If we marry...

We sleep by the Viking cemetery at night, and he brings me no birthday gifts.

If we marry...

When we marry, you mean , he corrects. I look at him and nod, of course, I am 22 and clueless.

“When we marry, can it be exactly here? In the wind and the snow cold river next to us, I will fly my family over and we do it right here, next to the stone circle.”

“Yes, what a great idea. This is how we marry then.”

I call him Bear, and he calls me Fox—this has always felt natural. We speak a mixture of four languages, love each other wildly, and the bed creaks so badly in his parents’ house that we switch to making love on a makeshift tatami on the floor. His mother walks in on us once, just as he is still inside me, asking what we want for breakfast. Under the covers, we stiffen, as in nothing: warm breads, please.

Later, we sit in his dead grandfather’s living room, surrounded by women laughing, their voices filling the air of a house like in a crotesque radio theatre play. It was an open casket. I held his hand tightly as he cried, pulling him close to my chest, rocking him gently and carefully. He wept hopelessly for the loss of a man he barely knew. He cries often, I learn. And I comfort often, I learn.

The women around me marvel at his grandmother’s wrinkle-free face as she silently arranges warm cookies in open jars. As I reach out for one, the cookie stares back at me with dead fish eyes, open casket.

“And how young you do look, Ingrid!” They gasp around the old woman.

“That is because I never laughed, my dear ones”.

And as his tears dry, Bear tells me his grandfather used to beat Ingrid often. The old woman first broke her wrists, then her hips, as she was flown across the hallway, down the stairs. Not once did she complain. She would silently gather the bottles and arrange them into a colourful mosaic glass. His father would flee and sail far away, to the Cold Ocean, disappearing for months, years even. Once, he was stranded at sea, and Bear’s mother went to the harbour every single day for two years, waiting patiently for her lover’s return.

He came back. Then, birth of my Bear.

And some years later, he found me. Or we found each other. Throughout our relationship we come across strange signs and occurences: he shares his father’s birthday, and I share his mother’s. That must mean something. We both have a birth mark on our right cheek. That´s it. That must mean love. We grab on to it like babies.

Then there are the fights. Nights of him kneeling before me, whispering names—hers, then another’s, then another’s, and another´s. But they mean nothing, don’t they? Isn’t it me he is supposed to marry? Isn’t it me who is supposed to wait, like his mother did, for his return from the Great Ocean? Isn´t it me whom he has chosen? Isn´t it me who learns to comfort?

So I wait. My tears drying. My patience thinning.

I notice the way others look at me. I, too, feel the need to pay back. To revenge-love.

Then come the breakups, the dramatic exits. Flying piano chairs. The creeping inkling of violence. A fist, suspended mid-air. Brahms is not Coldplay, and he grows in anger. The kind of sex that poisons a room, thick with the scent of ruin we call love. The hateful, forced commands and smiles and the slow lava melting heartbreak inside my chest. I am two months pregnant.

Fox and Bear. Bear and Fox. When I die, I want to die in your arms. And I rock him so gently.

We sleep by the Viking cemetery at night, and he brings me no birthday gifts. I know it is over, but I linger in hope. In the dark, someone knocks—again and again and again, screaming of fear, hopelessly scratching on the window sills. The echoes and the sounds from everywhere. His phone rings at night, his phone keeps on ringing at night. In a mirror I see his face instead of mine, and I see the pair of dead fish eyes staring back at me, open casket.

And I am 25 and clueless as we drive through Europe. And then I am 28 and clueless when we drive through the Eifel and forest and fields and our car gets broken into and he reverses fast and the police doesn´t care, I bleed during the long, distorted nights that mix with blood and fear and painful sex and us holding on to a big wound that we once called our child. I am 30 and clueless when I let him in, again, and again, and again, him always crying, always full of pain, screaming of fear, hopelessly scratching and me always comforting. Rocking him to sleep at night, making sure he feels loved.

When he finally leaves, I am full of his emptiness. And phone calls from Norway, have you seen him, have you heard of him, the father of my son?

That is why

I never laughed.