The Details

by Ia Genberg

She thought it was her duty to finish a book she’d started – just as she finished all her courses, papers and projects. There was a deep-rooted sense of obedience in her, a kind of deference to the task at hand no matter how hopeless it might seem.

Some books stay in your bones long

I asked myself if this was what structural violence looked like: to unconsciously teach someone about gifts, where to buy them, how to deliver them. To teach someone that you’re not supposed to buy the cheapest pair of pants, ready-made pesto, computer, or frying pan like I’d always done, but that you had to pick the best version.

To read with a fever is a lottery; the contents of the text will either dissolve or penetrate deep into the cracks accidentally opened by an out-of-control temperature.

Time folds in on itself, as it often seems to do under the influence of fever, and I suddenly find myself standing side by side with the me from twenty-four years ago. The brink of insanity lies at thirty-nine degrees, but not far below, at thirty-eight, there’s a clearly discernible valley where I wouldn’t mind spending my days.

It was like one single conversation that didn’t stop even when we were apart, not even the first Christmas we spent away from each other. For my part, the conversations with Johanna lasted long after she left. Maybe they never truly stopped.

But just as we can’t choose our deaths, we can’t choose the extension of a broken relationship.

That’s all there is to the self, or the so-called ‘self’: traces of the people we rub up against. I loved Johanna’s words and gestures and let them become part of me, intentionally or not. I suppose that is at the core of every relationship, and the reason that in some sense no relationship ever ends.

I think of the anecdote as a form of chronic illness that attaches itself to some people; that compulsion to tell everything in the shape of a story, to turn life into a formula meant to captivate, impress, upset, or inspire laughter. An anecdote is a sealed box that cannot yield anything other than more sealed boxes until every party to the conversation – or the ‘so-called conversation’ as Niki would put it – sits there with their own pile of sealed boxes, mentally obstructed, tied to the mast, and with the anecdote next in line tugging at their attention.

TV means that somebody else is trying to control my gaze, whereas books leave me to my own devices.

writers, and tried to wrestle with what I still wrestle with: the stroll of the thought from the head onto the paper. I knew almost nothing about writing, but there was one thing I did know: for me, the process had to be as tightly sealed as the distillate in the cone-shaped vessel on the stove; I knew that every leakage meant death, that the magic disappeared if I looked too closely, that nothing could be divulged before it was done.

Station, the art of getting on a train.

Letting someone leave literally meant letting someone get lost.

the self-knowledge brought by that irritation.

All relationships have the potential to end abruptly, it’s an inherent risk,

There’s no better place for hope than a bar, especially when hope is in short supply.

Maybe it was just about the right dress and the right sort of high, the timing of stumbling into the right person in a moment when your boundaries happened to be a bit loose so that trust could attach itself even when it could not, like that indestructible marble egg that would explode if you struck it at the exact, magic hour.

I was helplessly attached to this everyday, the precise hours which pass in us with such care, the detailed plan for the aching miracle, which meant that the end to the story was perfectly visible from the start, a premise given in advance. It was the nature of it that it would be over, kind of like a season, and I suppose that’s exactly where we found our fire.

time, in and of itself, is just a construct,’ she continued, ‘this whole silly business.’

We live so many lives within our lives – smaller lives with people who come and go, friends who disappear, children who grow up – and I never know which of these lives is meant to serve as the frame.

Anxiety’s central task, as instructed by fear, is to run ahead and touch everything, circle potentialities with the intention of preventing them from happening, on and on and on in a process that never stops, that becomes one with life.

that’s what’s at the heart of it for every person suffering from anxiety; the fact that life, by its very nature, is impossible to manage.

a life lived but also spilled.