The landscape’s ostensible stillness is harmonious with my presence.
All is eternal, motionless, complete.
There is no beginning, no end. There is everything, and there is nothing.
It is an image that the inattentive observer glances, only to erase from memory,
convinced of its nonexistence.
Below the apparentness of oblivion, everything is bursting with bustle.
2
A white expanse.
A thriving silence.
Thoughts gather beneath the surface.
Heat unites droplets and enhances the pain.
A blue eye enters the whiteness.
Beauty cuts into the heart.
A bang resonates.
The droplets disperse.
The ostensible stillness returns.
Changed I walk in the Land of the Gods.
3
A strained membrane has exploded.
The oldest god has just sacrificed his eye.
One-eyed Odin>1 holds the answer to every question.
4
I asked for our story to be explained, so the gods invited me into their kingdom.
They projected our story before my eyes through theirs.
Gods weave their own yarns, and as such they told mine to me.
My story. Transient.
The story of all. Eternal.
The story untold.
They took me by the hand,
and longing to be touched, I followed.
5
You love listening to stories.
Every story but mine.
You find my story too bright.
You say it lacks adventure,
something to blacken it and rob it of joy.
6
Words devoured every good thing that could have happened.
7
Humans are created in gods’ image.
Gods are formed out of human mould.
Did human imagination birth the gods,
or did the gods carve out the first human couple?
A man and Embla.
Ask from an ash tree, the woman from an elm tree.
Him from the Sacred Tree of the Cosmos.
Her from unique distinction.
8
You worship my body, because it serves your desire.
You worship my words, as long as they inflate your vanity.
You pretend to worship my thoughts to make me share them with you.
You try to tame them like a herd of wild horses.
You want to herd them to your stable,
to domesticate and subjugate them to your needs.
You assume divinity to tame humans.
9
They are scattered across the white landscape in colourful groups.
White, black, brown, spotted.
Free they brave the wind, rain, sun, and snow.
They accept the Earth’s movements and the Sky’s raging as nature intended.
They mock humanity’s presumptions.
They accept the training of humans
as a garment made to measure,
as they follow the order of the world,
designed by the gods.
10
You lured me to the sacrificial stone of your survival with enticing words.
11
Your presence brushed against me.
Fleetingly. Several times. Unannounced.
I was in awe.
Each time.
I craved intoxication.
I was searching for it. Searching for you.
Deliberately. Insatiably. Constantly.
I recognised divinity in you.
You radiated peace, innocence, and beauty.
You assumed Balder’s>2 form.
Your tributes to me came in drops.
An uttered word.
A brief, gentle touch,
which may not even have occurred,
but I felt it deep inside.
A curious glance, which evoked excitement.
You began showering me with your presence with increasing regularity,
the refreshment penetrating deeper each time.
I walked the world reborn.
Droplets of cohabitation found their way into me.
I was carried by the bliss of pure surrender.
12
I led you by the hand through the interspace of entirety.
You pretended that this could also be your world.
You led me by the hand through a world of concreteness.
I tried to convince myself to love your way of being.
We perfected the art of holding hands.
Everything around us had fallen apart,
yet our hands continued to search for each other.
They craved to be clutched.
Our fingers intertwined one last time to pull us into usness.
We were both plunging into our own world.
The fingers unlinked.
Usness dissolved.
13
Frigga3 saw my tears before I knew of them,
before I had even shed them.
She whispered no warning, and I dove into your embrace.
The Queen of the Gods came to me when I cried.
You could have saved me from tears, I complained.
I never reveal my visions to anyone, explained Odin’s wife calmly.
Why then do you observe the future, I inquired.
Us goddesses, we cry with you, she replied.
14
And what if the gods had not toyed with us?
And what if we had not surrendered to our dreams of omnipotence?
And what if we had begun anew?
And what if we had never existed?
What if our story was not but a copy of everyone else’s?
15
You believe in the gods, in the order they invented.
Despite your compassion for all living things, tradition directs your thoughts.
The apparent enlightenment you display like dazzling jewellery
indicates a falsity that cannot escape close inspection.
Your mouth is full of words that you strew around,
only to stumble over the piles of letters.
Your body does not abide by your words.
But your deeds speak untruths.
You wish to pamper me and place me on your kingdom’s throne.
You wish to admire and to praise me. As long as I played your game.
As long as I satisfied your every whim,
and submitted to your concealed desire for dominance.
16
You boast that you are not like other men, like other gods.
You conceal your true nature
to catch your victims in a web of apparent sameness.
I fell for your image of sweetness and got caught.
By the time I unmasked your deception, it was too late.
The web of your intentions clung to me ever so tightly.
You refused to let me go and entangled me even tighter.
The goddesses intervened in our unequal dance.
The tears I shared with the goddesses took away the web’s magical powers.
It dissolved, allowing me to escape.
While you were cursing the gods, I began worshipping the goddesses.
17
I tripped and fell into our story.
You entered it most decisively.
Skipping the introduction, we breathed in the harmony of our unique coexistence.
Laughter surrounded us, drawing us closer.
The joy and bliss of our usness pinned us to what was unfolding.
Everything was possible. Everything was eternal.
You tripped and got swept away from our usness.
My astonishment emboldened me.
I left the premonition of our story decisively.
I was searching for fragments of the end in my shattered memory.
Bits of the beginning. Pieces of me.
Bragi was arranging my words.
The God of Poetry and Hunting was directing my thoughts.
I started to piece together the fragments.
The divinity of poetry had tamed the hunter instinct.
Bragi strung my verses into gentle streams.
18
I blossomed.
Full of hope, my petals opened.
Your attention and presence nourished me.
I hoped for sunshine,
expecting the light of bliss,
yet you poured your hopelessness on me.
You coloured my days with an unbearable darkness,
and I refused to be drenched in such blackness.
I longed for my light breath of transparency.
19
The weight of your darkness descended upon me,
like late snow covers early spring flowers.
An apparent softness,
which brings a swift end.
20
Cracks began to appear in our usness.
Droplets were pushing the tiny lesions of insecurity deeper into the abyss.
Our two worlds separated and began to drift apart.
Even the incredibly robust and elastic Bifröst, the Rainbow Bridge,
which connects the Land of the Gods with the World of Men,
was no longer able to bridge our divide.
Asgard, the Land of the Gods, and Midgard, the World of Men, were losing their link.
While you were roaming around the Land of the Gods, I wandered in the World of Men.
Or was it the other way around, and you only aspired to be like the gods from afar?
To be like a god. The supreme one.
The presumption of identifying with him led you to seek wisdom.
You wanted to find a solution that would reunite us.
You were not prepared to sacrifice an eye, no matter how vast the promised knowledge was.
You sensed that this would not save our usness.
You resorted to Odin’s second solution:
You hung yourself from a tree to attain enlightenment without the need for excessive sacrifice.
You kicked and tossed about, yet remained resolute in proving that you were fighting for us.
The words that flew from you
were supposed to help us meet in the middle of the Rainbow Bridge,
but all they did was stretch Bifröst further.
Odin had tricked you once again. He did not share his knowledge,
which says humans cannot apply divine solutions.
He tricked you into surrendering.
With your head hung low, limbs bound and body dangling,
you opened the way for a mighty darkness
that surrounds worlds.
It began to settle within you, extinguishing every flicker of hope in a solution.
You persisted for days before finally admitting defeat.
You rouse awkwardly to your feet.
We were both still in our own worlds.
Your simulated sacrifice had failed.
21
I was ready to surrender to all your thoughts,
aimed at disapproving
of my way of being.
Due to your thoughts on my fragility—
which you loved dearly, wrapping them in cellophane as gifts—
I began to disappear.
22
You praised your insignificance,
smashing every mirror in the process.
You avoided every reflection
that wanted to present you with your image.
You kept demanding my gaze.
You dived into it.
You had no intention of discovering who I was.
You observed only yourself in the gaze.
In my eyes.
In my heart.
In my admiration.
Your hunger for greatness,
disguised as modesty,
which was too small a garment,
devoured our story’s every word.
23
Your self-absorbedness comes in hidden form.
24
We existed.
You.
Me.
Us.
We had woven our usness in the stream of life.
For a brief moment, we were one.
Our usness faded, though it will last forever.
I revisit its minuscule moments, and I am happy.
You revisit its minuscule moments, and suffer.
We were touched by impermanence.
Too soon and yet too late.
We could have retained only nice memories.
We could have sunken slower into that tenacious darkness.
Impermanence showed its many faces
during every period of our usness.
Me. And. You.
Us.
Enraptured. Happy. Bewildered. Miserable.
You. And. Me.
Separately.
Miserable. Bewildered. Happy.
You. Us. Me.
Our usness exists in eternity.
In one moment of infinity, it is all-encompassing.
If it were not for impermanence, I would never have tasted usness.
If I had not tasted usness, our story would not be destined to repeat itself
in every story ever told.
25
The experience of impermanence is universally unique.
It colours our thoughts into an array of emotions.
It fills me with the excitement of all its possibilities.
Everything will end, and it will occur again and again.
The meaning of existence fills you with the dread.
Everything will end and nothing will follow.
26
Again and again, you choose
the familiarity of the destructive darkness
over the familiar ease of being.
27
We were carved out by life in the same way.
We were convinced that our pasts were alike.
We told each other stories that mirrored those of the other.
Your past truly seemed identical to mine.
The chisels left us with the same indentations,
the same lines,
similar shapes.
All humans are moulded in the same way.
We are all Emblas and Asks.
Our arrogance in searching for our uniqueness
amuses the gods.
28
We entered the dance pure,
not knowing the steps.
Fascinated by the synchronicity of movement,
we surrendered to its ways.
We were carried on the wings of perfect coexistence.
Our minds were flooded by innocence,
which banished all concerns of past experiences.
The bliss of our union’s weightlessness heralded infinity.
Each new step became the foundation of a lifelong connection.
The lightness of intertwined movements was inspiring.
I was convinced it was our mutual reality,
but you were merely following the divine instructions for a lovers’ duet.
29
We assured each other that Urd4 had ascribed us the same past,
which we finally managed to intertwine and merge into one.
We believed we were identical, the same right down to the very last detail.
We only disclosed the visions and memories
that verified our desires, projected into reality.
We were trying to convince ourselves that we were not Ask and Embla.
We did not differ in our essence or our inwardness.
We are of the same tree—were the words we put in each other’s mouths,
painting pictures we wanted to see in our dreams,
while weaving veils of deception when awake.
Verdandi5 bestowed upon us the lightness of living in the present.
Both of us. To me it was heavenly, to you unbearable.
The indescribable ease of being,
which penetrated every cell of my body,
presented you with such insurmountable hindrances.
It carried me to higher plains,
while you sank deeper into the lower realms.
Yet we were convincing ourselves of our coexistence
in the blissful mutuality of our fleeting experience.
We were convinced that love conquers all.
That we shall be an exception to the rule. That our story will break the chain of history’s infinite repetition.
Our surroundings shall melt, and we shall remain. As one. For all eternity.
Or at least until we shuffle off this mortal coil.
We did not hear Skuld’s6 laughter. She had assigned us with different futures.
It was echoing around us when the first sparks flew to ignite our love,
but it fell on deaf ears, for we were cupping them too tightly.
If we cannot hear it, it does not exist—we tried to convince ourselves.
Each searched the other’s eyes to see if the laughter echoed there, too.
… if we had confessed to hearing it.
… if we had discussed it.
… if we had not been so presumptuous to settle in the Land of the Gods.
Perhaps.
Perhaps.
Perhaps.
Perhaps all three Norn sisters,
the maiden guardians of the Spring of Destiny,
would have decided differently.
… we would never have met.
… we would have been together forever.
Yet we are not important.
Our roles in the story of all existence are insignificant.
To the Norns, we were but trivial amusement,
a moment of fun during their eternal task of watering the Sacred Tree.
30
A lake of tar,
glistening in the sun,
tempts you with its blackness.
Time after time you climb back onto the slide,
which catapults into the sticky mass,
accompanied by a mixture of pleasure and fear.
You find the darkness so familiar,
and you wade along the bottom of the lake,
slowed by the surrounding mass
that sets the pace for your thoughts.
You dream of all the possibilities of an easy existence,
but you do not propel yourself off the lake’s bed, which you find so endearing.
The thought of escaping the adherent blackness
is more terrifying than being imprisoned by the familiar.
31
Loki7 was sniggering while plotting his antics.
The most cunning and crafty inhabitant of Asgard
was playing with our story.
He was directing your gaze.
He was showing you the image of Hel8 in your sleep.
You only saw the beautiful, bright half of his daughter’s face.
You allied yourself with her in your dreams, sprinkled with instances of paranoid moments of awareness.
You could only guess what the hideous, dark half of her face looked like.
You were drawn to her mysterious eeriness.
She managed to plant the seed of disbelief in our usness.
She cast a spell of silence on you, so as not to reveal your fraternising.
She lured you into her realm of the Ninth World,
where she reigns over those killed by non-violence.
The Queen of the Dishonourable dead.
You were dancing with her while dancing with me;
a different dance reserved for each partner.
You carved up your time between us.
She received a larger portion. You found her dancing more seductive.
You started introducing the steps you danced with her to our dance. We started stepping on each other’s toes.
We got entangled, yet still we believed in the infinity of our movements’ coordination.
You increasingly coloured our dance with the rhythm you shared with her.
You dreamed of Helheim9, your other dance partner’s realm.
We were constantly tripping up, often finding ourselves on the ground,
until we finally laid still.
Each separately. Far away from the other.
We stretched out our hands, yet to no avail.
The words roved the interspace, bumping into each other and intertwining.
They took on a life of their own.
They were bouncing off us.
Hel left you as well.
Despite your loud knocking, she did not grant you access to her world.
Her role had been fulfilled.
Her father sent her to the next story.
32
I can hear Loki’s guffaw.
He is pleased.
Another trick successfully executed,
without any other god suffering backlash.
Loki will therefore not be punished for this mischief.
33
Our story took place in the space between words.
It flourished in the interspace of thoughts.
We could breathe there and be happy.
Laughter filled this interspace.
It lifted us to higher heights,
bumping into the corners of words, pushing them aside.
The laughter is gone.
The corners are sharp and suddenly so extremely close.
The interspace had shrunk.
Our story evaporated.
I can only dwell in the interspaces of tangible things.
When I spread my arms, I can breathe easily.
I laugh and dance to the rhythm of the vibrations of non-existence.
You can only dwell within a defined definition,
a place with no interspace,
a place where concreteness embraces you and the possibility of grasping grants you security.
34
In the interspace of existence,
when I move with my eyes closed,
you are the fulfilment of my dreams.
We merge into each other.
I do not know where I begin and where you end.
When I cling to the corners of concreteness,
I wander with my gaze through the labyrinth of our usness,
yet I do not recognise you.
When my eyes are open, it is not you that they see.
When I look at you, your image scatters.
I do not recognise myself if I am not dancing my dance.
When I close my eyes, anything is possible.
Yet you do not want interspaces.
You do not want to dance blindly in an intangible eternity.
You want to label everything and place it in drawers.
35
How did we even manage to enter the same story?
The Goddess of Love brought us together.
Freya10 combined the gift of attraction and war with the gift of sex.
She covered us with the flap of her feathered cape.
Bewitched, hidden under her feathers,
we glimpsed eternity in each other.
36
In the light of the sun, you pretend
to break the shackles of anxiety,
but in the blissful cosiness of the night,
you put them back on most eagerly.
Nótt, Goddess of the Night,
so beloved by you,
helps you forge these shackles.
37
Male. Man. God.
Mine. Mine. Mine.
We lived in the Land of the Gods.
We strolled through Asgard.
We saw each other as divinities.
The gods saw as their siblings.
We were one of them. Equal among equals.
The Aesir11 adopted you.
I was one of the Vanir12.
Eternity was ours.
Eternity is ours.
Eternity will be ours.
Together in eternity we are one.
A tiny moment of inattention was enough.
We failed to recognise it.
We failed to sense it.
We observed with a delay, allowing it to skilfully avoid our understanding.
The cunning destroyer of all that is divine
sneakily smuggled the moment into our story.
Disguised as advice of eternal love,
he tricked the guards on the defensive wall of our oneness.
You bit into the divine apple. It was a trap.
Loki had placed it into the basket of apples from our orchard.
Idunn13, Keeper of the Apples of Immortality, did not notice any apples were missing.
Every day he planted a new apple.
Every day you bit into it eagerly.
Out of all the apples, you always chose the one intended for the gods.
The magical effect was not instantaneous.
The gods eat one of her apples every day,
and hence do not age.
You ate one of her apples every day.
Years were pealing from you.
A young man. A youth. A little boy.
Mine. Yours. Nobody’s.
Our usness collapsed
before Idunn discovered your daily theft and slapped you with a warning.
The effect was irreversible.
Centuries had been woven between us.
We no longer recognised each other.
Suddenly, we were wandering down our own separate paths.
A woman. A little boy. Idunn.
We cursed Loki, who was laughing uproariously at a safe distance.
He was flaunting his successful deception in front of the gods,
who were relishing the performance.
38
We communicated with looks and touches.
The spaces between words filled our oneness.
Everything was possible.
Everything was perfect.
Everything was falling into place.
Words brought complications. We no longer understood each other.
Ratatoskr14 was passing sentences between us in her unique way.
The squirrel is versed in carrying messages
from the roots of the Sacred Tree,
to its highest branches.
She was conveying the words
shared between Nidhogg15, the Corpse Eater,
and the eagle surveying all the worlds from atop the tree.
She changes the words intentionally along the way.
It took longer and longer for her to travel the distance between us.
One day, the journey became too long to travel.
She grew weary.
We could no longer exchange words.
Silence ensued.
We were too isolated in ourselves to communicate through touches and looks.
39
You crawl along the bed of a stream pool,
clinging to everything you can get your hands on.
This pool has become your home.
You could have long since begun living a different life.
You lost countless unrepeatable moments.
You became proficient in persuading yourself
that you are unable to change anything.
For thousands of days, you enjoyed the comfort of attention,
which you received while flaunting your anguish,
as if marching towards the sun.
40
Days brought us together,
nights inserted distances between us.
I was sinking into a dream,
while you were exploring the various shades of the dark night.
You were trying to escape the unbearableness
by delving into unusual repetitive tasks.
Every night you used nail clippers to cut the feathers off the dress
I had received as a gift from Freya.
I was oblivious to this
until one day I found that I could no longer fly.
I slipped on the dress, sored to the heights of freedom,
then plummeted breathlessly towards the ground.
I observed my bruised limbs in amazement.
Blood seeped through the dress
to reveal the clipped feathers,
which appeared whole in their whiteness.
You convinced me that there was nothing wrong with the feathers or the dress.
You convinced me that I had never known how to fly in the first place.
You convinced me that life is better without wings.
I understood the truth and saw your true nature.
I cupped my ears so as not to hear your words.
I started collecting feathers and learned how to weave them into the dress.
I will fly.
I will enter the sense of divinity.
The goddesses will welcome me among them.
I will dream without fear,
because my new dress will be safe from your meddling.
You will stop exploring the darkness,
or must I hide the nail clippers?
No woman or goddess should ever be left wingless again.
41
Your darkness is full of disappointments, fears, and self-pity.
You weave it out of unfulfilled expectations.
The helplessness of those affected is reflected in your apparent desire for liberation.
You frequent with Thor1516 and Tyr17.
They train you in the arts of thunder, battle, and war,
and so, fill your domestic pool with a premonition of atrocities.
42
You collect stories.
You dissect them beyond recognition,
to find the premonition of horror.
You carefully nurture the seed of this premonition.
You grow gentle ideas into rich atrocities.
You attribute everything with irreparable dimensions.
You enjoy your creation,
and put it on display for your friends to see.
With random images,
which attract attention,
you deceive yourself and any onlooker,
for in these images, you carefully conceal the splendours of stories,
so that an inattentive observer may overlook them.
43
As experienced translators of fleeting ideas,
accustomed to searching for meanings
and hidden messages and set symbols,
we entered the space between words.
44
The labyrinth of corridors
between carefully composed letters
feeds me. It fills you to the brim.
Wandering within the colourfulness of an ostensible void
opens the depths of understanding everything
that brings absence of thought.
This apparent absence is filled by the possibilities of everything.
45
Upon gripping each other’s hands,
we each chose our own version of the story
and pretended for a short time
that we were living the same one.
We spread our wings. Each our own.
We flew. High.
Side by side. United.
That was how it felt. It was how we saw each other.
But our view was that of Veðrfölnir18,
a hawk nestled between the eyes of an eagle.
Perspective had deceived him.
From the top of Yggdrasil, he saw us flying one above the other.
He saw the connection between us.
We believed
this view to be ours.
But in the Nine Worlds, we each existed in our own.
We tethered ourselves together to keep up the illusion,
yet the connection had closed its wings.
Plummeting to the ground was imminent,
a hard landing inevitable.
Ratatoskr was exemplary at performing her duties.
We no longer recognised each other in the words we received.
The interspaces disappeared in the process.
They were replaced by the shadow of the Moon that haunted us,
as the Moon is chased by its wolf.
46
We rouse, full of hope, yet each in our own world.
47
The gods roared with laughter as they watched us perform our play for them,
while we were utterly convinced that we were the creators of our lives.
They tricked us.
They wrote the play for us, adding our unconscious impulses to the script.
It satisfied their hunger for amusement.
We are not Embla and Ask.
There is not a trace of elm or ash tree in us.
We are but their insignificant descendants,
who did not ask the gods for permission to become a couple.
Believing in our omnipotence,
we had broken every unwritten rule.
We merged darkness with light
in ways they can never be merged.
48
We were learning about the Sacred Tree together.
Yggdrasil represented a common path.
We traversed down its trunk several times,
from the roots to the top of its crown, and we conversed with the eagle.
In between the branches,
we got to know all the Nine Worlds of the Cosmos.
Our favourite routine was to walk along the rainbow
that bridges the divide between the Land of the Gods and the World of Men.
We only familiarised ourselves with a fraction of everything,
before our paths diverged.
No more oneness. We had split.
We broke up. Divorced.
Darkness returned to its old shackles.
The light could finally breathe again.
We each sit in our own world,
leaning against the trunk of Yggdrasil.
We ignore the squirrel.
We each whisper our own story to the leaves.
The stories travel towards each other via the rainbow.
They got muddled up.
We only listen to the premonitions of the other’s story.
Leaves carry whispers between worlds.
The story of our parallel existence
brings smiles and tears to random listeners.
It is void of any originality. Just another story of dominance.
The goddesses of the north weep with me.
49
This is not our story.
We cannot own it.
We stumbled upon it.
We borrowed it.
We draped ourselves in it.
It has assumed roles that have been played countless times.
Always the same story, always different characters.
50
You love the embrace of blackness.
Its adhesiveness soothes you.
You sense the idea of light,
yet the cosiness of darkness always dispels it.
Darkness is you and you are darkness.
You grabbed me by the ankles
and dragged me with you into this adhesive dwelling.
A tar-like mass was eating into my every pore.
Just as I was about to sink,
I managed to escape your grasp.
I swam for freedom.
Yet still, every day,
I cleanse every cell off my body
of your darkness.
51
In every phase of our coexistence,
you breathed the idea of superiority.
It seeped from your essence
and boasted slyly its all-encompassing nature.
The masks were transparent.
They failed to completely disguise your nature.
If elation did not carry me on its wings,
my attention would not have slumbered
and the goddesses would not have to weep with me.
Their tears mingled with mine.
We shared the pain of the same experiences.
I became a goddess.
Us goddesses became women.
Humiliation, trampling, disregarding –
these are supposed to be your recognitions of us.
Deceits, intimate wars, rapes –
your gifts for our survival.
52
You saw the uniqueness of our unity,
which you placed on a pedestal of exclusivity,
only in the inimitability
of our human impermanence.
You wanted to clone the unique relationship, which we had supposedly built,
from the relationships of others.
Other men and their women.
A father, an uncle. A brother. A friend. An acquaintance. A god.
I did not fit into such a relationship,
and I did not follow your idea.
You brought me before a tribunal of like-minded people,
who would instil in me a guilt that would clip my wings.
You turned the pain of knowing that innocence did not exist into accusations.
You placed your beliefs into the mouths of gods.
Did the gods invent our story?
Were we even given the chance to flourish in parallel?
I should have been the fertiliser of your blossoming, and not the flower,
which robbed you of the admiration intended for you.
My colourfulness should not have competed
with the blooming of your colours.
You summoned everyone to come to your defence, to prove the only right way to coexist.
Odin, Tyr and Thor were not enough.
You opened the door for Zeus to use his disguises and tricks,
as he had mastered them fully to conquer the unconquerable.
Neither images nor words seduced me.
The wrath of the gods began to merge with yours.
53
How dare I disobey?
How dare I behave differently?
How dare I consider my own desires, dreams, and needs?
I should kneel humbly,
and place my essence on the sacrificial altar of our relationship.
You could easily direct my empty shell towards your vision of the story.
54
I stretch and contract the moment of unity, when all possibilities were still available,
when we immersed in the apparent absence of everything and we had everything,
within a moment of experience.
The moment lasts forever, yet no longer than a single breath.
It was your mourning of the passing of time
that robbed you of the power of magic.
You swim in the darkness of eternity,
brimming with the lightning of like-minded gods.
You and the gods wanted create the world according to your vision,
a world where we goddesses serve as mere decorations, fated to fulfil your wishes.
55
Storms were raging inside me,
but you only saw my external image.
You accused me of being a mere observer, while you sought our usness.
You accused me of not submitting.
You released the pool’s blackness to fall between us.
You tarred our usness, so I left.
Our unity split into you and me.
We dwell in our separate worlds, surrounded by different creatures.
Only Sol and Mani remained of our bond.
Goddess of the Sun and God of the Moon
are chased by wolves,
as we are haunted by the memories and premonitions of our usness.
56
I carry within me
horrors that you cannot fathom.
You wine to me about the scratches you sustained
while demanding my sympathy.
57
I chewed up slowly and spat out
every unwarranted touch,
every lustful glance,
every violent intrusion into my body
by every man
I have encountered since birth.
For a long time, there was only a void.
I was gathering hope, drop by drop,
and turning it into power.
With the tears I cried
I lit up the corners,
where even dark thoughts
dared not venture.
The sobbing of the goddesses freed me from the prison of helplessness.
58
Millennia of oppression,
subjugation and exploitation
that transpire day in and day out,
which we women and goddesses feel
in every cell of our bodies,
give us the strength
to step out of the void.
59
You cannot imagine the pain
that fuels the joyfulness of every moment.
The reign of fear that you men—aided by the gods—have domesticated,
serves as an excuse for your blindness.
No man or god could survive a single day
if subjected to their own daily rapes, trampling and coercions.
The gross interventions by men
in the thoughts, actions, and bodies of women,
which they carry out day after day without a hint of guilt,
while demanding compassion for yourselves, would be too much to bear.
60
Each morning that I woke up next to you,
I was waking up to the horror of Sif19 on the day Loki cut her hair.
Thor found her ugly hairless,
so he ordered new hair to be made.
When she no longer lived up to his expectations,
the world fell apart for both of them.
While the gnomes were forging her hair,
Sif, with the help of the tears she cried, paved her way out of the dungeon of limitation,
where Thor, burdened by the weight of his views on ugliness, had locked her in.
She had barely emerged from the darkness glowing,
when they fitted her with new golden hair.
Thor found her more beautiful than ever.
He instantly forgot what she looked like hairless.
The forged golden hair took on her light
and caged Sif once again.
60
Even a divine bed is no safe haven,
let alone the one I shared with you.
62
I sank into calmness.
Every day I step under the shower of happiness.
I no longer allow my joyousness to be taken.
I have transformed the weight of atrocities.
Everything that befell me since birth.
Everything that befell women since the birth of Embla.
Everything that goddesses experience
since the beginning of their time.
With the tears I cried
I paved the stairs leading from the darkness.
Joy is my guide along the path of life.
Though unexpected blows still make me stumble.
Sometimes, I find myself at the bottom again.
I never stick to the bottom of the adhesive pool.
I build an additional step each time,
and the darkness no longer clings to me,
when I emerge from the lake of tar.
63
I did not meet your expectations,
so you deprived my nights of sleep.
64
I lay out on the table
my shattered expectations and desires.
This puzzle is unsolvable.
The pieces are too small and I do not possess the right glue.
I project my wishes in my dreams.
It gives me hope.
It keeps me going.
It colours my world with light.
65
I had put my faith in you.
I saw you as I wanted to see you:
an admirer and worshiper of freedom.
Yours and mine.
Hand in hand we travel and float lightly.
The gods created you according to their wishes.
You are just like everyone I know.
You wanted to enslave me, subdue me.
You wanted to lock me in a cage and keep me all to yourself,
whenever you so desired.
Like a bird that passes the time with song,
I was meant to shower you with my essence.
I was meant to breathe for you, shine into your darkness, grant your wishes.
You would only have released once I had already disappeared.
As gods do with goddesses, imprisoned in cages of gold.
66
I believed that you were immune to the weight of history,
that you were one of the few who was not conditioned by tradition,
one of those who did not view women from a man’s pedestal of apparent power.
The truth shattered me.
Unrealised illusions even dispelled my dreams.
For a while. To allow the pain to pass.
67
Our story ended.
Like many do.
In truth, all stories end.
The most beautiful.
Love stories.
In all forms.
The ending shattered me.
The pain was indescribable.
The goddesses beckoned me to join them.
68
Freedom is the light of life in all the nuances of coexistence.
It transforms relationships into love.
Love enables perfect coexistence.
Coexistence is carried on the wings of freedom and love.
The circle is complete.
I live different forms of relationships.
My story goes on.
69
The goddesses of the north wept with me.
Together we dance a jubilant dance
in the Land of the Gods.
1 Odin is the highest-ranking and the oldest Norse god. He only has one eye because he exchanged the other one for wisdom. To acquire the knowledge of the Runes, he also sacrificed himself by hanging upside down from a tree for nine days and nine nights. Odin is Frigga’s husband.
2 Balder: Norse god of beauty, innocence, and peace.
3 Frigga: Queen of the Norse gods, Odin’s wife, who can see into the future, but refuses to reveal it to anyone.
4 Urd is one of the Norn sisters. She defines the past. Her name means destiny.
5 Verdandi is one of the Norn sisters. She defines the present. Her name means happening or present.
6 Skuld is one of the Norn sisters. She determines the future. Her name means debt, necessity or that which must become.
7 Loki: The god of mischief. He perfects the art of trickery, often resulting in serious twists to our plots, though he occasionally also rectifies them. He is Odin’s blood brother.
8 Hel: Half her face is white and beautiful, half black and hideous. She is the chieftain of Hela, the world where the dishonourable dead reside – those who did not die nobly in battle, but of old age, disease, or misfortune. Hel is Loki’s daughter.
9 Helheim: The Ninth World. Home of the dishonourable dead, ruled by Hel.
10 Freya: Norse goddess of fertility, love, sex, war, prophecy, and attraction. She is beautiful, sensual and wears a feathered cape.
11 Aesir: Norse gods and goddesses who embody the forces of nature.
12 Vanir: A group of benevolent gods associated with fertility.
13 Idunn: Norse goddess, the keeper of the apples of immortality, which give the gods eternal youth. Wife of Bragi, Norse god of poetry and hunting.
14 Ratatoskr: A squirrel who dwells in the branches of Yggdrasil.
15 A dragon that lives among the roots of Yggdrasil and feeds on them. He killed the eagle that lives in the branches of the Sacred Tree. He devours the corpses of dead murderers, rapists, and oath-breakers.
16 Thor: Norse god of thunder and battle, the most powerful of the gods. Sif’s husband.
17 Tyr: Norse god of war.
18 Veðrfölnir: A hawk perched between the eyes of an unnamed eagle perched atop of Yggdrasil – the Sacred Tree.
