Voices behind the door. People talking.You can always hear everything through the thin walls, every laugh, every sniff and every gurgle of a flush. The house does not offer any privacy. She hears how the old man in the upper floor coughs. He has always coughed. Her little brother in the attached room starts to laugh.
She turns on her Disc-man, a silent screaming which grows louder as she turns up the volume emerges and then she changes the song abruptly, to „The Man Who Sold The World“ sung by „Nirvana“. It seems to her as if the music would not flow out of wire but would actually be there, intoxicating her.
She whispers out the words;
„...Although I wasn't there, he said I was his friend
Which came as some surprise, I spoke into his eyes
I thought you died alone, a long long time ago...“
She is reading in a slim, worn out notebook, and with a pencil she scratches out a few lines. She sighs. So much she could write, and so little words.
She is comfortably settled on a blue mattress, around her a sea of papers.
„...You're face to face
With The Man Who Sold The World...“
There’s not much that wories her anymore because it all seems pointless to her. Long before any other child had started developing problems or becoming aware of them, she had given up on them.
„...I laughed and shook his hand, and made my way back home
I searched for form and land, for years and years I roamed
I gazed a gazley stare at all the millions here
We must have died along, a long long time ago...“
She closes her eyes and then opens them again to voices behind the door. She can’t make out a word they’re saying and she closes her eyes again. About half a second later she rips them open once more and looks at her watch, it’s 12:00 o’clock, they think shes still asleep. She has already eaten.
The curtains are closed, like always.
Suddenly, she stands up. Its a drowsy feeling to always lie around, her back hurts. She sits up.
Not knowing what to do, she leans forward to the window, sliding the curtain to one side. Its snowing again. It has been snowing without a break for the last three days. She watches the snow fall for a while, how snowflake after snowflake touches the windowpane and then sort of vanishes.
She picks up one of the papers and starts writing:
....I too would love to be one of those snowflakes
that glides to earth with such fascinating peace,
I dont want to arrive though,
melt away, eventually be forgotten
- nor do I want to be famous –
Just a part of the entire beauty.
She pushes the paper she just wrote on away and stands up, her body is aching, she has been lying for the last 18 hours. The paper lands neatly on a mountain of other scraps of papers, scraps of thought.
She pulls a pair of jeans over her leggings, takes her cloak and exits her room.
„I’m going out!“ she yells.
„Good morning!“
She walks up the road and takes a steep right into the needle woods, it feels like entering a whole new world. Before the woods started there had been a landscape of white snow around her and now it is a mossy ground, the air is cold but there is hardly any snow.
She sits down on a rock and scrapes off a bit of moss with her fingernails, in her a lump of nothingness.
She starts singing something, the words make no sense,but they dont need to, they calm her anyway.
There is nothing certain in her that needs to be calmed, maybe a feeling of being caged in, maybe a feeling of hate, regret, plain sadness, overflowing happiness?
* * *
She doesn’t have any scars on her body, nothing that could remind her of an incident or give her a memory of her childhood. If it weren’t, well, natural for all people to have had a childhood she would have known that she was never a child.
Her childhood is made up of what people have told her, and she has treasured them altough some seem very foreign to her.
One unfond memory is, however, her very own and she clings onto it more than all the others, it is of her at the age of five.
Her parents have guests over, boring guests who like wheat biscuits and to sip tea and nod every now and then. She is curled up in her mothers lap like a little kitten and her face is buried underneath her breast.
She turns around bored, her care taker winks at her through the half open door of his room making gestures for her to come in. She laughs, happy that someone has time for her, and goes in.
„Didn’t you get a book on your brithday? Go and fetch it, should i read you something?“
She runs out very quickly to get the book, excited, finally having found someone who has the time to read to her. It has a nice cover, colourful and in the inside there are alot of pictures, alot of writing, and alot of chapters. When she had gotten the book from her best friend across the street, she had been prouder than ever. Chapters. She is a big girl, finally!
Her brother had once, said that only grown ups have books with actual chapters. But of course she couldn’t read it yet, it was very complicated. Even so she was very, very proud.
So now, where someone finally wants to read to her , she is very greatful.
He opens the book and reads „Cinderella“ and she loves the story instantly.
She makes him promise to read it to her everyday. She doesnt want to hear the other stories, she loves this one.
On the third day, his hand slides over to her and touches her.
When she goes out of his room, he says, „wear skirts from now on, they’re easier to open“ and grins.
She knows ist wrong, she can feel it, but she doesn’t know why it is wrong and what it means. She doesnt wear a skirt. But she still lets him read to her because noone else has the time.
Day after day, after she leaves his room she feels awkward, she feels bad. As if a part of her was being drained away everytime she stepped out of his room again. She feels a slight guilt inside her. She is an Innocent.
One day, she screams. But nothing happens. No one comes, the house holder is busy and she is annoyed of always being called by the little girl for a silly reason like to play with her. She has work to finish.
* * *
As she grows up, there is something that is always blocking her way. Some invisible pull that doesn’t let her move on; mature. She is left behind.
She is alone. In a sense isolated from her surrounding, but then, not completely.
The world she knew so well seems to be spinning past her...spinning away and she is hanging in mid air, in a vacuum of darkness.
Everyone is unhappy with her behaviour, even strangers seem to shake their heads.
Thousands of conflicts are in the air, heavier than air though. They dont seem to go away.
She stands up and walks out of the woods.
It has started snowing again, the footprints slowly dissapear under the new snow, no one will know where she was, no one cares anyways. She pulls her collar over her head and buries her hands somewhere between T-Shirt and Sweatshirt. With the crunching noise of crisp snow under her feet she goes back home, a story in her mind.
« return.