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efterlader) wrote2024-05-10 04:59 pm
efterlader) wrote2024-05-10 04:59 pm
Entry tags:
fic | july 11th 1906
[ trigger warning: idealization of death, mention of suicide. ]
ON THE OCCASION OF CARL’S SECOND BIRTHDAY, JULY 11TH 1906
Dearest Carl,
The measures that we take of time are strange, illogical things.
In how many ways couldn’t I count today? It has been two years since you came into this world, the answer to all my prayers, while it has been three years and four days since I married your father in a ceremony exceeding all other ceremonies and only six days less than that, since I moved into this house, our little Nutshell. Which holds all my world.
However, I could count differently. I could say, it has been twelve months precisely since Gudrun left it. This world, mine. The clock struck nine five minutes ago, I heard the chime; outside, the dusk is still only half-fallen. That is another blessing of July, the time between sunset and sunrise is brief, one is not made to wait long at all in the dark of night. Should I thank God for that? I fear that I must.
I have a desire to tell you a story. One that you are still much too young to understand, and perhaps you never will; I shan’t hold it against you, my darling, for I barely understand every little twist and turn of it myself. It plays out far from here, in a rural town in Western Jutland, where I was born and raised, never imagining I would ever leave that place.
Never imagining I would ever want to. It may be that I wasn’t entirely wrong in thinking so.
The town is called Holstebro, a new train station was built the year after I moved out, as if mocking me, knowing I would soon have little reason to visit any longer. Yet, it is no story about train stations, it is about growing up in a quiet little pond full of ducks, while being actually a mute swan. The writer, H. C. Andersen, wrote a similar tale that I shall one day read to you; his at least ends happily. But I am getting ahead of myself.
You will never know your maternal grandparents, for they are no longer among us; both perished when I was still very young, only a good handful of years older than you are at the date of this letter. Suddenly an orphan, I moved from the farm outside the town and into the small townhouse of my aunt, who was something as rare as a revered spinster, living right next to the school inspector, Johann Hald, with whom she often associated, because she herself was also a scholar.
These tedious details are necessary to fully introduce the other leading character of my story, another figure you shall never meet or know, but she came to be of the utmost importance. To me. Although choices I later made might not reflect it.
I am getting ahead of myself once again.
Hr. Hald had two children, a son who had at the time of my arrival just entered grammar school, and a daughter my own age. Her name was Gudrun. I recognised immediately upon being introduced to her at one of my aunt’s tea parties that she was, in the same way I felt, a mute swan in a duckpond. It ensured I was instantly attracted to her, even at seven years old, the draw was undeniable.
The first day I went to my new school, Gudrun walked the way with me. Our little, buckled shoes, polished within an inch of their lives, struck the ground at similar intervals, in perfect time. I told myself it was a sign. Her dark brown hair was braided in two thick braids, bound at the ends by silk ribbons, cherry red. I couldn’t help thinking how sophisticated she looked, a little stern, too. As if holding something in, a secret, perhaps. I was only guessing.
I was reaching.
As we drew nearer to the school, of which her father was the inspector, she turned her head and looked me straight in the eye, in a manner that frightened me. Never had I seen such an honest gaze before. Never had anyone levelled me with one such.
“Do you sometimes wish you were dead?” she asked me, then. Her question frightened me as well, but not due to its nature; rather, I was frightened because it felt as if this girl had looked right into my sacred soul and was pulling out all the dark, shadowy enigmas it was trying to seal up in its depths.
Since the funeral had been held for my parents a month prior, I had had recurring dreams of my shadow, that it had become its own individual creature, separate from me and so long as my shadow was not under my control, I knew, the way you can know something with great certainty in dreams, even as you know nothing, I would never find rest. Peace. Death would not come for the girl who was chasing her shadow rather than the other way around. Thus, these dreams were of great anxiety to me, and I struggled with them daily, albeit in complete silence and solitude. I didn’t tell my aunt. I didn’t tell anyone.
Even so, I told Gudrun. “I live in mortal fear that I shall never die,” I said.
And clever as Gudrun was, she replied, “I suspect one cannot obtain the good kind of death until one has lived the good kind of life.” Her words made me shiver but soon after, she took me by the hand and the chill subsided. Her wisdom beyond all years both froze my insides and thawed my skin, where we were touching. That was the first time I came to understand, one can freeze and burn at the same time.
The rest of the distance to the school building, in front of which the young teacher stood, ringing the bell, she was a local girl who had returned from her studies in Aarhus, we walked hand in hand.
At two years old, you know so little of the world. Perhaps that is the reason you can look at it with such a bright, open gaze now, in the end much more honest than either Gudrun or I would ever allow ourselves to be. I wonder if that is the progress of your generation. If that is what you will leave behind when you one day die, far out in the future, I pray; having ventured in pursuit of many more horizons than I ever did.
Yes, I pray, let me finally be gone, when you go. It is long due. Most importantly, let me have left behind such a wonderful mark on the world as you; it shall make up for all life’s clawing and scratching and biting and the blood I have spilled, the tears I have cried and the lives I have lost. Not counting my own.
At two years old, you can’t possibly yet know that your mother has no shadow, that she lost it many years back and has been in desperate search ever since. You cannot know what it feels like, to find the person who is willing and glad to lie at your feet in your shadow’s stead, taking its place, so you are never alone. And you cannot possibly know, because I am here, and I will be here for as long as you need me, the deep darkness of sorrow that overcomes you when that person is taken away. Removed like boots from your feet or gloves from your hands in the merciless frost of midwinter, you are bidding goodbye to all protective measures, all familiar sources of heat.
You cannot know. You mustn’t.
Therefore, I am telling you the tale of the two mute swans who found each other in the pond full of ducks, hoping what you take from this, if you should ever read these letters, is how there is hope for you, and you may indeed find an animal that suits the strange but wonderful little creature you yourself are.
Just as I one day hope to tell you the rest of the story, so you may learn not to make the same mistakes that I did and which I live to regret, because death does not come for the girl who has no shadow.
The certainty of dreams is a wondrous mystery.
If I should start to question it, there would be nothing left to which it wouldn’t extend, and I harbour no wish to call you into question, my son. Light of my life, blessing of my heart.
Happy birthday, darling. Long live Carl.
With love,
Your mother.
Dearest Carl,
The measures that we take of time are strange, illogical things.
In how many ways couldn’t I count today? It has been two years since you came into this world, the answer to all my prayers, while it has been three years and four days since I married your father in a ceremony exceeding all other ceremonies and only six days less than that, since I moved into this house, our little Nutshell. Which holds all my world.
However, I could count differently. I could say, it has been twelve months precisely since Gudrun left it. This world, mine. The clock struck nine five minutes ago, I heard the chime; outside, the dusk is still only half-fallen. That is another blessing of July, the time between sunset and sunrise is brief, one is not made to wait long at all in the dark of night. Should I thank God for that? I fear that I must.
I have a desire to tell you a story. One that you are still much too young to understand, and perhaps you never will; I shan’t hold it against you, my darling, for I barely understand every little twist and turn of it myself. It plays out far from here, in a rural town in Western Jutland, where I was born and raised, never imagining I would ever leave that place.
Never imagining I would ever want to. It may be that I wasn’t entirely wrong in thinking so.
The town is called Holstebro, a new train station was built the year after I moved out, as if mocking me, knowing I would soon have little reason to visit any longer. Yet, it is no story about train stations, it is about growing up in a quiet little pond full of ducks, while being actually a mute swan. The writer, H. C. Andersen, wrote a similar tale that I shall one day read to you; his at least ends happily. But I am getting ahead of myself.
You will never know your maternal grandparents, for they are no longer among us; both perished when I was still very young, only a good handful of years older than you are at the date of this letter. Suddenly an orphan, I moved from the farm outside the town and into the small townhouse of my aunt, who was something as rare as a revered spinster, living right next to the school inspector, Johann Hald, with whom she often associated, because she herself was also a scholar.
These tedious details are necessary to fully introduce the other leading character of my story, another figure you shall never meet or know, but she came to be of the utmost importance. To me. Although choices I later made might not reflect it.
I am getting ahead of myself once again.
Hr. Hald had two children, a son who had at the time of my arrival just entered grammar school, and a daughter my own age. Her name was Gudrun. I recognised immediately upon being introduced to her at one of my aunt’s tea parties that she was, in the same way I felt, a mute swan in a duckpond. It ensured I was instantly attracted to her, even at seven years old, the draw was undeniable.
The first day I went to my new school, Gudrun walked the way with me. Our little, buckled shoes, polished within an inch of their lives, struck the ground at similar intervals, in perfect time. I told myself it was a sign. Her dark brown hair was braided in two thick braids, bound at the ends by silk ribbons, cherry red. I couldn’t help thinking how sophisticated she looked, a little stern, too. As if holding something in, a secret, perhaps. I was only guessing.
I was reaching.
As we drew nearer to the school, of which her father was the inspector, she turned her head and looked me straight in the eye, in a manner that frightened me. Never had I seen such an honest gaze before. Never had anyone levelled me with one such.
“Do you sometimes wish you were dead?” she asked me, then. Her question frightened me as well, but not due to its nature; rather, I was frightened because it felt as if this girl had looked right into my sacred soul and was pulling out all the dark, shadowy enigmas it was trying to seal up in its depths.
Since the funeral had been held for my parents a month prior, I had had recurring dreams of my shadow, that it had become its own individual creature, separate from me and so long as my shadow was not under my control, I knew, the way you can know something with great certainty in dreams, even as you know nothing, I would never find rest. Peace. Death would not come for the girl who was chasing her shadow rather than the other way around. Thus, these dreams were of great anxiety to me, and I struggled with them daily, albeit in complete silence and solitude. I didn’t tell my aunt. I didn’t tell anyone.
Even so, I told Gudrun. “I live in mortal fear that I shall never die,” I said.
And clever as Gudrun was, she replied, “I suspect one cannot obtain the good kind of death until one has lived the good kind of life.” Her words made me shiver but soon after, she took me by the hand and the chill subsided. Her wisdom beyond all years both froze my insides and thawed my skin, where we were touching. That was the first time I came to understand, one can freeze and burn at the same time.
The rest of the distance to the school building, in front of which the young teacher stood, ringing the bell, she was a local girl who had returned from her studies in Aarhus, we walked hand in hand.
At two years old, you know so little of the world. Perhaps that is the reason you can look at it with such a bright, open gaze now, in the end much more honest than either Gudrun or I would ever allow ourselves to be. I wonder if that is the progress of your generation. If that is what you will leave behind when you one day die, far out in the future, I pray; having ventured in pursuit of many more horizons than I ever did.
Yes, I pray, let me finally be gone, when you go. It is long due. Most importantly, let me have left behind such a wonderful mark on the world as you; it shall make up for all life’s clawing and scratching and biting and the blood I have spilled, the tears I have cried and the lives I have lost. Not counting my own.
At two years old, you can’t possibly yet know that your mother has no shadow, that she lost it many years back and has been in desperate search ever since. You cannot know what it feels like, to find the person who is willing and glad to lie at your feet in your shadow’s stead, taking its place, so you are never alone. And you cannot possibly know, because I am here, and I will be here for as long as you need me, the deep darkness of sorrow that overcomes you when that person is taken away. Removed like boots from your feet or gloves from your hands in the merciless frost of midwinter, you are bidding goodbye to all protective measures, all familiar sources of heat.
You cannot know. You mustn’t.
Therefore, I am telling you the tale of the two mute swans who found each other in the pond full of ducks, hoping what you take from this, if you should ever read these letters, is how there is hope for you, and you may indeed find an animal that suits the strange but wonderful little creature you yourself are.
Just as I one day hope to tell you the rest of the story, so you may learn not to make the same mistakes that I did and which I live to regret, because death does not come for the girl who has no shadow.
The certainty of dreams is a wondrous mystery.
If I should start to question it, there would be nothing left to which it wouldn’t extend, and I harbour no wish to call you into question, my son. Light of my life, blessing of my heart.
Happy birthday, darling. Long live Carl.
With love,
Your mother.