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Back Loop Save as PDF
Chapters (33)
  1. Loop
  2. 1
  3. 2
  4. 3
  5. 4
  6. 5
  7. 6
  8. 7
  9. 8
  10. 9
  11. 10
  12. 11
  13. 12
  14. 13
  15. 14
  16. 15
  17. 16
  18. 17
  19. 18
  20. 19
  21. 20
  22. 21
  23. 22
  24. 23
  25. 24
  26. 25
  27. 26
  28. 27
  29. 28
  30. 29
  31. 30
  32. A note on the text
  33. Copyright

It’s Sunday. I like Sunday nights, and this particular time always puts me in a good mood. It’s the National Hour on the radio. The airport hour, Sunday from ten to eleven p.m. A transition into Monday, a waiting room. Normally, when Jonás is here, at this time we’re watching a film, having dinner or driving home in the car.

Today I was wondering what my metamorphosis would be. What my true metamorphosis would be, I mean, if such a thing were possible. I’d like to turn into a swallow, I know that, but I wondered what I’d really turn into. What if I became a duck or a rock?

Daphne, for example, turned into a tree. Her metamorphosis wasn’t a punishment. She wanted it so much and so deeply that in the end it happened. Her words granted her the transformation. Metamorphosis is the continuation of a character’s story: it can be a punishment or a gift. I wonder if the written word has the same power, if words can change us like that. If writing and reading transform us into something we have yet to discover.

During the weeks I spent recovering in hospital, and then in the apartment where I lived briefly before moving in with Jonás, I remember it was raining. Hours, days, weeks of rain. I watched it fall. First lying down, then sitting up. Anyone who’s been in that kind of situation knows how the physical pain presses you up close against the present. This hurts, that’s injured, I’m cold, I’m hungry, I need the bathroom, I’m falling asleep, are the kinds of thoughts that subject each moment, each second, to being there. There in the present, which lasts longer the more painful it is. When the recovery begins, when you’re gradually getting better, there’s a window, a small frame through which you can project yourself into another time – into the future. In spite of the rain, during that period I thought about what I wanted to do when the sun came out. At the end of the day, that’s what low points are for: to open that window. I thought a lot about doing everything I’d been too afraid to do, and that was the window I had. When I met Jonás I flung myself through it, with all my weight.

11

11

This afternoon I heard a man in an ice-cream parlour say to his wife: ‘We can leave the dwarves with your mother, darling.’ It struck me as a sentence with cruelty at its core. Children as dwarves, dwarves as children. Evidently a question of height.