Letter by the end of May

My dearest friend,

My recent trip to Oslo was the first time, after about six years, I traveled with someone else. The second day there we decided to visit a sculpture park. We started with making our way to a wrong place (yet another sculpture park!) by the fjord, but when we were finally close to what we were looking for, we spent almost an hour circling around its boundary before noticing a side gate to enter. Inside there was a great enumeration of wrestling, intertwining human bodies of all kinds, quietly rinsed in the rain, overcast with something immense and serene. Then I realized how little I had known you, with respect to how much and how explicitly I had tried. Oslo, I thought, would be a nice place to call home. Somewhere toned, distant and not too welcoming, yet filled with secretly happy people, who would scream (of course we love Munch) and crumple in the middle of a bridge, a meeting, or a long-delayed phone call, just very subtly. I wonder if they also hypothesize about a plane crash before taking off, finalizing their marks of existence while boarding, by replying shortly to a work email, nodding at a stranger, folding a wrinkled receipt of grocery from last night, these sort of mundane chores. Would our lives be different, if being prophetic (blissfully or sabotagingly) can actually redirect us into scenarios that we desire and fear the most? Would we dream about or contend with the same thing as before? For this reason I think you’re out of reach sometimes. I’m waking up from many, many old mornings, freshly amused.

c