Bokelskere.no

Just words. I didn't know then the damage words can do. You can't feel them, or see them. Someone opens their mouth to speak. The words are there. And then they're gone. Except of course they're not, now they're inside the other person's head, sticking to their brain. I should have remembered the line from the song my mother sang: words never die.

Look at you, so busy writing everything down on pieces of paper. Scraps of paper to lose or put away in a cupboard to grow mildew. Nobody ever bothered to teach me to write. They didn't need to. Instead I taught myself never to forget.

You, I remember how you talked to your children. You asked them: 'Do you want this or that?' 'Coca-cola or Fanta?' 'Front seat or back?' You drove them around in a big four-wheel as though they were born with no legs. You let them push away the food everybody else was eating and you asked the cooks: 'What else is there in the kitchen?' And I heard the way your children answered you. As though the world was upside down, and you were the child, they the adults.