Dancing in the Dark (My Struggle, # 4)

by Karl Ove Knausgård

I would have given absolutely anything to sleep with a girl. Any girl actually. Whether it happened with someone I loved, like Hanne, or with a prostitute, made no difference, if it happened as part of a satanic initiation ceremony with goat’s blood and hoods I would have said, yes, I’m up for that.

Oh, this is the song about being sixteen years old and sitting on a bus and thinking about her, the one, not knowing that feelings will slowly, slowly, weaken and fade, that life, that which is now so vast and so all-embracing, will inexorably dwindle and shrink until it is a manageable entity which doesn’t hurt so much, but nor is it as good.

But what we were best at, what we were really the kings of, that was buses and sitting around in bedrooms. No one could beat us at that.

Day in, day out! Wind and rain, sleet and snow, sun and storm, we did the same. We heard something on the grapevine, went there, came back, sat in his bedroom, heard something else, went by bus, bike, on foot, sat in someone’s bedroom. In the summer we went swimming. That was it. What was it all about? We were friends, there was no more than that. And the waiting, that was life.

Why would someone with such red cheeks who liked to go on long walks in the forest have such a big cock? I wondered. What would he do with it?

I would have loved to buy a hot dog from her, just to watch her squeezing the ketchup and mustard from the plastic bottles over the sausage,

If dogs can smell fear, girls can smell nervousness, that was my experience.