In Holyroodhouse

HANNAH AND DON

Are sitting at the table, and no water is dripping. They are sitting at the table for no clear reason, since they actually all prefer to lie on their beds in front of the TV, but that wouldn’t be grown-up. To be young is not to be able to imagine yourself older. When you believe in yourself infinitely. And that your body will not change. A young person doesn’t doubt. A young person just is. And above all a young person is virile. Endless virility and the ability to sleep on the floor, just fall over and sleep without sleeping pills, without the need to urinate overnight. To be young is to believe things will go on, except that it’ll get better, because you’ll be smarter, later, in your still-young body, and that the world will have become a brilliant one. Hannah is in love. And it’s worse than for an adult, this condition of being involuntarily out of your head, this excitement, that knows not what it wants. What does it even mean beyond hugging the other person? Don is in love. She accidentally touches Hannah’s hand while handing her the bowl of spaghetti and thinks, I’m going to cut my hand off and put it in the freezer and take it out once in a while and lick it. To be young means falling in love in a way that is no longer possible later on. Because you know what comes next. Awkward sex that is never as imagined, awkward conversations and insecurity, and in the end you’re always alone, and true union, the dissolving of your boundaries, hasn’t happened. There’re just two people who look at each other while they sleep and see the spittle in the corners of their mouths, but you don’t know that, as a young person, when it seems holy and sacrosanct and untouchable, this being in love, that is always conjoined with pain that carries with it the first inkling of misery. One will never be loved the way one hopes. Unconditionally. One will never not be alone. Later. And love will just be love. And now Karen arrives home, she’s pale and says nothing, she sits down and stares at the spaghetti. And Don thinks: too bad, I might have touched Hannah on the neck, there where the collarbones can be seen to the left and right.

And

Karen suddenly sees the squalor in which she lives. The charred pots and pans, the full rubbish bin, the fruit flies, all the crap.

To be young means not seeing the chaos in which you live because there is nothing to compare it to. There is no need to purify yourself of your toxic humanity with a maniacal urge to clean.