On the Calculation of Volume, Book I

by Solvej Balle

That is why I began to write. Because I can hear him in the house. Because time has fallen apart. Because I found a ream of paper on the shelf. Because I’m trying to remember. Because the paper remembers. And there may be healing in sentences.

Our love has always been microscopic. It is something in the cells, some molecules, some compounds outside our control, which collide in the air around us, sound waves that form unique harmonies when we speak, it happens at the atomic level or even that of smaller particles.

We were living in two different times. That was all. Two times that had flooded their banks. At a place where rivers meet and converge, a kind of temporal Mesopotamia where the Euphrates and the Tigris are merely two different names for water. We were doing fine in Mesopotamia.