Every day it is as if she falls off a cliff, as if every day she wakes up in a new place in a body she doesn’t recognise. Even her heartbeat is unfamiliar, as if someone is tapping a secret code inside her body, a prisoner in there who is sending his message out into the world. That’s what her heart sounds like.
Sometimes she senses memories of dreams she doesn’t know if she has had or if someone else passed by while she was sleeping and left them beside her, as if she were already dead and lying on the stretcher. She can sometimes remember a truck driving down the side of a cliff while grenades explode all around them. The last image she has of her father is when his head is torn away by the grenade. Only she, her mother, and siblings were left. They arrived in Sweden on a ferry that shook like an animal. They had disposed of their papers by tearing them up into small pieces and flushing them down the toilet because the unwritten rules of refugees insisted on this, that it was harder to get rid of a person without papers than if one still had a name, an identity. This is what it has come to that the ones who don’t exist are more true to themselves than those who refuse to give up their identities.
In Sweden they were provided with socks, warm coats and tea-bags in a chilly youth hostel right next to the cold grey sea that was the border to all that had happened before. It was as if they had torn up all their memories of their earlier life along with their papers. Kind people with frozen smiles had shown them to this place and then left them there. At night they had picked frozen apples and raided bird feeders. They had arrived around Christmas time. The old Laurinda understood that they had finally arrived at their destination and had lain down to die.
After that they had broken up. Her siblings were sent away to be cared for, Laurinda was also supposed to be cared for but she ran away. She walked along a road that went through the brown fields and then someone had stopped and given her a ride and each time this happened her silence was so frightening that the driver stopped and kicked her out. She continued walking. Each step was like a struggle with the earth that was trying to claim her but she didn’t stop until she found the black rubbish bag by the side of the road. It must have fallen from a truck. Perhaps someone had simply thrown it there.
