In Memory of Gunhild 1978 – 2017

I shot these with my first digital camera back in the summer of 1999. They’re all I have left now. These and a handful of faded memories.

In Memory of Gunhild 1978 – 2017

In Memory of Gunhild 1978 – 2017

In Memory of Gunhild 1978 – 2017

In Memory of Gunhild 1978 – 2017

Dear Gunhild, I’ll pretend that I’m writing this for you and that you can read it, but to be honest it’s more for my own sake. A way to deal with it I guess:
I’ll head over to the park one evening, leave some flowers and light some candles for you over by the Buddha statues where we used to BMX and skateboard back in those punk years. News can still travel slowly in this digital age, but even when they do, they can still hit you hard and this was a surprisingly hard blow. Especially considering the fact that we’d lost contact through the years.
You got married, moved to another place and had another kid, while I traveled around, got married, had a kid and got divorced. Life happened. It fucked us all like it always does, but it also made sure to throw in some soap bubbles of joy here and there. They burst easily, don’t they?

I’m terribly sorry that I didn’t go to your memorial – I didn’t know about it, that’s why. I found out about it 5 months later. In some ways it doesn’t really matter that much, because it’s just a ceremony to say good-bye. Your husband, family and friends spread your ashes up on a mountain and I thought about going there, but since we were never there together, I prefer to say my good bye’s alone in “our” park.

Do you remember that Christmas eve at your brother’s place at Majorstua? I sat home alone, called you, asked what you were doing, you said: “not much” and ordered me to come on over. Then we had some drinks and food before we went to a pub downtown. There’s not many of my friends that I could call on Christmas eve and they’d tell me to come on over. It’s devastating that we were so close, but still lost contact… Anyway Oslo was, not surprisingly, dead quiet that night.

Can you remember that dead quiet? That dead quiet, that’s kind of like a visualization of how my soul feels like right now: nearly every window in every apartment was dark, there were no people on the streets, the pub was quiet – almost empty – just a few lost souls, us included. There was no traffic. The signal lights illuminated the cold streets and the snow was falling softly, covering our tracks as we were trying to run from our demons.

It’s possible that we outran them for a while, but there’s nowhere to run is there? You’ve stopped running now. You don’t have to anymore. But I do. I run alone, but there’s still nowhere to run. There’s no escape.

In Memory of Gunhild (04.02.1978 – 07.03.2017)

Sees i Valhall!

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Even though the gun wasn’t invented until centuries after the Viking era, the word comes from Old Norse. The most common usage was in the female name Gunnhildr: gunn and hildr both can translate as “war” or “battle”. Only truly badass Vikings named their infant daughters “Warbattle”. – https://www.babbel.com/en/magazine/139-norse-words

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Bluebird  by Bukowski

“There’s a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I’m too tough for him,
I say, stay in there, I’m not going
to let anybody see
you.

there’s a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I pur whiskey on him and inhale
cigarette smoke
and the whores and the bartenders
and the grocery clerks
never know that
he’s
in there.
there’s a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I’m too tough for him,
I say,
stay down, do you want to mess
me up?
you want to screw up the
works?
you want to blow my book sales in
Europe?

there’s a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I’m too clever, I only let him out
at night sometimes
when everybody’s asleep.
I say, I know that you’re there,
so don’t be
sad.
then I put him back,
but he’s singing a little
in there, I haven’t quite let him
die
and we sleep together like
that
with our
secret pact
and it’s nice enough to
make a man
weep, but I don’t
weep, do you?”

― Charles Bukowski

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Your husband, family & friends created this album for you: https://photos.google.com/share/AF1QipPdY357f3zN3OE4XI2Qr14rKj8xS-TWALk4ZIm6TidsjL_ENzwhfLC6zaTFj7Jj2Q?key=THl6UEdNSm01TnhvbFRrSmFZU1RRWHdBcTN0aGJ3