Det finns en strand i mitt liv. I was carried down to it on my dad's arm as a child and I remember how the scent of the balsam poplars hit me just before we came out on the beach meadow and instead got drunk by the smell of sea and sand. It was a long time ago. Things that are a long time ago, vissa saker, can become more alive within one with time.
That beach I was on at dawn last year when I was paralyzed inside out of fear. Out of anxiety I did not show anyone. I left my mother's house on a dark winter morning, went and went with cramps in my chest and finally stood by my shore just as the black sea detached from the space of infinity through the first streak of sunrise over the surface and again – igen! – dispersed a blind night's paralysis. It hurt so much in me that time. In every corner of me. It hurt the most not to understand how I could have ended up in the terrible situation I was in. It hurt the most to feel that nothing was left. No tomorrow. That feeling scared me the most because I always get up at ten. I did not recognize myself. I can not find words to describe the heart-wrenching captivity and betrayed loneliness I was carrying. A kind of horror. All for another person's insidiousness, a human being I could not understand that it came into my life at all. A man who really had no value in my life, who just took over my life, sucked out my now, min framtid, my dignity.
I stood the dark winter mornings at the edge of the sea and the great sky without anyone knowing- and wished I could stop. Do not die. Cease. As if I never existed. As if everything I've never been started. As if all those I love could have just let me go, for if I had never existed, it would have been easy to stop. No one would even notice it. That was my wish. To just stop.
I would probably never go out to sea. Jag tror inte det. But where I stood, everything was over. It scared me so much. Nobody noticed, because I did not show it.
I spent my visible time clattering the keys while wandering around beneath the surface or simply directing my thoughts to emptiness. In many ways more and more inaccessible without anyone really understanding it. You can play yourself. For a while. I was going to eliminate myself. Do not act anymore. Just react. Exist but do not work. Just seem to work. While I waited for the disaster. Or the redemption. The anxiety I had was like a cement block over my neck, over breathing, my hands were burning and I could not touch anyone or anything. I was like a lone craft in space, a vessel without targets that would be best to drop.
Today I was there again, on the same beach, but lovingly in the neck of my grandson's arms. Another child on earth with sparkling open eyes and obviousness. A child who creates language, and thoughts, which is a new world in our world, which comes with humor and the child's straightness to us. Of course kind love. As I get to witness, and loved by, which I get to love. Which I will follow. And who has just waved hello then and traveled on summer adventures after a time with me.
(Oj, as i write this something magical happened?!
I'm sitting in my mother's house and suddenly a glass starts, a music box from Vienna that I have seen all my life play. I have not touched it. It has been quiet for several years. It's playing right now, the melody very slowly, with small pauses between notes. Do you believe me?? Det är sant! A childhood music box melody. All by itself…!)
Back to what I was going to write. Filled with context, of meaning, of the golden pattern of the web of life, of gratitude and some fatigue after a week with the small child, I packed a basket and rode the blue bike to my beach. It is so goddamn beautiful this year. I never think it has had such a rich flora as now. It did not look like that in the seventies when I was growing up and poppy died of ddt. The beach meadow is today like a calm crescendo in colors. Backtimjan, crows, gulmåra, violate, mauve, fists, cat's foot, bluebells and of course the beautiful beach rye and heather. The oaks, young and old, which creeps up the slope caressing the backs of the storms. I'm so happy about this. The short-grown meadow grass that smells sweet and that my nose was very close to when I was a little girl and learned sensualism.
I thought today when I stood on my beach that nothing is dark anymore. Every morning I had stood there in the compact black and looked out at an invisible black sea , I prayed and let out a few tears that froze. Tried to get power from my meadow, my beach, my sea, this place i love. Now the frozen petrified is forgotten and I am happy to see this rich splendor! It was waiting under my feet where I stood. The wonderful thing I see today was possible – också. Next to the sea suction. Också. With a little wait.
I have played on this beach every summer while growing up. We were many children playing there. And our moms wore swimsuits and were beautiful. My mother was most beautiful, tanned, sunbonnet, pearl necklace and with an enjoyable smile, the most beautiful smile. We had a coffee basket and juice and buns and my dad lay like a white seal in the sea. He often swam straight out, was underwater for far too long – he had enormous lung capacity – and I did not know until the other day that my mother was worried every time. But he was never taken by an insidious stream, but always came back, with his head under the water all the way to the shore, even though it was very shallow, the broad white shoulders shone.
My kids do not care about these stories. You do not listen so carefully to your parents' stories, they seem so distant, so finished. You do not understand that all that is still alive. I've never listened to my parents either.
I was thinking about all this when I was lying there on the beach today and suddenly I fell asleep under my sun hat. Completely safe.
I woke up to an old woman's voice, in fine mild Scanian, she said:
”Åh, it's so lovely with the beach!”
Like my mother. The old woman walked arm in arm with her very middle-aged daughter on her way up from the bath. She wore a dark blue swimsuit and a white little cloth hat. With her daughter's help, she stumbled through the sand and lay down under the rosehip roses to drink her coffee. Ja, you have to bathe before you can drink coffee, such is the rule.
The next moment I saw a tall, gray-haired man, slightly older than me, go with his really crooked mother out into the water. Osteoporosis, tänkte jag, the vertebral compression that affects so many Swedish women, it's too sad. A crooked woman, who once was like the mothers on the beach when I was little, those in floral swimsuits and pearl necklaces and coffee baskets. Beautiful with small children around their legs in the warm sand, in the middle of the obvious love, among the sparkling eyes small, with the menu and the bike and the fresh fish and vegetables and summer parties in mind. Maybe sex. Fever August sex when the children slept in their stinging burn on sand-strewn sheets. The old crooked woman had probably also bathed there all her life.
The long narrow zone with thick gray hair, took his mother's hand. She was so small by his side. They went far out hand in hand, but it never got deep enough so she dipped, straight down, as a child where they stood. Then she released his hand but I looked at his body language and how his arms waved in the air, that he guarded her as one guards his child. Funny enough, there were only four people in the sea at the time and the others were a middle-aged father with a rather small daughter. She dived and swam and he fit and encouraged. They were not aware of what they were painting.
After the old woman enjoyed the water, she took her son's hand again and they went up together – he himself did not bathe – and he held her hand until we met at the shore. She smiled at me as I walked in. That smile. An old woman who got to do the most wonderful thing: swim in the sea with the help of his son. Oh her laugh.
I went in, appeared so that the hair gets wet and the salt water enters the head, and then floated on my back for ages as always in my bathing procedure. I lay in the water with my eyes full of sky, united with the sea, long. The sky that was so black, the sea I could not distinguish in the dark winter mornings, but whose dangerous liberating closeness attracted me, always always attracts me. So lonely then. So dangerously lonely. Dangerously lonely.
Nu:
In the sea under the sky, buren, flowed through.
Tack, igen. Tack.
I heard myself breathing, the sea breathes, I breathe, the sea breathes. In the end, I returned.
The crooked mother went home with her tall son, long as mine. The other old lady remained in the sand drinking coffee with her very middle-aged daughter. The wind played in the daughter's gray long hair.
With the salt water dripping over my body, I once again walked through the sand with my middle-aged feet and filled my cup with coffee, pulled the sun hat down over his eyes and then thought nothing more.
