Inner worlds inside Stamsund

I think I may have hit the wall. I’m clamming up. Perhaps it is because I am faced with writing about six days all at once and too many things are dropping into my mind. Perhaps because I can still see myself, nestled inside the cabin as each evening stretched into darkness, while around me 19 candles burned and danced. There is a lot of space that I feel I am still keeping to myself.

I read. A lot. And everyday I went for a walk with Craig. Also everyday I visited Craig and his beloved, Anne, at their flat, and we all ate together. The tiny moments that thread all these other larger ones together are the ones that I do not feel the desire to share. They are the dew on the spider’s web, which changes with the light.

My cabin is the one of the far left. Number 9, number 9, number 9. I adored my cabin, which I know I am supposed to call a rorbu, but I don’t. It had two floors and three bedrooms. On the first evening I explored all the bedrooms to decide which one would be mine. I first thought I would opt for one of the bedrooms in the loft, but instead I chose the largest bedroom, which was on the ground floor. It had two beds that filled the space between the walls, while the low ceiling completed the feeling that I adore, of being surrounded and cozy.

I had my own wee kitchen, where I ate brown cheese on homemade Craig bread (four seed type). Brown cheese: both salty and sweet, just as Craig told me it would be. It looks horrid, but it is surprisingly tasty. The cheese section in the supermarket is made up largely of various forms of brown cheese. I got some slices and mostly I kept thinking that this would be what Kraft singles would taste like if Kraft singles were actually good.

There were a lot of stray cats, many of which lived in the spaces underneath the cabins. I would often hear their meows coming up through the floorboards. This only frightened me on a couple of occasions, while I was reading a horror novel, Naomi’s Room. I became convinced that there was a cat upstairs, even though I had closed both the doors to the upstairs bedrooms. The cats were known to run into the cabins if you left the door open too long. What if one was locked up there? Dusk falling. I crept up the steep loft stairs to search the rooms. Even thinking about it now gives me the creeps. Of course there weren’t any, but it was the slowness of the experience – the slowness of my fear. Brrrr..

Each morning the seagulls woke me around 6am. Then I would lie in bed and read or just let myself drift back to sleep and hope to dream all the strange dreams I cannot dream when an alarm clock bats my consciousness awake before it is ready.

I wrote little, but what I did write I enjoyed. I borrowed books from Craig and Anne, like Stargirl, O Caledonia, and Japanese Death Poems.

More about the outside world next time. And here’s a wee poem from inside the glow:

There is not enough space
In the whole world
for me to spread myself out completely
The earth would have to spread out too
flat like a horizonless myth
Flowers would have to stretch their petals
against the ground
with the ceremony of slow sacrifice
The sky would have to
push
down
thefranticfrictionofminuteparticles
rolling out my body
until my pulverized bones
are s p a t o u t in a cloud
like flour
like cold ash
and even the tiniest breeze
could pick me up
spread me further than I ever thought I would go