NOVEL
You Give Me Warmth and I Love It
The Love We Had, Chapter 16
16
It is becoming more and more clear. I have to trust myself. Others can hardly be trusted to get it the way you want it.
Everyone must create and take care of their own happiness. The other usually fails not out of malice or complacency, but for other, perhaps external reasons.
The hard but fair truth to realize is that all, yes, each and every one of us is dramatically alone. We are left to ourselves, to who we are, who we can think we should be.
The other, the one I love, is a parallel universe a little further away that I can be a part of for a while. For a while we need each other, we want to give each other mutual support, be a travel companion for each other, on the road to the unknown somewhere further ahead.
There is a force inside me that does not leave me alone, a restlessness that gets a little annoying when I start thinking. I look for words she has given me in exchange for my words, I read what she has written and see that I have control over her.
“You give me warmth and I love it. I’m glad you appreciated me. You’re a big part of me, and of course I do not want to lose touch. ”
I read through the emails she sent me in the first half of the year. They are many, intense and it takes time. I scroll down, go back, read on and search for new emails where she writes about herself and what she thinks and feels.
She writes that she cannot wait to meet me, she thinks a lot about how good it is to be together. She thinks about what she has with me, she hopes she will have me for a long time, she longs to lie next to me.
“The attraction I feel in relation to you is difficult to describe. Something I long for. Desire, longing, physical attraction, lying together, silence, respect, joy.»
It’s a kind of game for adults who have lived for a while and are still hungry. We say what the heart feels, without thinking that life and the days are anything else.
We long for the wonderful, we come unexpectedly close to each other with open eyes, we let ourselves slip into the other’s secret zone. And we bathe in our secret rooms, we close our eyes and experience everything as it is meant in the best sense.
“I loved to touch you,” she writes, “I loved to kiss your beautiful, wise head, to be close to you. Thank you for letting me experience you — I wanted you forever.“
It was quite nice to read, but one day the bright light disappeared. It dawned on me that she was done with me. It felt like I was walking through the shadows, and felt the cold breath from the fall. I felt fear, I longed, but froze inside, we open our eyes, try to see clearly.
After days of waiting for nothing and days of teasing on her part, I finally understand. She’s come out of it. She has become free. The coercive force that in these months, this year, has steered her towards me — she has become free from it.
I’m late in perception, I need some time to see clearly for myself, the change that has happened in her. She is no longer controlled by her desires, she no longer experiences that she has to surrender to me, to be drawn towards me.
I am no longer the magnet to which she is more or less reluctantly drawn. She becomes invisible on email and on the phone, I notice her less and less in daily life.
I’m starting to see the whole picture. She’s not who she used to be. She has left me uncertain for a long time and when I ask there is no answer. When we finally talk on the phone, she talks as if everything is as before, says that yes, she would like to meet me.
She’s talking, but it’s just words. I fear she’s gone for me. The pressure at home may have diminished, or difficult things have happened on the home field. Or maybe the relationship between her and the husband has become more to live with, and she feels that it will be a little too tiring to line up for a lover who wants her as before.
She does not have to explain the obvious to me. I’ll just wait and see if there is anything more. No tree grows into the sky. Everything has a beginning and everything has an end. When something ends, something else replaces what was. She is there, I’m here. We all have ours to take care of and that’s how it should be.
Silence says more than a thousand words. Life stops for a second or so. What we had is no longer what it used to be. Silence says more than a thousand words.
Never say that everything is lost, because it is never the case that everything is lost, even if it may feel that way. I can feel miserable and down to earth. I can feel completely empty, and yet I’m not there.
I know in my heart that I have more to take, more to grow, I am not empty yet. Life is rich, life is promising, it is a waste not to believe that things can work out, most things can be improved.
The optimist’s credo is that it’s never too late to move on and get things done. It can always work out; you just have to believe in the dream that it can work out.
There is so much madness and so much sadness in the world around us, but why should we let the world dominate us?
«Eira, I gave you my heart, that was what I had to give you. You got my heart, so hold on now.»
The story that the novel tells takes place in a small industrial town at the end of a fjord in western Norway. The story being told and the characters are fictional.
The photos included in the chapters are taken on location in the Odda Smelter (Odda Smelteverk, 1906–2003), the carbide factory that is mentioned in the story.
The Love We Had
Part 1 The Longest Night -chapters 1–3, told by Lars Part 2 The Light Inside -chapters 4–17, told by Aslak Part 3 Save Our Secret Love -chapters 18 — XX, told by Eira
Links to earlier and later chapters:
Part 1
Chapter 1 I Love It When Things Are Normal
Chapter 2 I Came Home as Usual
Chapter 3 I Believe in What I See
Part 2
Chapter 5 All we have is — ourselves!
Chapter 6 Coming together — escaping loneliness
Chapter 7 When I first met her
Chapter 8 An unskilled factory worker
Chapter 9 That Sunday morning we met at the parking lot
Chapter 10 At some point they gradually stopped listening to one another
Chapter 11 Going into the furnace hall to dig out shit from the smelter furnace
Chapter 12 In a small boat far out on the high seas
Chapter 13 The ugliest city can be the happiest city in the world
Chapter 14 A Man from the North
