Copenhagen Wednesday

She had the day off from work and we spent it together. We took the train across the long bridge across the Baltic to Malmo, Sweden. It was raining across all of Scandanavia. There isnt much to Malmo. It is a northern town like any other, cobblestones and streets and squares and we sat in a restaurant and then a bar. We ate and drank and talked and it was like all the other times between us except for that one thing which made it completely different.

We stayed in the bar hoping the rain would pass and it did, finally, but the wind had picked up. At the bridge before the train station we were almost blown over and both our hats blown off into the canal. We climbed down the bank to the water and reached in with an umbrella for the hats. Then we ran to catch the train back for Copenhagen, she making it through as the doors closed but I had to throw my shoulder in and then pry the doors back. The Swede conductor was upon us quickly for holding the doors and she started yelling at him on the crowded train. I finally stepped in and said it was me that stopped the doors and he should be talking to me. He said I wouldnt do that in my country, but I have and would and said he needed to let this one go and walk on by. But she wouldnt let off him either and so I just sat back and watched it and the ashamed faces of the Swedes and Danes on the train. It was a good good show.

We went to Christiania where they smoke the dope and believe they are free. It is dark there and the people mumbled and huddled outside near the fires. There is graffitti and they try at art and they believe they are alive. .....................................................................................

..........................................................................................................But its not easy to keep writing of what has happened here because what happened wasnt some place I went. Today and yesterday and tomorrow and until I leave are useless. I cannot make them literature. She was only a dream. She was the dream of an overnight forklift driver. I had come to Copenhagen to finally give the city and her back to themselves. I wanted them to exist as they had during the nights I lifted boxes of bleach up ladders, drove reach lift trucks, tossed bags of stone, and listened to the trauma of the very poor. I was in Copenhagen then, with her, and it was beautiful.

But now here is nothing. Vacations are useless. There is only physical training in new places and this is not a very good place for training. The Danes irritate me. They are exactly the same and admit to it. They told me of Jantes Law and how it defines them and how it strips them of any ambition. They long to be like each other, to find some average. I do not understand how brother Søren could have stayed.

And the rest is literary pretense. I dont want literature from this trip. This trip happened months before and I should have written it then. Then it was literature. It was the literature of a forklift driver. There arent even any feelings. There is only boredom. What I wrote of Sunday is mildly embarassing, but to reread those feelings, to know I was capable of them, that is something. I am encouraged. I do not know how those feelings passed so quickly. How quickly boredom replaced them. She and I had already happened. Copenhagen had happened.

The pictures are the only thing missing and I must take them. The city and her and I were stories without pictures.

I am here now to take those pictures.

I will show you the city. I will show you her. And then I will have to write of the trip to Copenhagen and the girl. The city and the girl that were with me in the nights driving the forklift and living as the poor. That was the story.