The stories that I keep are like the tokens I have stored away, but not forgotten, in old designer shoe boxes. Every once in a while, I bring out all my boxes. I unpack them all on my dining table, going through old love notes, weird notes, nonsense notes, stones, feathers, a wisdom tooth and the remaining of a penis-shaped candle my first love made for me. I must watch nostalgia, attentive, like a wild animal on the horizon. To not be lost in it’s all-consuming beauty that seems to be the favourite color nostalgia paints with.
I know I was conceived on a blue couch, in a borough of Copenhagen called Amager, or at the time known as “The Shit Island”, because the story goes that all the excrement from the city were dumped there.
Even before physical conception, I know I was metaphysically conceived through a shooting star. My parents, fresh off the love boat, only just met when they began conceiving me. My father, 16 years older, then my mothers maiden 24 years. Him, a wild romantic, who had chased her down severals stores on The Shit Island, after having become completely captivated by her beauty. My mother, unaware of her beauty, because it was easier than owning it, shy and always in her own world, accepted the unorthodox invite from a strange man, who popped his head through the window of his green SAAB, passionated crying: “Wanna grab a beer?”
To this day, I’m unsure if she actually even wanted to grab a beer. My mothers timeline seems to choose her, rather than her choosing it. I know it , because I’m a product of it. I’ve felt the same longing in my bones. The longing to be chosen, as an act of love.
Love, is different. The whole world can choose you, but that doesn’t mean you’re loved. Nor that you experience the homecoming of belonging.
My father arranged a picnic on the local beach. He brought white wine instead of beer. On a Midsummers Nights Dream you drink chilled white wine. Not beer. These are the kind of formation my perception of reality are build upon. That night when my father served his chilled white for a princess of a foreign island, he saw 3 shooting stars. When the first star shot across the celestial body, he made a wish. He would wed the princess and she would be his queen. When the second star danced across the great sky, he made another wish. That the greatest creative act human kind knew of, would bring them a child. As the third star moved across the heavens, he made a one last wish. That their lives would be forever intertwined.
These are the formation that has laid the blueprint of my psyche. Stars. Celestial Bodies. Great wishes granted from above. As within. To be a child of the stars, can be as lonely as being a child of the earth.
I’ve always had celestial tokens, astrological drawings, and the dances of the zodiacs in every room and every house I’ve ever lived in. They reminded me of home.
Not long after the dance of the three shooting stars, I was conceived on a blue couch, in a coop-apartment on the Shit Island. I am the creative equation of a bipolar film producer and a young woman, who in her own words was: “Naive”.
When my mother gave birth to me on a Full Moon in Virgo, 9 months later, the midwife told her she was: “A Lioness”. The Sun was rising in the celestial horizon of Leo on that very day I came into the world. Black-haired and tanned, not because of jaundice, but because of the amount of carrots my mother ate while pregnant. Till this day I still love my looks the most when my skin is burnt brown by the sun, and my hair golden like a lions mane.
My mother always told me that her life began with me.
My father always told me I came with the light.
Both felt like an equal pressure on my tiny frame. To be an extension; existential tension? a byproduct of creation; a rib of a rib. I am the life I gave my mother that she gave me. I came with the light, but am I the light? Am I ever my own? These are the stories that have been my main threads to wove the tapestry that is my perception of my life, my self, through the landscape of my conscious, unconscious, psyche and soul.
Light. Life. Lioness.
The first time I heard about triboluminescence I was 13. It was my at the-time best friend Kat who opened my internal gates. We were sitting at our favourite shitty coffee franchise on Main Street, in our identity-less suburban city. We’d known each other since my first day at kindergarten where she’d proclaimed first dibs on the new girl. Me. I was the chosen one.
We’d been best friend ever since.
Together Kat and I grew a mutual love and interest for punk-rock, suburban-rebellion and any thought form, ideology, art og culture that could transport us out of our misfits teenage lives, surrounded by grownups who hated their jobs, hated their partners and in return projected their unfulfilled life, hopes and dreams onto us, their children.
So that day, over a milked-out-coffee, and illegal-bought cigarettes, Kat introduced me to a new concept she had just learned in physics class. The many creations of light. With such intensity and poetry she explained to me that light in fact could also be made out of destruction. That process was called Triboluminescence. Kat was bulimic and I was anxious, so our own prolonged internal destructions all of a sudden had another dimension. The light was hiding right behind it. Right there, between the physics class and franchise coffee we’d found purpose in the friction of life.
It was light.
Kat told me about luminescence, which would become our mantra when shit hit the fan, as it continued to for another 10 years. Luminescence; self-generating light. I had grown up with the belief that my arrival with the light, created a light, and a life, for everyone around me. I was never taught that this light, inside of me, was generated from me to me, for me. And for a reason which could be so simple as solely just existing.
When I think of the stories and token I move from house to house, but always heart in heart, no matter how dark, how painful or beautiful; the ones I keep close are the ones that has brought me closer to Life. To Light. They are the ones that continue to remind me of the rich aliveness that is this very life. They are the ones that remind me that I’m not just the Moon reflecting the sun, but I am the Sun. I am the entire Solar System, a constellation of celestial bodies wrapped up in an earthly body and human mind. And so, as much as I was conceived off the shooting stars, I am of the Earth as well.
The other week I learned that the fetus is a sovereign, growing being. The fetus decides to grown to umbilical cord, the fetus decides to live. The mother holds the space for creation; but the fetus is creation. I am my own singular creative expression of the kaleidoscope of creation.