Whenever I think about true creative happiness, my mind goes to a room in a house in Växjö. I’m seventeen years old, Amme is sixteen. It’s the middle of the night. We’re sitting on a mattress on the floor eating candy, listening to Leonard Cohen, writing (and, in between, talking and probably giggling our asses off). On those nights we would grab a book, preferably one that felt special to us, or a dictionary, randomly choose a page, pick a word or a sentence, put our pens to the paper and just go.
The poems that came out were sometimes pretty good, for two teenagers anyway, but it wasn’t about that. At least to me, it was about sharing the joy of artistic expression, and trusting someone else with experiments and risk-taking, and connecting through what we wrote, commenting, referring, asking, supporting. There was also the absolute feeling of being outside of time. The only thing that mattered was that space. And there was nowhere else in the world I’d rather be.
When she died, about ten years later, there was a pretty long period of time when I thought those feelings had gone with her. That joy, and the trusting, the togetherness I’d felt, and the looking forward to the future, possibilities. My mind linked those things to being with her. It took me quite a while to realize that those feeling were inside me, and still are. They will be accessible to me for as long as I live.
I am very lucky to have had that experience around creativity, artistry, whatever you want to call it. No matter what I put my energy into – poems, homepages, online journal entries, handmade books, drawing – I had someone out there, a recipient, that cared about my art and found it meaningful. I felt the same about her. Basically everything she made touched me in some way.
Today is our anniversary of sorts. We met on November 21st fifteen years ago. I am very fortunate to have had her come into my life. With her my life became bigger and more meaningful and filled with possibilities. Still, when I hear the lyrics to The Ark’s song It takes a fool to remain sane – Do do do what you want to do – I think of that time when we were on the phone (me lying on my back in my bed in my old room), I was contemplating making a rather big change in my life, and she quoted that line. Do do do, do what you wanna to do, don’t think twice, do what you have to do.