7: Selling and the power of a name

The day the realtor came it was a gloriously sunny day in Copenhagen. It was the beginning of February, and winter still held the land in a tight, icy grip. But in the streets you could see the first Vikings at heart in shorts or t-shirts. Sunshine brings out the crazy in the Nordic; we have so little of it, every ray makes us shed all decency to soak it up with any patch of skin available.

When she knocked at my door, I still didn’t know that in just a few moments, my life would change forever. She was just supposed to do a routine appraisal for the bank. Just an everyday thing. To adjust my mortgage, so I could stay there another 3 or 5 or forever amounts of years. Except that is not what happened, not even close.

Knock. Knock.

Her name was Maria. Of course it was. I should have known already then that something was up. Like Universal-level, life altering up. Her eyes were that shade of deep blue that seemed to change when her head moved even a little. Like a pond in the sunlight with pebbles on the bottom reflecting the light back up. Blond, shoulder length hair, latest fashion, gorgeous. My photography mind had a hard time paying attention to anything she was saying, because I couldn’t help staring at those eyes and at how the light of my living room on a gorgeous February day fell across her face. She worked hard to engage me though, talking rapid fire style like she was in a contest of who could say the most in the shortest amount of time. Except she had won before she entered the door.

- So, she said, looking me intently in the eye, while I tried to avoid her gaze, feeling on the spot, because I didn’t know what the next thing was, she was going to say, or how it would change my entire life:

- Have you ever thought of selling?

For a moment I just looked at her. Her gorgeous face could have just turned green, and she could have grown tentacles, I wouldn’t have noticed. My mind had gone completely blank.

I can’t even imagine how weird a meeting it must have been for her, me first not being able to listen because her eyes were mesmerizing my mind, and then not being able to understand a thing she said, because she had just blown the roof of a belief, I had thought was set in stone.

- Um, wait, what, selling, wait, what do you mean, like me selling the apartment, like when, what?

She just smiled now.

- It’s a gorgeous place, I could sell it really fast, she said.

- It even smells good!

She laughed. I stared.

Then a good minute passed of just silence.

- Just think about it, she then added after another while of me dumbfounded.

I couldn’t believe it. Was it possible? How was it possible? What had happened to take it from never in a lifetime to happening right this minute? And she didn’t even know. She didn’t know the stories stored in these walls. She didn’t know how trapped I had been here. How this pretty little apartment was really a prison.

- I don’t understand, I stammered:

- The financial markets, unsellable (and a lot of other words, that made no sense whatsoever, I was practically uttering syllables and pauses by now, hoping something would stick and form actual words).

She smiled again.

- The markets recovered, she said.

Like that could explain how my prison had suddenly become a house made of card board instead of impenetrable walls.

Could this be true?

Could I be finally free?

Was the war really, actually, finally over?

The days after I steadied myself. Easy now, I would tell myself. The doors might be open, but you haven’t walk out of them yet. Nothing is for certain until you not only have walked out, but that you’ve also left it way behind. You’re not in the clear yet. The simple fact is I just couldn’t believe it.

The day I went to Maria the Realtor’s office to sign the papers for her to sell my apartment, it was another rare Copenhagen day of February sun. I biked the short distance from me to her office. We spend most of the time talking about her pregnancy and our shared belief in feminism. I tried not to let it show how scared I was being there. Laughing through the tightness in my throat that was threatening to break out in full sobs of fear.

I knew that one of her partners was best friends with my brother. And I was so scared the partner would be there. That he would recognize me. That he would tell my brother I was selling. Not to be mean, just as a curiosity; did you know, your sister is selling with us! That my brother would tell my father. That all Hell would break loose. The fact was I was scared. I was so scared my body was physically showing me just how much by trembling all over. The apartment was my place. I could do with it whatever I wanted with it. Only not all members of my family saw it that way.

And here I was. Daring to think I could not only do whatever I wanted, I could do it without asking for permission, not even informing any of them of what I was doing. Because it was none of their concern. I was a very grown woman, I actually did not need to inform anyone of anything, if I didn’t feel like it. I had to hold my hands firmly clasped together not to reveal just how much they were shaking.

Cue rebellion. Cue The Resistance. Dammit! I was doing this!

At the realtor’s office, he wasn’t there, the partner. In fact no men where there at all. I noticed how immediate a response that made in my entire body; I could physically breathe a little better.

Before I knew it, I had a piece of paper in front of me. And then that piece of paper had a signature on it. Mine.

The taste of freedom as I swung the pen across the paper wasn’t sweet, it was metallic. It was the sad mixture of breaking free of bonds that had been fraying at the ends for millennia. But it was also the deep sadness of knowing that the people who were supposed to love you the best, were so utterly broken themselves that their love took on such destructive ways.

It was the freedom of walking away from what was hurting you. But also the heaviness of grieving that this was reality.

The knowing that no human being is a monster, no one believes they are the villain of any story. Everybody thinks they’re the hero. My parents were just human beings. Who had had horrible things happen to them. That had broken them so badly, all they could do was to pass the broken on, because it was too much darkness to carry alone.

I knew that. I felt the boy my father once was, the sweet soul, who only wanted to be seen and heard and held like every other human child. I saw the little girl that grew up to become my mother. I felt her loneliness, how she shrunk to become smaller and smaller, because no one paid any real attention to her, and in the end she simply let go like a red balloon with no one holding on and she disappeared all together into the open sky. I saw how the both of them were patronized and ridiculed and belittled. And how instead of knowing their own wounds, they both spent a life time denying anything significant had ever happened to them and that what they could acknowledge had happened never affected them at all.

My parents were not evil people. They never meant to hurt me. But they had. And by keeping denying you have hurt a person, who has told you this repeatedly her entire life, you not only deny the real – you continue the hurt. Today we had no contact anymore. I loved them both deeply. A child always will. But in order for me to survive myself, I had no choice but to stay away. Letting go of this apartment was the final step. At the age of 41, when I would finally close the door behind me for the very last time, I would have let go of the final thing that had given them control over me.

They had loved me as best they could. They had also broken me into so many pieces, I wasn’t sure they would ever become a coherent whole again. And yet this is the truth slowly finding it’s way to me in all it’s grace:

In the end, there is no evil. There is only degrees of broken. 

Looking down at the paper the realtor had just handed me, and that now carried my name at the bottom, I smiled. It was a good name. It was my name. Maybe that is where this journey had started: By choosing this name for myself, every last syllable of it. That was six years in the past now, and it still spelled freedom to me. The proof that I could indeed do whatever I wanted, however much anyone disproved. 

When I left the realtor’s office that day in February the first thing I did to celebrate this new freedom was to cross the busy street and go look for hair color in the shade of deep emerald green. If I could dare do this, sell this place, then I could dare do every single other thing I felt calling in my heart – no matter how ridiculous others might find them. Like coloring my hair green. And not look for a new place to live, but instead begin a journey with my backpack as my only home. Two things so different from one another in the grand scheme of things, both equally freeing in each their own right. By the time I got back home to the apartment that was still mine a little while longer, the smile had lodged in my heart.