YOU ARE TRYING TO HAVE MEMORIES

4.  religion in eivindvik

you can still see the mountain range if you focus. one jagged line of blackness against the dead night sky. one vast entity separated from the other, mountains from heavens, that in essence - when looked upon from a position on the ground - are made up of entirely the same matter. only the line is real. the electrocardiogram of perception. the sutured gap of reality. you would like to think that you are staring into this darkness, but - as you tackle a relatively grown woman in the midst of a psychotic breakdown to the ground, outside, some time before sunrise - you find it increasingly hard to suppress the notion that the darkness - indeed - is leering into you. even the newspapers, as your new acquaintance can confirm, are staring back at you. reading out headlines of events that have yet to pass. even belief is reduced to two intersecting sticks glued to someones door. just ask the priest. he knows. medicate? no, the doctor is somewhere up the fjord on his boat. what to do? pray. pray, my beloved, pray. so you pray. and your girlfriend at the time (who loved you more than anyone ever will, you know?), to the best of her praying abilities, barricades the bedroom door with a couch. god's own contingency against madness, at eight o clock in the morning. all priests asleep by then, and doctors too. and later denial from everyone involved. too much beer. it was simply too much beer. and you are nowhere, not asleep, not even dreaming. only the shiny chord that separated you from the other, that highlighted the darkness you could live with, lies there; thrown nonchalantly across the living room table, between empty beer cans and an unfinished game of trivial pursuit.