wrapped 2024

 January. An empty page, Twilight-like.

Vampires. A trip to hell, to all the things we didn’t talk about. A trip to awkward silences. February 15: 341 minutes of Stubborn Love on loop. February 25: Numb. Tired of carrying it all. Alone while you hold me with dead arms. So lost in my head, spiraling into myself. I killed the love. It’s over.

7 p.m. Danish classes. Exhausted. Feelings in the freezer. Friends holding the pieces together, cooking for me hand-in-hand, day after day. The shy smile, the funny joke. The sun is out. A run. 5K. A pastry. A podcast. Women building culture, sharing knowledge. 7K. Taking extra shifts. Working in the stockroom. Working in a school. Patchwork of jobs: shifts and gaps. Full-time hours, part-time pay. Broken rhythm, weekends on a Tuesday morning. 9-hour shifts on Sundays. Crying myself to sleep. No prospects. Nightmares, dreams of you coming back and saying yes. A seller. A substitute. A wasted master’s degree. Avoiding eye contact. Going to the library, borrowing a new book. A woman writing about all my pains. Another one. Avoiding it all.

April. My cousins always knowing. Just knowing everything and laughing it all off. My aunt cutting tomatoes, drowning them in olive oil for me. I feel myself cracking open. I give myself permission to stop now. It’s been months. I throw up - my body’s way of mourning. Every cell fighting, feeling guilty. Replaying it all in my head: what I said, what I didn’t. More anxious than ever. Dreaming of your hands touching me, painful, remembering how safe I felt. Fix you. Fix you. Fix you. Lies I still cling to.

Arm in arm, she takes me for a walk into a fortress. She’s a healer. I’m sad, feeling her carrying it all. Being the worst, the selfish one, the one that cannot stand good news, lives thriving. A beer that tastes like ashes. Everyone is ugly. Everyone is, and I cannot avoid hating them. Reading our conversations at 3 a.m. Again. Wanting to erase you from this world. Biking down your street, not wanting to look at your window. Always checking if you are home. Maybe watching my stories again. You are always the first. Still.

Chalky hands in May. Sleeping in tents, cooking beans, falling in a 6B. Crimps, little footholds. Slab. It’s cold at night. Early mornings belaying them. I realise how much I missed the outdoors. Walks in the forest. Drinking from a stream. A beautiful lake ahead of us. I cry so much. You could have not. You could never do any of this. I need the space, all the space. I need all the forest, and the trees, and the lake. And they give it all. They hold me afterwards. They cook for me again. Friends. I would have just given up on this. Helpless about it. What was I supposed to do? Say it. Out loud. This is what I need, are you in? Crying that day made room for something else. Space to breathe again. Space to start over. Deleting all your traces from my phone. Uninstalling you.

July 15: Moving. Out. Out of that place filled with hate. Light as a feather, a full van and three friends with their bikes and their high-pitched laughs, noisy, always so noisy that I will never be grateful enough for them, pushing a wardrobe out of an old building and into my new place. I play Viva Suecia and translate the lyrics for them. The girl with the tattooed dots under her eyes opens the door of my new home. Feeling delicate, not fragile. Wide open, bleeding in front of new people, asking them to press their fingers into my wounds.

Long sunny days. Tons of dips in the cold Baltic Sea. Reading naked on a little island in Norway. Laughing again, the unworried teen laugh that I missed for so long. Clever, sharp, open eyes now. Seeing the world again, not for the first time, but also yes. A day with my past, with someone that buys me cheese, and picks me up from the airport, and lends me clothes after the rain soaked me on the way to his place. Taking care of each other in our own way, after all these years. A Pandora’s box with tape, “think again” written on the top - a reminder of how dangerously comfortable we felt poisoning each other.

Listening to Costa way more than I would like to admit.

Being alone and feeling blessed. Another job application. In my head again. Wolf eyes. Long night. Dark room. Sweat. Too many times catching his eyes on mine. Just wanting to feel something. His tongue playing with mine. Let’s meet. Biking home together later. No, you’re not coming upstairs. Silence afterwards. Too close. Hungover.

A childhood friend visiting, looking at the scars, reminding me we’re one phone call apart. I didn’t want to bother. There was too much to talk about. It’s better now. Let’s eat on the balcony. And then I have to go to the university. I am a teacher there. We talk about wanting to always be the best ones. It’s insane, it’s unhealthy. We know. We are all the same, the obedient, smiling girls that behave always as expected. Socially pleasing with honours.

August 28: A call. Yes, we want you. Work with us. Full-time. Yes, you can keep your job at the university. Yes, you’re worthy. Pension. 4-day week, 21 kids in your class. God morgen, you work in Danish now. A bottle of champagne that I hid in a cabinet because in winter I didn’t believe in myself. A bottle of champagne that my neighbours brought from France and gave me for taking care of their cat. Happy birthday. Orange sunset. Too much love, way more than what I deserve. Shut up. You deserve it all. Cheers.

Back home, where all the streets smell like orange blossom. A deep breath. 10K on a mild afternoon in October. Locking eyes with my therapist after 11 months crying on a screen. Why did I move? Why am I always moving? People are buying houses. Playing adults. The geographical cure does not exist. I look away. I fly back to Copenhagen.

Short days. Shorter. Long nights. Vitamin D. 6:20 alarm in the morning. Up again. Routine. Blessed. Blessed because a forced schedule makes me feel human. Blessed working almost 50 hours a week because I don’t want to give anything up. Fridays out, fully booked with people that push me to be better, reading out loud what I write. In Valencia: the rain. Al meu país la pluja no sap ploure. Now there’s mud everywhere. You write. I really don’t want to talk. I’m proud of myself after a long, long time. Congrats on whatever you told me, I didn’t want to hear it. But you never cared about what I needed. I see it now. We bought a Christmas tree. What does one do with savings? Am I a grown-up now? Silly. Still scared. Writing with precision, being faithful to the inexplicable. Flying back home, heading to the rabbit hole once again, but now loving more and more these hands that never stopped writing, and this body that learns, and this voice that – sometimes – speaks up.