We Were Young

We went abroad to a summer language course. We met there, by 'chance'. We fell in love with each other , and we both thought we had won the great price, Both of us were young people. We fell in love and it was so easy! At the same time it was very difficult.

It happened like this; it just happened. And with time it became much too difficult for both of us to know how to do things right.

Time has shown that it would have been of the utmost importance that we could have done things right. We should have done the right thing to save our lives, and to save the life of a daughter. This is where we failed.

It's about a bad conscience. It's about us not understanding each other and what happened. It's about us being young and inexperienced. And then there was a kind of mental disturbance or illness in the picture. There were so many things that came into play that made things go wrong. Eventually things went very badly.

The first years we were not so bad. We had a good time together, I felt. What I do know is that in those years we had sex. Good sex together, I think, she and I. But then it happened. Little by little, almost invisible little signs happened that worsened the climate between us. It was those little things that do things with us without us noticing.

Things were getting worse and worse, and we noticed it almost too late. That was when it happened. We were expecting a child. We had traveled to her parents and lived there for several months while waiting to become parents. And we were there in the months after the birth, while we were new parents to a new sweet nice little girl.

What threatened our little family, what ruined us showed itself in the mental state, in her tears and accusations that came so often and without me being able to understand what it was. It was like a curse being thrown at us. She was very unstable and sad, and she was very quick to criticize me.

I experienced it as an Inferno. Nothing was good, everything was wrong or bad. And it was this that finally broke down our relationship. The relationship - our cohabitation  -  went from crisis to crisis. I never knew where I had her, she swung a lot in her mood. It could be very up and down. She could be very happy and content, and then she could be completely down, far down there where it was not good, neither for her nor for me.

We did not have much to go on. We worked poorly together. I had a bad time with her, and in hindsight I thought it was my fault. But then I thought a lot about this, and I could not understand that I alone should be the reason why she was feeling so very bad. I could not understand that it was because of me that she was so unpredictable and in such a varied mood. I could not understand that it was so very tiring - even exhausting! - to be in that relationship with me.

It was absolutely awful not knowing  -  not even being able to guess  -  what I would come home to after work, what a chaos that was waiting me when I got home.

To make a long story short, we tried to make things work. We both tried to make it so that we would all be well in our little family. We tried for many years and we also tried by having another child. And that was good. We got a nice little girl that we were very happy with.

But that was not good enough anyway. We built a big new house, a nice house with view on the sea, where we would thrive and live well together, the four of us. That was the plan. But it failed.

We did a lot of things that made us happy, but happiness did not last. We did not succeed. I tried to talk about it. I said it was not good, as we had it together, and she started sniffing and crying, and she shouted at me and accused me of all that could be wrong. In the end, it peaked. She shouted and branched out and threw accusations at me, and suddenly several things happened at the same time, in the end we got here  -  to the decisive blink of an eye.

We had been going on for several days with this quarrel, we had worn each other out and ourselves, and we gradually began to approach the bottom. It was a quarrel about everything and nothing, a big and sharp quarrel where none of us had a full overview of what happened.

Often such very important things happen in people's lives. What is initially trivial is poorly handled by the directly involved, and in the end they are both pushed into their respective corners and cannot help but accept the tragic course of the conflict, as well as the tragic outcome.

She stood in front of me and looked me straight in the eye. And she said:

"You can just disappear. You are worth nothing. You can just move out!"

It might be that something in me was protesting, and that I pretended to be sorry for what she said. But deep inside me there was a secret cheer that broke loose, threatening to burst the surface.

"No, listen, you!" I said.

"Yes, you can!" She said.

"Well," I said, and in the blink of an eye I felt that there was a little Devil passing through me.

"Then I do it! Then we will do exactly that!"

I could see that she was a little stunned. But I also saw that she was very altered, so she certainly gave a big F … in all such nuances, I thought.

Now she had said it, those little words. "Just go away!" And now I could do what I had never dared to do before. I followed on, building my liberation on her words and on the relentless logic as a goal built into those words. And snip, snap snout  -  that's how we parted ways, and I got out of a more than 15-year-long captivity (as I experienced it). We both got out of it, she and I, in our own way.

We saw an end to this relationship, our marriage, a connection that was broken, that was overdue. The tragedy was that there were two small children - or rather a big child and a small child that we could not take good care of, she and I. This is where the tragedy began, for the child who was to grow up, and for the unborn.

We were separated first and a year later we divorced.

She kept our big house, she was allowed to keep it. I did not take out my share of the values in the house. It was naive and stupid of me, but it happened because I was so happy that I had finally managed to escape and get away from this terrible, oppressive and unstable addiction in which I had lived in together with her for so many years.