#GOALS

I've got a stubborn headache and an even more stubbornly growing laundry pile.

I'm sitting all still on the bed, with Chopin turned up a bit too loud and a coffee that's

now a bit too cooled down. I look around at beautiful things.

How I've collected, carried and travelled with.. things, I think to myself.

So valuable, so costly, and such cherished memories.

The big backpack made of straw I bought in Bali many years ago,

from a man with one dead eye. It was cloudy and lifeless,

his smile capricious and awake.

The curvy urn is an old French olive jug.

I've sat high in the passenger seat of many furniture trucks with that

held to my chest through the years. Most recently moving from Sweden

to England during warm summer days. I had beads of sweat forming above my

top lip and the arrow of Cupid deeply embedded in my chest.

The photograph of my little sister with orchids in her hair is faded now

and one of the first portraits I ever took. The frame holding her we bought

together during a road trip through France with a sullen Parisian

at the wheel and everything that is supposed to be easy was hard.

In that manner it often is right before something ends.

The small photograph of me there close to her, with a python,

Sara shot in Bali. The snake weighed nearly sixty-seven pounds and

we had blue bruises along our ribs where it had winded itself in all its

magnitude, for days afterwards. When I look at those photos today

I can still wonder at how we never hesitated for a second

having the snake on us for hours during that sweltering afternoon up in

the mountains of Bali. But I've said it before;

our love for that country had grown so strong that we forgot our fears,

forgot we ever even had any. All those travels together asked,

- & answered every question we might have had.

The little linen jacket I bought at a piazza in Italy.

There was one linen garment more beautiful than the other,

hanging in rows and costing no more than a big cold ice cream and 

a hot espresso each. Now some of them hang here at home 

and brings us back to kissing among the market stalls,

of how we all danced together one magnetic night under the moon;

my family young and old with my then all new lover.

A trip our love is still standing firmly on, with bronzed bare feet.

I count on my fingers and love affairs that the white

embroidered dress I must have had for at least eleven years,

whereof it's been hanging in a dark closet for the last two. 

A short while ago I went to pull it over my head in the midst of,

- & in defying the thought it would no longer fit me,

with breasts that have fed my son and a belly that has carried him.

But it did fit and it meant something all differently beautiful to
caress the fabric now, down my own shapes, as if it found me all new again
and all like before, at the very same time. 

In among dusty vinyls and despairing, discarded old china dolls

at our local flea market on a sudden Sunday, there were
a Tulip table and chair waiting, with the right markings underneath
and my name on them.

I thought the worn price tag was miswritten, that's how cheap they were.

Maybe they don't know quite what they've got here,
I thought to myself with the banknote in my hand,
but not voicing it.

That's how flea market-fiendish and delighted I was.

The shell-shaped straw bag is all new and from

& other stories in London. I cut off the appertaining tassels

and very soon it will get to travel along into summer, 

accompany me to at least one wedding this year

and carry new memories I'm yet to know anything about.

☾

They all, the things that is, must carry a story already;

in their seams and held on their insides, - or be able to really create

new memories, new value, from now on, for me, I'm thinking

- if they are to expand in numbers. They have to mean something

or it all just makes me really tired these days. Le Stuff.

I'm thinking of the vast amount of images we see of beautiful

things and attire, every day, - & of how little, in comparison, we get to,

or take the time to, - get to know about the story around it,

memories in between seams and in shapes that have carried and held.

The most cherished behind the, to me very hollow tag, - #goals,

is the genuine, true life in between, what happened to You for real.
I'd love to know more about that.