My Struggle: Book 4

by Karl Ove Knausgård

When we were together I always left early so that he wouldn’t discover how boring I really was. There was a kind of fever in me, two conflicting emotions, such as on the spring morning when we ditched school and went by moped back to his place and listened to records on the lawn. It was fantastic, yet I had to cut it short, something told me I wasn’t worthy or couldn’t fulfill his expectations. So I lay on his lawn with my eyes closed, like a cat on hot bricks, listening to Talk Talk, whom we had discovered at the same time. “It’s your life,” they sang, and everything should have been great, it was spring, I was sixteen years old, had ditched school for the first time, and was lying on the grass with my new friend. But it wasn’t great, it was unbearable. He probably thought I feared a reprimand for skipping school and that was why I got up to go. How could he have known that it was because it was much too good? Because I liked him too much.