The distant song of a forgotten child

A FORGOTTEN CHILD (2020)

I found, at last, the dreaded place
inside the most dangerous forest
from where I once fled
with a shredded heart

And I have dreamt so often
about the horrors in there
and believed they would burn me
tear the flesh from my bones
snatch the last remains of life
from the one
I once believed was me

if I returned, still
now

as I stand here, expecting
to see a reeking infernal pool
all I find
is ashes

Around the edges, already budding
is something slightly unknown
but mine

like the distant song
of a forgotten child

(Featured image: Looking for the dreaded place.)

The dreaded place

I suddenly remembered this 5-year-old poem of mine as we prepared for this year’s visit back to Norway. The thing is, I felt the same chilling fear I’m describing in the poem before travelling. I feel it every time we make this trip, to be honest. Not because Norway is ‘the dreaded place’. No, ‘the dreaded place’ is somewhere deep inside me.

Trondheim, Norway, 2019 AD

It wasn’t that bad anymore.

Circumstances had been pretty horrendous for years, but things were definitely better now. It wasn’t bad at all, or shouldn’t be. So, why did I still feel low and anxious? Not as much as earlier, but still… Why did I worry and ruminate, always overthinking everything? There must have been something wrong with me.

This was my conclusion, at least. My wife at that time had put up with me all those years. We had had our struggles; I had definitely had mine. But things were all right now, weren’t they? No imminent catastrophes, just the everyday, peaceful life we had waited so long for. Why couldn’t I just enjoy this?

There was definitely something wrong with me, and I decided to fix it once and for all. Of course, the root cause of everything had to be found in my childhood; I had understood that much from all the psychology textbooks I’d devoured through the years. The time was ripe for a confrontation!

Facing the ghosts

I had been in therapy for a long time, some years earlier. It helped, but only to a certain extent. I believed I had finally figured out what I had done wrong. I had used my strong analytical abilities to analyse my childhood, and most of my conclusions were accurate enough. However, I wasn’t brave enough to face the emotional side of it. I had intellectually pointed out the ghosts but hadn’t emotionally faced them.

Better get on with it, then, I thought.

I used the same ‘delicate’ tactics as my ancestors, the Vikings, when they went into battle. I just barged straight into the enemy lines, fighting and screaming, hoping I would survive. In this case, barging into the enemy lines meant deliberately seeking every ’ghost’, every bad memory I could find, letting them wash over me, allowing myself to feel what I should have felt 40 – 50 years earlier, and hoping for closure.

To be honest, I barely survived.

Trondheim, Norway, 2020 AD

But I did survive.

In February 2020, I wrote the poem above. I had finally gone into that dreaded place, my childhood memories, enough times to tire the ghosts. They were starting to fade. I could look at them and think, “Okay, there you are again,” but they weren’t too terrifying anymore.

My anxiety also faded. I didn’t feel low that often. So, what did I feel? Was I happy? No, the truth was, I couldn’t feel anything at all. Nothing. I had survived physically, but I felt dead inside. I thought, well, perhaps this was how far I could get. Numbness must be better than pain, right? Or, maybe it isn’t.

However, something had happened. I had, far off, heard the child I could have been singing—at least fragments of a song. Echoes lingered in my mind, an almost unconscious recognition that life should have been different. And then, exactly five months after I wrote the poem, my whole world detonated.

Revelations in a row

In some ways, it was a slow and quiet explosion. In other ways, it was a chain reaction occurring so quickly that I only understood it later. 

Incidentally, I started exchanging messages with a woman in a different country, approximately 700 miles away, as the crow flies. After a couple of days, I felt she was my close friend. After a week, I started to call her ‘my little sister’ because how could this person, who I had never met and hardly seen a picture of, be so similar to me in every way without being my unknown sibling? Or, as it turned out, my soulmate.

Dear reader, two years and two months later, I married her.

What on Earth happened here?

What many spectators may have chosen to see was a 55-year-old married man having a world-record midlife crisis.

What else could they think? I met a random woman online. Less than one year later, I moved out and separated from my then-wife. Another year passed, and I was formally divorced and promptly remarried. As soon as the papermill churned out a British Visa for me, I left absolutely everything behind and emigrated to England. If this isn’t a result of insanity brought on by declining testosterone levels and fear of growing old, nothing is!

Well, let’s allow people to stick to that story if they prefer. It’s often convenient (and a bit lazy) to use the label ‘insanity’ when someone does something unconventional.

In my story, my online soulmate, from the very start, made me feel accepted and respected for who I was. Even across the distance between us, she saw who I was, and I was good enough! She didn’t want me to change. She eventually came to love me unconditionally.

And I had never felt this in my life before, ever, with anyone.

Once something like this has happened, you can’t turn your back on it. I would have died if I had.

Returning to the dreaded places

What started to dawn on me back in July 2020 was this:

If talking to a stranger makes this much of a difference to me…

No, it wasn’t even talking; it was just text messages on a discussion forum for people who shared some common life experiences, like a peer support group. Messaging with a person I had never met, and at first, I assumed we would never meet. I didn’t even know her real name, for Christ’s sake, until some weeks later.

But if this messaging made such a difference to me, what did this say about my real life until then?

And the truth struck me with the force of a freight train: It wasn’t all about my childhood. There must have been something seriously wrong with my adult life as well. Something I perhaps had tried to cover up by focusing all my efforts on psychoanalysing myself free from my childhood the year before.

You know, sometimes, it feels less scary to confront ghosts than living people.

And then I began to remember and understand. There was more than one dreaded place in the jungle of my mind. More battles were waiting, and they all had to be fought.

The song of a forgotten me

Yes, I had heard fragments of the song of the forgotten child me. But there were new songs to discover, songs that should have been sung as I grew up and lived a life up until July 2020.

I’m still searching for these songs, and I’m willing to walk into dark places to find them. I’ll be a little wiser this time. I won’t charge into the ranks of the ghosts like a madman, like I did in 2019. I will apply everything I’ve learned in the later years to keep my balance while drawing them out of hiding and evicting them from my mind.

One day, all the dreaded places will be merely battlegrounds of the past. Remembered, but not to be feared anymore.

The original poem in Norwegian

ET BARN JEG HADDE GLEMT

Jeg fant til slutt det fryktede stedet
inne i den farligste skogen
som jeg en gang flyktet fra
med revnet hjerte

Og jeg har drømt så ofte
om redslene som finnes der
og trodd at de ville
brenne meg opp
rive kjøttet fra beina
røske den siste rest
av liv
fra den jeg en gang trodde
var meg

hvis jeg vender tilbake
nå

når jeg står der
og venter å se en rykende pøl
finner jeg bare aske

Langs randen spirer allerede
noe delvis ukjent
men mitt

I det fjerne synger
et barn
jeg hadde glemt

Apart from the wedding picture, all pictures used in this article are AI-generated illustrations. They resemble me at different ages but are not real pictures.