Solvej Balle

Every night when I lie down to sleep in the bed in the guest room it is the eighteenth of November and every morning, when I wake up, it is the eighteenth of November. I no longer expect to wake up to the nineteenth of November and I no longer remember the seventeenth of November as if it were yesterday.

What I remember most clearly from that evening is how much I enjoyed sitting there between Philip and Marie. They had a closeness which I could not help but notice. Not the sort of unspoken awareness that shuts other people out, the self-absorption of a couple in the first throes of love who need constantly to make contact by look or touch, nor the fragile intimacy which makes an outsider feel like a disruptive element and gives you the urge to simply leave the lovers alone with their delicate alliance. They had an air of peace about them, Marie and Philip, which reminded me of the time, five years ago, when I first met Thomas.

The sudden feeling of sharing something inexplicable, a sense of wonder at the existence of the other—the one person who makes everything simple—a feeling of being calmed down and thrown into turmoil at one and the same time.

I have counted the days. It is my #122 eighteenth of November. I have come a long way from the seventeenth and I do not know
whether I’ll ever see the nineteenth. But the eighteenth arrives again and again. It arrives and fills the house with sounds. With the sound of a person. He goes about the house and now he is going out.

It was one thing for me to have encountered a fracture in the normal progression of time, but the idea that he had played a part in my day and that he had had conversations and done things he could not remember obviously gave him the same feelings of faintness and unease which I had had when I saw that slice of bread drifting floorward. That strange moment when the ground under one’s feet falls away and all at once it feels as though all predictability can be suspended, as though an existential red alert has suddenly been triggered, a quiet state of panic which prompts neither flight nor cries for help, and does not call for police, fire brigade or ambulance. It is as if this emergency response mechanism is there on standby at the back of the mind, like an undertone, not normally audible, but kicking in the moment one is confronted with the unpredictability of life, the knowledge that everything can change in an instant, that something which cannot happen and which we absolutely do not expect, is nonetheless a possibility. That time stands still. That gravity is suspended. That the logic of the world and the laws of nature break down. That we are forced to acknowledge that our expectations about the constancy of the world are on shaky ground. There are no guarantees and behind all that we ordinarily regard as certain lie improbable exceptions, sudden cracks and inconceivable breaches of the usual laws.

It seems so odd to me now, how one can be so unsettled by the improbable. When we know that our entire existence is founded on freak occurrences and improbable coincidences. That we wouldn’t be here at all if it weren’t for these curious twists of fate. That there are human beings on what we call our
planet, that we can move around on a rotating sphere in a vast universe full of inconceivably large bodies comprised of elements so small that the mind simply cannot comprehend how small and how many there are. That in this unfathomable vastness, these infinitesimal elements are still able to hold themselves together. That we manage to stay afloat. That we exist at all. That each of us has come into being as only one of untold possibilities. The unthinkable is something we carry with us always. It has already happened: we are improbable, we have emerged from a cloud of unbelievable coincidences. Anyone would think that this knowledge would equip us in some small way to face the improbable. But the opposite appears to be the case. We have grown accustomed to living with that knowledge without feeling dizzy every morning, and instead of moving around warily and tentatively, in constant amazement, we behave as if nothing has happened, take the strangeness of it all for granted and get dizzy if life shows itself as it truly is: improbable, unpredictable, remarkable.

But when Thomas is on his own nothing disappears. It was me who made things disappear. That must be it. I am living in a time that eats up the world.

. I leave a trail. I have become a ravening monster, a monster in a finite world. A swarm of locusts. How long can my little world endure me?

I can no longer flow through the day. It seems to have grown too small, either that or I have grown too heavy. To have grown huge and shapeless. A monster cannot flow in and out of a day, a monster is not fluid. It cannot flow into and fill the day’s empty spaces. It overflows. It grows. It cannot hide in the world. A monster rumbles. It rampages. It cannot be still. It cannot play in a quiet orchestra. A monster is slow and heavy. The days begin to go more slowly. I fill. I do not flow. It is me who is slowing things down.

But I cannot work the soil. I have one single rainy day. I harvest nothing. I sow nothing. Nothing is sprouting or growing. My seasons are gone. Nothing comes of my days. They merely pass and I follow them and eat up my world and listen to the ghost in the house.