Prologue — present
Isn't the bearable lie better than the biting truth?
Sea wind rustles through blackberry bushes, carves the skin of my back, loosens foam from the crests of the waves, which seem even colder than yesterday.
The soles of my feet rest on a boulder.
Sea water splashes against my ankles, like pulverised ice.
I step forward, a rustling wave envelopes my legs, the pain reaches into my bones.
My cheek is chapped from so many tears.
I long for the pain, for it is weaker than the pain of being robbed and lied to.
I wade forward, the sea now embraces my thighs.
The sea is indeed colder than yesterday. The pain is more severe than yesterday.
I submerge my wrists, throw sea water towards my heart. I inhale, the tips of my lungs hurt.
Twice I swore that I would always love my father, but I didn't know how hard he would make that for me.
The wind dries my chapped cheeks.
I’ve been alone since I was eight.
I just did not realise it.
I dive away from it all, headlong into a wave. I sink for three seconds of ice, of pain, of forgetting everything.
Then I come to the surface and swim along the current. Waves beat my face. The cold doesn't bite my skin anymore, but creeps underneath it, banishes my pain for precious time. I float above the deep seabed, my hands row through the leaden water.
I hear splashing, howling wind, and memories.
But I must get out or I'll die, so my frozen body swims back to the mainland. I taste salt water. I wrestle with the breakers, scrub my skin with my mother's towel, which I moisten for the very first time.
The wind beats against my skin. I dress in wool, do jumping jacks, but shiver still, so from the boulder I grab my father’s thermos flask. Hot drinks are the best warm up after a wintery dive. The steam smells bitter, my lips are numb. My stomach warms up, the cold becomes bearable, my mind dozes.
From the distance, two memories wave to me. They want attention. An old one I never got used to, and a fresh one that unhinged my existence.
But the icy cold banishes them, my consciousness tightens like the skin around my muscles. For a while, my life is nothing except what exists here by the seaboard.
This is why I have submerged myself in the icy waters.
The sedation lasts a few hours at most, then the pain flows back into my heart, like the sea regains its high tide. If only I were a fish, then I would always be in the icy cold and permanently sedated. But if I were a fish, then I would seek the dryness of sand, for it is not the chilliness, but the uneasiness which sedates me.
For a while there was one man who could chase away my pain. Sometimes his scent wanders through my home and I feel he must be near. Then I desperately wander through my house, to recover nothing but my own sadness.
But recently something happened. I found out something, which became a heavier burden. One that I cannot shoulder and the sea cannot bury.
And that is the reason why I write this.
I kneel in the sand, the back of my head rests against the boulder, my eyes sting. I peel an orange. The sap splatters on my sleeve, sinks into it. I suck it out of the woollen threads.
While ruminating on my memories, on the pain they cause, I look out to the sea in front of me. The bay absorbed so much of my pain. On the right, I see the marina with the hotel where I work, where I met two exceptional men. On the left, the North Sea widens, unpleasantly drab, she flows over the sandbank where so much happened in so little time, where I could briefly meet that dear man, until my sorrow inevitably overflowed our relationship again.
In my years of pain I swam between fleeting circles, while I ducked under to avoid little hail stones, while the sun's reflection blinded me, while the sea splashed against my eyelids, while snow flakes chilled it, even while thunder struck the bridge of a cargo ship and I trembled, but I didn't swim to land, because I was training my courage.
Every day I awake with pain and sedate it immediately. In the evening the pain returns and I swim again. The most difficult are the summers, when the sea is too warm to sedate, like wine without alcohol.
But so, recently I found out something. A betrayal which happened a long time ago, but remained hidden until recently, and the sea can only fight against that understanding if it is like pulverised ice.
Had I rather not found out? Isn't the bearable lie better than the biting truth?
I tear loose a slice of the orange, put it in my mouth, which tightens from the sour coldness.
Behind me the blackberry bush rustles. He emerges from my garden, smiles sadly, and sits next to me, his bum in the sand, his head in my lap.
I grow numb.
“Will you stroke my hair," he asks.
In the past my fingers enjoyed stroking his curls, now it hurts to stroke him.
I walk away, sand against my feet.
And to think that I myself had asked him to come!
By the edge of the beach thorny bushes grow. I crawl underneath them, they scratch my face, and I emerge in my garden.
Fifteen kilometers away stands the house in which I grew up.
In that living room I recently told the man whom I always wanted to resemble that he mustn't walk away from his pain anymore.
But he did.
It is the only mental tool he taught me how to use.
How should one not walk away from pain?
I enter my house, the floorboards feel cold under my feet.
A wave passes through the sea bay behind the thorny bushes, I see it from my living room, and I hear it breaking. Half a kilometer away rests the sandbank, now submerged, on which in one afternoon I spoke more about my mother than in the thirteen years before it. It was a sandbank that seemed so far removed from my ordinary life, that I could talk there about what was taboo in my father’s house.
But isn't the bearable lie better than the biting truth?
For years I walked away from the truth, until that afternoon, I stopped, and watched, and started to find. The truth has barbed hooks, said my brother, its pain will only pass if you summon her, however much it burdens your shoulder joints, your heart muscle.
In my bedroom stands a wooden desk. I sit at it, on a wicker chair that cracks under my weight.
I grab the wooden sheep which I keep there, it fits into my hands, and I lay it on my lap.
The window rattles in the gust of wind that just before tore apart the ashen clouds, like one tears apart grimy cotton wools and like history tore my life apart. The clear blue scorches through the tufts of cloud and colours part of the grey water like my grandfather's stained silverware. A landscape is at its most beautiful, if it mixes sombreness with light, more beautiful than when it is only light.
Perhaps I need the grubbiness of betrayal and loss to rediscover the courage that always slumbered in my family.
I take the notepad from the wooden table top before me. It balances on my knee, its pages rustle in the sea wind, my fountain pen scratches these words.
Let me tell you my story.
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