A place where one walks amongst the trees
When I go to sleep these days I see the highways of my hometown. I see rivers of asphalt stretch endlessly forward upon which fleets of metal cars stream down. It is hypnotising the way we swerve together and how the wheels hum against the ground. We are just an inch from crashing into each other and ripping through each other in a tangle of metal and bone.
It was strange to me to hear my parents ask if I wanted to eat some noodles which were a twenty minute drive away. Twenty minutes on a highway is almost twenty six kilometers, or sixteen miles. To shoot yourself in a one ton metal box many towns away just to eat a small bowl of noodles. I sat there sweating in the coffee shop looking at this small bowl. We shot ourselves all the way back home again. I think in total we took twenty steps.
How cruel it is to see the world pass by you and never get to touch it, stand on it, live in it. It is so strange to me that I can walk out of my door in Oslo and my feet can take me where I need to go. Everything I can see I can walk on. My living radius may only be about a kilometer but it is rich and full of things and places within it.
When I get sleepy at night I think of home. I put on my eye mask but I am still awake seeing myself fall asleep at the wheel and careening into the darkness. I've watched enough videos of accidents on the highway to feel in my bones the stakes we are dealing with. And millions do it every day and hundreds pay the price. Like a machine whose joints need to be lubricated by blood, KL heaves and breathes and sends cars up and down her arteries. Sleeping brings me home in the worst ways.