The Details

by Ia Genberg

I could tell how she felt about a book based on how fast she worked her way through it. If she was reading fast (Kundera, all crime fiction), I knew she was bored and rushing to be done, and if she was going too slow (The Tin Drum, all sci-fi), she was equally bored but had to struggle to reach the last page.

Some books stay in your bones long after their titles and details have slipped from memory.

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?

An altogether different fever, I write, even though every fever is the same fever, with the same nightmares and the same distress.

I couldn’t choose to hold on to or let go of feelings; instead it would be the feelings that finally gave up and released me.

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.

There was a time when people who disappeared were hard to find.

But I stayed on, somewhat baffled though mostly fascinated by the intensity of her love and hate, the way she churned through people as if every feeling immediately had to be realized in action.

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

We’d say we were headed down to Drottninggatan to “get” some books, not “buy,” as if the books with all their contents somehow already belonged to us, as if all we did was provide the bail to set them free and bring them home.

It seemed to me that the two of them shared a room in a bloodred, severe, and chaotic world I couldn’t access, where emotions were the gods that decided almost everything and where anger could result in plates being thrown and where a new passion might entail a journey across the world at two days’ notice.

“Unhinged”—what does that mean anyway, other than an ability to drive people crazy, disrupting their worlds?

Like death, I guess. Everyone knows it’s coming but few look at their living hands and think that those hands will one day go limp and reach room temperature.

Right when I wanted a hurricane there was a hurricane. I had longed to be swept off my feet, to get entangled in something, and I had the good luck of getting exactly what I’d asked for, the bad luck of getting everything I thought I wanted, the good luck and the bad luck of having my prayers about passionate love heard.

As for me, I had looked forward to the new millennium while it was still remote, a gift that was marvelous while still wrapped, but the closer we got the more ridiculous my fantasies about myself as an “adult” at this point in the future looked.

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.

She was never granted peace, there was always some aspect of the world that had to be controlled lest things went out of hand. And I suppose 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.

When I use that word, “superficial,” I don’t mean “banal,” but rather “incapable,” robbed of the ability to be authentic.

Going deeper requires a loss of control, requires the abandonment of that constant surveillance of time and space in exchange for a headlong fall inside oneself, or into somebody else, or down one of life’s many cracks and fissures.

As far as the dead are concerned, chronology has no import and all that matters are the details, the degree of density, this how and what and everything to do with who.

When I was younger I often thought I should travel more and farther, spend more time in foreign countries, that I should be in a constant state of velocity so that I could get out there and truly live, but with time I have come to understand that everything I was looking for was right here, inside of me, inside the things that surround me, in the money jobs that became my actual jobs, in the constancy of the everyday, in the eyes of the people I meet when I allow my gaze to linger.