I have spent my last day in company of a friend and his son. Walking around town, chatting, around in the playground, eating soup and waffles… rather wonderful. He says this is a very normal day for him, but for me it has been a quite surreal day, because it has been like a borrowed day, extracted from the normal flow of time, from my normal flow of time that is, into somebody else’s. Today it felt very much like the day I took the boat to Brekstad, in that like that day, nobody knew exactly where I was or what I was doing. Like having had disappeared into a blank map. Only with the difference that today I was just here in Trondheim, where I was expected to be. So it felt like I disappeared in time but not in space.
But now, writing about it, I realize, it is not about disappearing, that feeling of today, it is about the pleasure of being removed. But being removed without the coldness of the word. Remove oneself from a usual context, from an expected space, from a regular time. If a place or someone allows you to do this and share their context, this distance serves as reconciliatory interval. This distance is a warm one, it allows to ‘feel’ space, or time in an almost magnified way. And also, in a way allows you to be removed from your ordinary ‘counting’ or ‘accounting’ of time and space. The passing of time is not just something you try to control until the next thing you have to do, it is just something that you are allowing to happen. Today I did not think of being anywhere else, or doing anything else, no plans, no expectations, just the present. With the certainty of being exactly where I am meant to be, in the here and now.
But I don’t even know if all this makes any sense. Anyway, tomorrow, inevitably, I will be elsewhere. Tomorrow by this time I will be home (for now at least, that I call Sheffield).
My time in LKV has come to an end. And all I can say is thank you. Thank you to everyone in LKV and Babel. Everybody so friendly and fantastic. I leave with a smile and sure that I won’t forget it. A perfect last day without the stress of traveling and packing (that was yesterday…), without the stress of time, thank you Markus!
So long Trondheim, and thanks for all the fish!