Feeling unfulfilled. Something is missing, as always. I am not whole. I am fragmented. A million piece puzzle. Outer spaced. Sometimes the pieces fit together, sometimes it’s just one big mess.

Did I ever tell you about my past?

I remember inviting Christian to come home with me and play. After a while I would pretend to get a headache and he’d go home. I wouldn’t really have a head ache, I just needed to be alone.

I remember hating the mornings. I still do. Getting up and out of bed was a struggle. But I’d start to get up earlier and earlier. Because if I went to school early then the halls would be empty. No one around. I could walk to my class room without meeting anyone. I could go inside and sit down and be alone. Until people started coming. It was safer that way. Avoiding a crowded hallway.

I remember sitting on a rock somewhere deep in a Swedish forest. In the middle of a rain storm. Getting soaked, the rain pummeling me. While everyone else was sitting inside drinking warm beverages and laughing.

I remember the first day in high school, all the new students gathered in the big hall. We had to dance. Nobody knew anybody, but everybody paired up two and two. When all was said and done I was left without a partner. A million strangers coupled, me alone.

I remember how summer vacations were like a different reality. Sleeping all day. Staying up all night. Sitting in front of the TV and zapping between channels. Over and over, looking for anything interesting to waste the time. I remember making a pentagram out of paper. Folding sheets of paper together. It was about the size of a steering wheel in a car. I dripped wax from a candle all over it. Brought it out in my back yard. As the sun started to rise I lit it afire. I wonder what the neighbours would have said if they had seen it. Burning pentagrams at dawn. I wasn’t a satanist though. I did buy the Necronomicon, but only the paperback version. I’m not sure why I did all that, I think I wanted to die and I was hoping that somewhere in the darkness of the universe there were demons and monsters and maybe if I was lucky I’d attract their attention and they would kill me. Suicide by demonology.

I remember seeing school shootings from America on the TV. And understanding. It scared me. That I understood those people. I remember lying in bed and imagining bringing guns to school and killing everyone. Not because they deserved it, not because I hated them. But because I wanted so desperately for them to understand, for them to feel my pain. Making sure they would never overlook me, never forget me. I could never hurt a fly though. But I understood. And I wondered what that said about me.

I remember sitting in my window on a Saturday night, looking at the stars above. Listening to the sounds of laughter and bottles clanging. Music playing somewhere. Parties.

I remember “Teardrops on the Dancefloor” as the soundtrack to the few parties I did go to. I remember dancing to Bryan Adams’ “Everything I Do (I Do It For You)” with Sara. Perhaps my greatest wish come true. The only other time I danced with a girl was with Lone. I had to bend down because I was taller than her. I remember being one of the tallest kids in my class. Until we reached puberty and everyone else seemed to growing taller and taller while I only seemed to get shorter.

I remember breaking my leg in a soccer match at school and crying. And Camilla saying “it must really hurt, because Lasse never cries”.

I remember my grandad’s car crashing. One minute I was asking for a piece of candy, the next minute we were crushed up against a tree on the other side of the road. My glasses disappeared somewhere on the floor. Everything a blur.

I remember my physics teacher jamming a knife in his fake leg. A truck ran him over and he lost his leg. He got angry with us the day he returned because none of us dared to ask about his leg or the accident. He always had a temper. I faked his classes for years, got good grades. It lasted until the final exam where I couldn’t fake it anymore and only barely passed. Afterwards he looked at me and asked if that was all? I shrugged.

I remember my french exam. I got the highest grade possible and I felt like I was the smartest person in the world. The only other person who got that grade was Eva. When we went to Gymnasiet we ended up in the same class. She told the others about her french exam and everyone praised her and ooohed and aaaahed and I sat there and thought “me too! me toooo!” but I didn’t say anything. I wanted people to ooh and aah over me. But I couldn’t say anything.

I remember walking down the road with my dad. He said something about a car. I squinted but I couldn’t see the car. We went to the eye doctor and soon after I had glasses. Today I can’t remember what it’s like to not wear glasses really. I remember it was very strange at first, like someone changed me. Made me into a new person. And I didn’t have a choice. “Here, glasses, wear them. That’s who you are now”.

I remember cutting open my wrists and the water turning red. The feeling of doing something that you can never ever take back. I remember the complete horror when I realized it wasn’t going to work. That I would have to live with it.

I remember sitting in front of a doctor and a psychologist. The doctor asking “If you were going to kill yourself how do you think you would do it?”. And I didn’t know what to say, I stuttered a bit. Then the psychologist said “you haven’t thought about that I guess?” and I said “no no” and was relieved that I had dodged the question.

I remember my dad telling bedtime stories. He made them up. There were these two brothers… maybe they were modelled after my brother and I. I don’t remember what they were called. But they had all these adventures together. It seems strange to me now, my dad making up stories. Seems like something he would be too serious to do.

I remember my mother reading bedtime stories. The Silas books. The Hobbit. She seems more like a likely bedtime storyteller than my dad.

I remember vacations in Sweden. We would go there every summer. I remember being amused that Batman was called Läderlappen. That Donald Duck was called Kalle Anka. I remember the year we borrowed my dad’s colleague’s cabin in the woods. It sounds like a good setting for a horror story. And it scared me, this lonely cabin in the woods. All those trees. I remember thinking that if some homocidal axe-weilding madman came after us then we would have nowhere to hide, we’d have to just run into the wood and get lost.

I remember the sound late at night. The clock. Tick-tock. Sometimes it felt like it got louder and louder. In my head. Tick tock. I couldn’t sleep alone for a long time. I slept in my parents’ bed until I was past 10 I think. And when I was younger I had this.. compulsion. I had to keep saying goodnight. I had to say goodnight and have my parents respond with a goodnight. And then 30 seconds later I have would say goodnight again. I don’t know why. I think it was because I was scared to be left alone. I had to keep reassuring myself that I was not alone. My mother would have to get up early to go to work and I kept her awake with my constant goodnights. My dad sat up late, he would bring me into the living room and I’d sleep on the couch. So my mother could sleep in peace. I wonder how my life would have turned out if they had taken me to the shrink or something. How could they think it was normal for a kid to say goodnight a hundred times like that? I still don’t really understand that they just accepted it. Didn’t they wonder what was wrong with me?

I remember almost poking out a classmate’s eye with a needle. I was so close to hitting him in the eye. It was an accident of course. But later on it would scare me for years when I thought about it. How close I was to blinding him. How random it was. How different everything would have been for me and for him if my hand had slipped a little, just a little bit more in our pretend-fight.

I remember getting an obscene phone call. From a guy who said he was a doctor. He wanted to know if I touched myself. Later that day my parents were going out and I asked if they couldn’t stay home. My dad was surprised, he asked me “but you’ve never been afraid to be home alone”. That was after I had gotten used to sleeping and being on my own.

I remember developing this whole grand fantasy about the smurfs living in tree stump in the back yard of my kindergarten. I was trying to impress some other boy with my collection of smurf figures and I decided to just wander home and get them without telling anyone about it. They called my house, and everyone was very upset at me. And I didn’t understand it because I just wanted to get my smurfs.

I think that’s enough for now. Always fragments.

you do it to yourself, you do, and that’s what really hurts

This entry was posted on Saturday, February 25th, 2006 at 22:44 and is filed under Blogging. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.