seemingly so it ain't so, it just seems to be

The stories not told

T

I put my pen down 11 years ago and told myself that I will not write again until I have found my own heart. In the beginning of those following years I met a man and he said to me: ”If you start on this journey, you will have things to write about for the rest of your life.” My greediness at the time had no doubt about that and I threw myself off the cliff and in the fall I lost my pen.

Even though I had lost my pen I still thought of myself as the prodigy writer having a creative break. As the years passed also that self-image dissipated and one day came when not only the pen had been lost but also that self-image. Then even the passion for writing was not there anymore. It was a dark time. In general I didn’t know why I did things at all.

And when everything had been given up and there seemed to be no reason for doing anything at all then I looked back at the years that had passed and I saw that they had been not as empty as I had first believed. I could even see a richness there. Written into the cells of my body I had stored the experiences from those years, no pen, only experiences, and they could be recalled in detail.

So it unexpectedly happened that a new pen was bought and also a leuchtturm1917-notebook and when I opened it for the first time (which was 10 years after I had initially stopped writing) my hand reached down by itself and wrote to my surprise: ”Welcome back, Lars.”

Stories started turning up, one after another. Even though I can not in any fair way translate the richness of those years here I still feel a small urge just to share a little bit of something for you on this new years eve. A few things come to mind. I love the short and sweet anecdotes of when there is a strong push and pull happening between me and other people.

I remember a story like that. When I was in Buenos Aires and a very disappointed girlfriend threw my bags out of the room and yelled at me never to come back and shortly after that we were making out and I was very confused and felt very tense. I wanted to get out of that poisonous situation and 24 hours later I was in North America receiving a massage from the masseuse of Arnold Schwarzenegger. Oh God, I cried like a small baby when my muscles released that tension, and the masseuse she didn’t know how to comfort me and seemed to feel very awkward about it. ”It’ll be fine”, I told her and I think she understood that I also referred to her well-being.

Oh, another amusing story coming to me now: When a man approached me in the deserts of southern California and asked me to come and visit him in his mansion in the mountains. ”What a nice man he is”, I thought, and so I came to him a few days later. Oprah Winfrey was one of his neighbors in that valley of mesmerizing beauty. We swam in the hot springs, ate good food and had interesting conversations and he needed comfort so I held him when he screamed his anxiety out. I guess I became some kind of therapist for a couple of days. And then one day when we were sitting in the hot springs looking at the stars he wanted to give me a massage and I realized that he had been trying to seduce me all along. The next day I packed my bags and got out of there. Since then I have learnt that I can be quite naive when gay men wants something from me.

And that time when I met the love of my life. But wait, she was the love of someone else’s life too, a married woman she was. For some time it felt like I was her husband, but I wasn’t, and it all could have been very confusing, but it wasn’t, it was as clear as the bright blue sky. She was like an extension of my body and we could read each others minds and hearts, even when being miles apart. And one day I met her in her very own living room and we held each other for a long time and exchanged a short but sweet kiss and it felt like the most natural thing in the world and that was the last time I ever saw her and I don’t know if I ever will again.

Joys, pains, adventures, disappointments, fears, comforts — the list of the dualities of living life is a long one. But there is no doubt: I have lived this life and I have felt the dualities without hiding from many of them. And I will put my pen aside again for whatever comes my way.

Death is only dangerous to the unlived life.

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seemingly so it ain't so, it just seems to be

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