ragnhild
New Year's Eve: fireworks from every garden on the island for an hour, on the stairs with Kjell's aquavit, whole sky green and red and smoke. Seventeen days now.
Yesterday I met Ragnhild. Small flat on the other side of the island, plants on every windowsill reaching for a sun that isn't there. She's tiny and wears two cardigans. We drank coffee and ate waffles with brown cheese and went through forty pages of my draft, and she was right about most of it, and she enjoyed being right.
On the title she won't move. "Polar night is for tourists. I wrote Mørketid."
Then she looked at me over her glasses and said I wasn't sleeping. I said no. She asked why and I told her everything, the knock, the chart, Piotr.
She listened. Then she asked, "And do you open?"
I said every time.
"Hm," she said, and poured more coffee.
When I was leaving she told me to put the phone in a kitchen drawer at night. "Then you can't look at the time. Time is the thing keeping you awake."