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You don’t know what air is, yet you breathe. You don’t know what sleep is, yet you sleep. You don’t know what night is, yet you lie in it. You don’t know what a heart is, yet your own heart beats steadily in your chest, day and night, day and night, day and night.
I spoke to no one about this, for I believe that something becomes true if it is spoken. If it isn’t spoken, it is as if it doesn’t quite exist. And if it doesn’t quite exist, it hasn’t become fixed, and if it hasn’t become fixed, it can still go away.
At times I thought that my job was taking care of the shadows, so that they would grow up in the light. That I devoured shadows.
I myself had grown up during the 1970s, and I remembered how separate the adult world had been. It was as if it played out on a plateau, while the children lived their lives in the valley beneath, where we were allowed to do as we pleased. At times we could see the adults standing up there looking down at us, but they hardly ever climbed down into the valley, nor were we allowed up onto the plateau very often.
When someone is going through a difficult time, the difficulties spread out in concentric circles and touch even peripheral situations and relationships. When darkness falls in one person, fire is lit in the other, and thereby all sense of normality vanishes, unless one struggles to stay within it, without necessarily even realising what one is doing.
It was like one of those fires that sometimes flare up in rubbish dumps and can go on for years. It might get smaller and smaller until it is just smouldering, but then something new happens, something dramatic, and it flares up again. No one could see it, no one knew about it, and no one could understand it, because everything looked the way it always did.
Sometimes it hurts to live, but there is always something to live for.
