The First Postcard

I must admit I’ve been cheating. When I wrote the first post, I already knew what I know now. Well. Here goes. A week ago, I received this postcard in the mail. The photo is, as you can see, quite dated, and the gold letters in the top right corner are Russian. When I found it, I almost forgot to flip it over and read it - startled by the image. Postcards are usually spectacular, bright-coloured, an almost pornographical display of landscape, but this particular one is something quite different. It has a fragile beauty of distance; somewhere unfamiliar, almost unspecific, yet faded, personal, like a dream image. I wonder whether that someone who sent it knows about my fetish for dated, unfamiliar kitsch.

Eventually, I flipped the postcard over to read who had sent me such a strange image. Perhaps one of my many travelling friends, perhaps someone bored on a summer holiday finding old cards in op-shops. But as I read the sparse sentences in the palm of the russian forest, I became even more confused. The card told of two rocks, two rocks the writer had been telling me about on some occasion, and of two people climbing them. Two people I know climbing faraway hills in Russia? I was intrigued, expecting at least a signature of recognition at the end of the card. My name and address was on it, so this someone must have asked me once of my address in Norway.

The postcard ended with a general "See you soon. Love, Ira." Ira. Ira? I don't think I've ever even met anyone named Ira. An Ira telling me about rock formations in Russia? Was my goldfish memory outdoing itself, or did I live parallel lives, one in which I am now, and one populated with Iras and Russian rocks? I spent days sitting on the balcony, reading with the postcard as a bookmark, so I could look at it every now and then. See you soon. Love, Ira.

Pre-story

Every now and then, I have this definite feeling that whatever is happening at that moment, is the beginning of a story. I pick up a bottle of water in the local supermarket on my way to work, drink it in large gulps, walk to the pier, empty it, throw it towards a recycling bin. But the bottle misses and falls down on the ground, rolls toward the edge of the pier, rests there for the tick of a second, then tips over and into the ocean. And there it goes, I think, there’s a story on it’s way, something in the air, a pen falling into the paper.

I watch it fall and then I stop watching it fall, walk off the pier and step onto the beach, the snout of the city; wet, cold, sniffing. And there, rolled up in sundried seaweed like a Bacon Dog, is another bottle, same brand as the one I just drank from, or possibly the very same one, and I think: it’s another sign, the story, the telling. The bottle is filled with wet, heavy sand and something white, round, pearl-like . I put the neck into the water, let the sand wash away, and out tumbles a tiny seashell.

It’s another sign, I think, ridiculously lulled into my own logic, and place the shell against my ear, imagine hearing the flapping of paper in the wind, the turning of a page and then the next page: a fall, undertows, the pier, pillars, and before that: a loose grip, lips, supermarket coolers, tanks of mineral water. The voice sung through a tiny, white spiral, placed in a bottle with the print of my lips around the neck.

But this introduction is from a story of a seashell, not from this story. This story hasn’t started yet. This story starts like this: I was going through my stories one day, craving a voice from elsewhere, that I could not make out of something. Something else, of another colour, something I could not hear.