Texts from July II

What is the reason we experience scary things?

As a small girl, on the years before I went to school, and even some time after that, it never occurred to me to be afraid of the dark. I wasn’t afraid of mice either, or bees, spiders or high places. After all, I was a child who knew about things and it was perfectly clear for me that such things couldn’t hurt you. Come to think about it, I wasn’t even afraid of nightmares. Because each time I was having a dream, I was perfectly well aware that it was just a dream.

In one of those dreams, I was walking in a gloomy forest with some other children from the kindergarten. As I saw the other children getting scared, I tried to convince them there was no reason to be scared, because it was only a dream. That was perfectly clear to me, though I don’t remember if the other children in my dream believed me. Such things seem to be hard to prove... In any case, as I then finally opened my eyes, all the other children were gone, so there was no-one left to say “I told you so”.

My real nightmares were of totally different character.

***

One of them sort of had to do with making friends. When I was five years old or so, I got acquainted with a girl from the same neighbourhood. Even before that I had spent time with some other children, but mainly to avoid any worse consequences. With Anna, we used to go swinging for hours. She was okay, although there was one thing that puzzled me. It seems she once stole one of my beautiful blue hairpins, which sort of came between us, because I never really could prove that she had taken them. Eventually I even doubted it myself, for it was after all only my word against hers. I tried to be as if nothing had happened, but after this, it never really felt the same. Still for outsiders, she could pass as a friend. This meant that making acquaintance with her was one important step on the road to perceived normality.

Once Anna and I got an idea to go selling hand-picked buckets of wild flowers to all the people living in our courtyard. The people weren’t too impressed, so it took a bit more time than expected and we wondered quite a bit away from my home. She didn’t seem to mind and I also pretended I didn’t. All the time I was trying to ignore a slight warning somewhere in the back of my mind, that my Mum wouldn’t be so happy about me being late. That I had gone beyond the home area, was also not exactly a positive thing. Maybe my Mum would never find out that part, but I couldn’t leave out of my calculations that she would.

However, for a good while, I managed to push away those thoughts to the back of my head, saying to myself that preserving good relations with my friend was an important thing in life. Up until the moment came that we had to part, and she started heading towards her place, where she would have dinner with her family.

I went to sit on a small rock on the edge of a forest near my home. I looked at my house from further away and started calmly to weigh my alternatives. I knew a family close by and they were quite nice to me, but my Mum would eventually find out I was there, and that would just make matters worse. The forest itself was too small to hide into and additionally it was only May and I didn’t have any extra clothes or food with me. Few days would be possible, but at some point I would have to come out of there. Even though it was spring and not any more so cold at night, I just had to be realistic. After some thinking, I came to the conclusion that being only five years old, I could not survive without my home in the long run.

So I had no other choice but to go behind our front door and ring the bell, no matter what would happen. I was whispering desperately: please, let not nothing bad happen to me, let it pass at least for this time. After a few seconds my Mum opened the door, and looked exactly like I thought she would. It's hard to describe her expression, though I still saw the same face twenty years later in my dreams. But to my surprise, she didn’t say anything else except “so you came late” in a strangled voice. After some seconds still, I thought it okay to sneak into my room, where I hid for the rest of the day and read one of my countless books. I knew that by next morning, the whole thing would seem much milder, and if I was as quiet as possible for a while, my Mum might not bring up the topic more than once or twice after that. Though of course I knew she would not forget.

***

One evening around the same time I was waiting in my bed in the evening for my Mum to come and say me goodnight. We had this goodnight-poem which had seven different parts, and it ended with “see pictures of the princess”. I was begging her countless times and always she told me she would come soon. Finally I lost my patience and crept behind the bathroom door, where she was doing laundry.

"Can’t you just learn to live with a simple 'good night'", she asked.

“But I can’t fall asleep if you don’t say the whole thing”, I tried to explain with tears in my voice.

After a while she did recite the whole poem through the bathroom door. Except for the last bit, the one with the princess. I started to beg desperately for the last verse. Suddenly she yelled: "This is the last time I will say more than 'good night' to you!"

Having heard that, I simply paralyzed. All the time she had been behind the door and the door had remained locked. After this I knew there was no point to fight. This door would never open again. I remember that I cried in my bed for hours before going to sleep. She was maybe still inside the bathroom or maybe elsewhere. It didn't matter, since I knew I didn’t have to do anything else except just to be, to stay in my room and not make any special effort, and she would seize to exist. I had learned long before that to anticipate the moments when I absolutely would need her, so that I could save energy to fight for her being there at those moments.

Thinking about this now, I must ask myself why I bothered to cry. After all, I could be very realistic and had a habit of acting rationally, so I must also have known she would never come no matter how long I cried. I can't be absolutely sure, but I guess somewhere very deep inside me I thought it must be enough, not to do anything but to cry. Though it took a further twenty-one years before I learned that it indeed was so. By that time, of course crying could appear in many other forms, such as philosophy, psychology, ambition and a desperate search for love.

***

When I was around ten, the nightmares moved from my home to my classroom.

I always had the same strategy. To turn as colourless as possible till the storm calmed down a bit, to act like I didn’t care, to make myself believe I didn’t hear, and to wait for the next morning to come, which would make the whole thing seem smaller. And for the next morning, and the one after that. Until different kind of worries would step along.

***

As a teenager, the nightmare was my eyes. My contact lenses were difficult to use, easy to drop and made my eyes sore, but those times, they were the only thing that guarded me from the horrors of the world. The times that I happened to drop one of them, I made some of the most desperate prayers I remember. For years I avoided looking my Mum in the eyes, so that she wouldn’t see how my eyes looked like. I knew that if she knew I was so dependent on one thing, she would force me to give it up. In her logics, being dependent on something must be bad for you.

But at that point, I didn't exactly listen to her advice for living my life. There was no way of trusting someone whose life was so empty of feelings that she didn't even notice when she was treading on those of others.

***

Some years after that, my nightmares started to become more complex. It was unpleasant for me to stay in the dark, so I would rather not do that. I hated spiders, so I chose to leave the room if I saw any. I could go to the university lessons when I wanted to, and I didn’t need to see my Mum too often. All in all, I had managed to climb the ladders of normality surprisingly well. There were a few times I sort of wondered off from my courtyard with someone, at least partly for the reasons of appearing normal. But from such journeys you eventually need to come back, and the further you go, the more difficult it is to come back.

***

During these years, it happened a couple of times that I met someone who actually seemed real. But even then, it wouldn’t take long before some small thing happened that brought the nightmare back. Again, my strategy was the same: to act like I didn’t care, to make myself believe I didn’t care, to go back to my own little room, and to wait for the next year to come. And the next, and the one after that, and the one after that.

***

Somewhere along these long long years in between – I guess the nightmares just became nightmares. In many of those dreams there was someone big and terrifying who had enormous powers, like a witch. First I always first tried to be calm my fear and calmly negotiate with her. I first succeeded, at least up to a point, but in the end I started losing my strength of will. I always woke up just in time, and in one breath went through all the prayers I knew, until I finally more or less managed to convince myself that it was only a dream.

But, in a time when I for some reason had managed to empty my life of all things that somehow resembled life, the truth was that I was fascinated by those dreams, for they were one of the few things that made me feel something.

I think that's a point which is important to remember.

***

In those times, I started to hear rumours of one of my cousins.

I had lost contact with her a long time ago, regardless of the fact that she was one of the only people who were real to me when I was a child. Those times, she had prettier hair than mine, a princess-like Swedish accent and the ability to make funny jokes, but she was always the one who was afraid of spiders, bees and the nightly silence of our grandparents' country house. But I guess at some point in our teenage years some small thing had happened which offended me, and I started to act like I didn’t care. It was easy, because she lived far away and we both had then a lot of other things to think about.

The rumours said everything was not alright with her. She had started a schooling, one after another, but then always soon quit, and locked herself inside her house. After a while, they said, she had even troubles going out of there, as every time she went outside, she would go into a panic.

I hadn’t seen her in many years, and I knew nothing about the details, but when people talked about her, I stayed quiet. Her nightmares were not foreign to me. People thought of course, that I was the one who would do well in life, and that for some strange reason, my cousin just didn’t know how. However deep down I knew there was no big difference between quitting schools and quitting people you cared for. Only difference was that the latter you could hide and pretend that you were perfectly sane and normal.

As long as nobody knew that you did care.

***

But maybe the worst nightmare of all came one day when I looked back at my life and I realised I had carefully followed the strategies of my mother. I didn’t know if I was awake or sleeping, but it didn’t matter. Thinking logically, it meant I would also be leading my future children to take the same path as me. Ironic, since the only thing I really had wanted to do in my life was to prevent that.

Of course putting all things together, in the end this was also a kind of nightmare only I knew about. Looking from the outside, my life looked totally different from my mother’s. After all, she knew nothing about philosophy, psychology, or ambition. In my opinion, not so much about love either. However, this made me puzzled.

All these years and all those nightmares, I never really expected that things could be different.

***

Until one sunny August morning when I was twenty-six, he finally came into my life.

Thinking of my past, all the stories, histories, philosophical and mystical theories of my culture I had grown a part of, everything I had learnt, all the paths I had taken which never really ended up anywhere, it never had even crossed my mind that I might one day find what I was looking for. And when I did, nothing could be more simple. He was not one bit mystical. At the moment that I decided to follow his path instead of my Mum’s, I still had no idea what he was really like, though he knew who I was. For a few weeks I was in a safe place where nothing could touch me. And it was a place where I wanted to take all my friends with me. But that was not what he wanted to give me.

In those weeks, it happened one evening when I was working at a grocery store nearby, that I got a visitor. Suddenly I just knew it was he who was there. I had to stand behind the counter so I had nowhere to hide. Each time a customer came in, my blush got deeper and I realised he saw the whole thing, he saw my embarrassment, he knew all the very human feelings I had in me, and he just stayed. I couldn’t help smiling, and the people looked happy and smiled back at me, but after a while I just couldn’t take it anymore, I murmured: “I’m sorry” and rushed to the back room.

***

Then very soon, all my nightmares started somehow coming back to me, one by one. I found the present and the past ones, and some nightmares of my friends and family too. I was overflooded with them, until I was so surrounded that I couldn’t look away any more. Then I had no other choice but to start to find my way out of the mess.

I can’t understand how, but after making acquaintance again with all the nightmares I have ever known, there have been moments that the life itself starts to fascinate me more than my dreams. And I guess somewhere deep down I know they are only nightmares.

***

So what is the reason we experience scary things? I’m still not totally sure. But for me personally, it's kind of hard to trust anyone who has never seen a nightmare.