TARRYING
EXCERPT
(…)
What is a beloved who does not stay?
He is the gate.
Not the garden.
I stayed for years. By then, I wore heels that punished the earth and smoked my mother language to ash. Freedom, it turns out, can be a rather dizzying liberty; one capable of seducing you to become everyone but yourself. I belonged, so effortlessly—so thoroughly—until the same fire that shaped me also began to unmake me. But isn’t that the very cost of it? That only those willing to burn have any hope of becoming whole.
The time that followed were fevered and I stopped recognizing sincerity. Italy became a theatre, and I danced through lovers and lunacies. I was charming in seven languages and emotionally available in none. There were nights where desire spoke fluent nonsense, and mornings where the only evidence I had of being alive was the receipts for glasses that filled themselves like magic and a very bad decision. My name meant nothing, but my god—I looked good. I looked so good that I thought it was okay to confuse the intensity of another’s passion with the proof of my own worth.
I called it resilience, called it moving on.
But I was seated on the same old bench,
Still holding a number that never got called.
(…)
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The work was exhibited as part of Venterommet, a curated collection of artist books by Jonathan Hörberg Danzer and Sanna Sønstebø at KHiO (Oslo National Academy of The Arts).
