ROOM FOR YOU

My life is nothing but room for you, I said.

-

The words from Kurt Vonnegut's novel Mother Night
has been following me around for weeks.
The book is not at all about motherhood, but the sentence
My life is nothing but room for you resonates deeply in me and
feels like it says it all, with only a few words, about being a mother.

He who turned out to be Cassius lived behind my ribcage and so far
remains the only one who's heard my heart beating from the inside.
I had insane morning sickness all hours of the day for three months
and that was followed by a virus. Pityriasis Rosea.
Also, roughly Mountain ridge Rose in my mother tongue.
Sounds like a serene coolheaded flower, but it put my skin on fire.
I held my fists clenched for months not to scratch and
counted down the weeks that was estimated left for the
venomously red roses to bloom on pale winter skin;
from delicate collarbone to hips slowly widening, in his name.

He came to us on a Sunday, in a room cloud high.
Rain hung there, it was all a swollen grey coulisses right
outside the large windows where candles burned still,
for what felt like infinity. Seagulls flew in circles and I floated.

Floated on my back in the warm, still water as if
it could go on infinitely through the waves of pain and illusiveness.
Floated with my left fist clenched around my fiance's hands and
my right around my sister's.
My own mother's words along my spine;

You have to be able to float, Hannah.
Swimming is good too..
but most of all you have to be able to float.
To float is to surrender. Float first. Then love.
That's what she said. One cannot exist without the other.

Now we share a room. A spacious one that opens on to backyards,
winding old fire-escapes and our wild little garden.
We have our large bed and his small one.
I turn the generous paper lamp on in the evenings.
It's got the wrong switch and needs an extra plug and this
makes its light flicker as if were it a giant lit candle.
Christian reads Winnie the Pooh with that voice I fell for
before we had even met and we all slumber together, close.
Only later do we lift Cassius over to his bed and pull the baldachin
around him, his little bed and around sleep itself (as if its own being).

I have no doubts where nothing hurts.
That's my most safe room as a mother. That I don't
think much about how things are 'supposed to be', or
how others do it, as long as it works for us.
As long as it stays afloat.
Lovemaking there's always room for.

My calm I think is his most safe room.
My melancholy, my worry, that I try to be honest about,
as long as he asks or listens. He's afraid of the dark.
We walk slowly through the long hallway after brushing our teeth.
I hold him and we don't turn any of the lights on.
His face is close to mine when I say that these are the
same rooms, just without the light.

My life is nothing but room for you.

The space he occupies can never be reclaimed.
Not when he's away either. My worry is in that, the sadness
of missing space, that there's not really time for it all.
That I can't quite find the way back to the rooms of my own.
Something tells me though, just as I put it into words,
that it's the word and thought of back to that has to go.

I can't go back. I can only try to create new room
inside of the life we have now. It will have to be in a home
a bit more worn, be in between wider hips,
eyes more tired and sentences only semifinished.
I had to listen to myself. It's the same rooms.
Just in a different light.

I think to myself that that's what it's like with the biggest,
enduring loves of our lives. They occupy all rooms and we are
never again the same as before. And then all is as it shall.






∞

i have a collaboration with danish brand bonét et bonét
{i do those types of collabs exclusively when i really like a brand
and solely with pieces i love and otherwise wouldäve bought}
cassius's rattan bed, bedding and canopy is from them
| the various shell pillows are by the amazing tamar mogendorff
| the brown pyjama is from soor ploom
| knits and all other clothing is by bonét et bonét