A Line in the World: A Year on the North Sea Coast

by Dorthe Nors

the place you come from is not somewhere you can ever return. It no longer exists, and you have become a stranger. Too urbanized, too acculturated, too loud to assimilate, but all identity is formed in the schism. I will never escape it, and of course I knew that even when I was young. So now I sew my geographical stitches between this coastal world and the savage city. I need the plurality, the conversations, the invisibility and the people. But I cannot cope without the landscape, without nature. I need a broad, still place to which I can return. A horizon. Some friendly, level-headed neighbours. My own place, and a point of departure, where I don’t necessarily know all the names on the gravestones, but where I know the light, the scent, the meaning of the shifting winds, and where all the time that’s running out is raised up in the telling of a story and snatches its piece of eternity. Before we come apart.