A Weighted Interplay

by Inger Christensen

When I was ten, I didn't notice being ten. Just as now, at thirty-five, I barely notice that I'm thirty-five, though occasionally I do suddenly notice that I'm acting as if I were only ten, actually am ten and childish curious naive awkward and full of laughter. But back then, at the time, I didn't notice that. What I noticed wasn't about being ten years old or being young at all; it was about being older: it was as if my body suddenly, on its own, from one day to the next, had started practicing for something I hadn't the faintest inkling about, as if there were some twenty-year-old, twenty-five-year-old, or thirty-year-old body practicing something inside me, making me move in new and strange ways, even making some of my cells notice themselves: grown-up determined all-knowing confident and tragic. Like an exchange between a space that had gradually become captivity and a time that could gradually become freedom. What had previously been a neutral relationship was suddenly transformed into a weighted interplay.

6S

Inger Christensen - whose six sentences are excerpted from her essay collection The Condition of Secrecy - was a Danish poet and writer.