A period of adjustment in which I still consider myself a writer who writes primarily about the city. Compiling noodly free verse surveys of tiled underpasses and concrete estates, cryptoforests and edgelands. Drawn to the seemingly empty margins. The ghost zones where the city suspends in space.

And now the grumbling disenfranchisement of a writer spent too many years failing to meaningfully write about place. An even longer period of adjustment in which I struggle to think of myself as a writer at all.

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When I arrive it's hours coasting on roads emptied of traffic. Norwegian spruce flanks interrupted by villages with postcard houses. Farmsteads with bell crowned barns. Falu red paint with white frames.

The treeline giving ground to fields of sheep penned by zigzag roundpole fences, built from saplings, tied with peels of bark tightening as they dry.

Buzzards perching atop the tallest posts.

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I spread the documents across the bed.

 Passport. Bank ID. Personal Number. National ID. EU Residence Permit.

 Muscle. Marrow. Bone.

I self-diagnose. I am suffering from a disease of chronic disappearances. Lived in cracks.

Some part of me fights to stay aware of a life before Sofie's Mountain.

In journals I try to describe the feeling of two selves parting as sediment layers in a soil test do. The settling of indistinct dirt brown acquiring character. The gradations appearing first as bands of light, dark.

Coarse, fine.

Like tea leaves. Like geomancy.

All lived material with no metaphor or meaning.

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In the attic under the eaves. Writing desk tucked between collar beam and window. I feed a sheet into my Olivetti Roma, manufactured in the 1980s by Olivetti Do Brasil. A travel typewriter with smooth keys, 13pt micro elite typeface, grey case with eye-catching red trim. A detail that recalls the best known works by the architect Lina Bo Bardi.

In a cafe across the North and Baltic sea's, a chronically ill poet reading from a collection of body horrors offers the advice: “Write what you know”.

I check the line spacing, the page margins,

Lock the paper in place.

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I read about how populations of oak stag beetle are declining globally due to the loss and fragmentation of their habitat.

I lay back on the grass and indulge my pareidolia in the clouds. Daydreaming about leaving the city.

Clouds as forests, as lakes, as mountains.

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I sit beneath the shadiest tree in P______ R__ Park. The oak canopy reaching twenty metres in diameter. Full leaf boughs ornamented with noisy parakeets.

I'm dressed all in black despite the sun.

Across the lawn three generations of friends and family chatter in contact fusion. Barbecuing beef and catfish in sticky brown glazes. Everyone marinating together in the fragrant smoke.

I watch as X______ stretches her arms around the two-hundred-year-thick trunk. Enveloping as much of the knotted stem as she can.

Blackberry lips reflected in the fridge-freezer section. Our something at first sight superimposed over a packet of tofu. A dozen oranges tumbling down the market aisle. A tributary of citrus orbs confluxing with a delicate phalanx of phalanges. The performance of her femur and pelvis in orchestration with these appendages. Bending and scooping. Flexing. Extending. Rotating. The fruits passed in sleight from hand to hand.

Steam rises from the dewy skirts around the burst of ornamental beds. Azalea, magnolia, rhododendron.

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Blue scilla spreading among mossy rocks and rotting tree stumps. Cross-pollinated tulips swirling vibrant splashes. The horizon a pale swell of cherry blossom.

Instead of writing

I weed around paths, around planters, around floriferous mounds bordered by birch trunks. Most of the papery white bark peeled away.

Getting lost in days of dirty nails and muddy knees. Gardening gloves thin at the fingertips. A little irritable skin poking through.

Rubbing one sunburned spot the size of a rice grain.

Pearl hyacinth, hellebore, pasqueflower.

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