figure out how, 

from mornings in the cemetery, 

from never fully mourning, 

from that one light image, without any substance, 

just this thin layer of icing, sprinkles, 

so I don't have to live looking too far into the future or too far into the past, 

i can just look around, 

the present like a puddle, 

the field, the mushroom, some grass, all the network underneath, if some snotty kid comes and kicks my hat off no problem, im more than my hat.

It’s time to reply to a message that says

“i’d rather see you naked”

before i am all bones.