2024. 8. 19 Mon

Not wanting to come home to a still room, I put some music on as we were leaving and its serenity took Mum by surprise. She had once found the music dull, and that was before we visited the composer’s house in Bergen - there we listened to a few more songs behind a lake and the hut where the composer probably wrote them. It was the power of circumstance that made the music sound better this time, I thought. Seven weeks of abundance packed back into suitcases and the remains being the bare minimum - by which I am referring to my private life and its solitude. Perhaps what she heard was this solitude and the stillness behind it. Ironic, as I realise now writing about it.

Thus I am coming back to it finally, my solitude, this. I believe everyone’s solitude is a quaintness in the form of a personal object because we need to be able to physically grasp it, not merely mentally, to command it, to conjure it. Someone types away in silence, while the other might be sewing stitches, Ichiko Aoba humming from a large headset (or a rainy day in Copenhagen Nordic lofi mix flowing). So I imagine his solitude as I will never know it. I think of this unknown F sometimes, whom I will never meet. Then I think to myself how much I would like to meet this person, the solitude of my one personified, making loops of thread that perhaps resemble his feelings and thoughts in the remotest distance from me. A few times I thought I glimpsed this F, as he was walking away from my place. I looked down and he turned back. This instant he was again the F I knew, but then as we waved and he turned, it was the solitary being shielded by the music from the headset. How I was drawn to this being walking away, amused and captivated by the strange fact that he was a complete stranger whom I loved.