A Humane Turtle

And now the final frame:

Yes, it is the typical tirade
The trouble letting go

No more Melody, or dreams of D
No more Home outside of me

While I cherished what we tried to make
I never got the flow

Ah, heck, I wish I could just turn my back
And leave it all behind

The bad, the good, the dearth of time
The things I couldn’t find

No more masquerades, no fait accompli
No closets with no room for me

The irony in all of this:
While having what is most alike
Myself I could but miss

Christmas is the one time of the year where I get to see family, where all siblings are back home at the same time. That is what Christmas is for me: family time.

• The prospect of meeting my family soon.
• The surprising sight of newly fallen snow on the way out of Oslo.
• Noticing, right after the airport security check, that I still had a half-full bottle of water with me.
• Discovering a magazine I had liked before (‘samtiden’), and buying it.
• Starting to read that magazine and, again, being delighted by its quality.
• A pear, an apple, and raw cashew nuts.
• A sunbath for face and mind on the plane, for two hours straight.
• The sense that, landing in Salzburg, I understood what my singing teacher had talked about: the deep feeling of coming home (as expressed, in his case, by the song ‘Ved Rundarne’).

So I went to the movies last night, without any expectations whatsoever. I only went along with the usual crowd, without having seen any trailer. I didn’t even remember what the title of the movie was when I arrived, only that it was supposed to be a good movie (judged by its IMDB rating, at least).

So I watched ‘Shutter Island’ last night.

The movie targets these questions: What is real? Which reality is the real one? Who is sick, who is trying to help, and who isn’t?  I find these questions highly interesting. My problem is just that they aren’t only interesting to me, I feel connected to them in a deeply emotional way.

When I was in my early teenage years, a close family member was diagnosed with Schizophrenia – and is still living with it today. It’s a fascinating condition in so many ways. First of all, you’re not supposed to talk about it: everybody knows, nobody talks. Second, the patients don’t necessarily agree to having it. It’s a mental disease after all. And third, both treating and not treating it will have an impact on the patients’ state of mind, but treating it might mean taking away power from them – something everybody of us would try to avoid at (almost) all cost. It’s a thin line really: when does a situation justify to take away powers of an otherwise free person, to do something to them that – despite the good will – isn’t what they want? How do we know that what we are trying to do is really any good? And who tells us, the involved outsiders, that we have the real reality on our side? Do we just think we do because our reality is close enough to average?

A lot of these thoughts and feelings I can sometimes only handle by locking them away in some shady corner of myself. The movie yesterday managed to break those locks. I’m not sure if that was good or bad.