Spending the day in Stockholm with Nanci – my best girlfriend since 20 years.

I am sitting on a bus on my way to Stockholm to see a friend. I haven’t gone back all by myself since the break up and the moving out of his house last summer. I feel conflicted inside. Am I going away or returning home? I look at the shifting landscapes outside the windows of the bus, like I’m rewinding life or speeding it up, somewhere between my hometown and Stockholm. Where is home anyway? Perhaps it’s wherever I am at the time, inside myself – but isn’t that just a cliché? I don’t feel at home in every place I visit just because I am present inside myself. Perhaps home is in the love from my American lover, but that makes home a risky place, if he would leave, he would take my home with him. Can you really put your home in someone else’s hands? Maybe we are building an invisible home together, from each side of the world, and one day we can move in there, wherever it might be. I just have to wait and see.

Perhaps home is my apartment. Or my studio. A place of familiar things and routines. A place where I can rule and reign like a queen. I don’t have a lot of friends, I’m kind of a loner, so right now my apartment could be anywhere, in any city or on any planet.

I close my eyes and I feel the vibrations of the bus and its soothing noise from the engine. When I really think about it, when I go deeper inside, I know home is in my creativity, in my art and in every creative expression I put out there for the world to see. Home is the Universe I can create with my imagination and my talent. Home is in the truth I find in the unleashing, in the limitless explorations of my inner self. In the place where reality and magic meet and mesh. In the blurred out boundaries between life and dreams.

But that makes my home a place of fantasies. Where things are more real inside myself than outside my own head. Where is the line between the imagination of an artist, and simple madness?

And if that’s my true home, then I won’t ever find it anywhere else on this planet.

Well, except for the invisible home I’m slowly building together with another dreamer.

I feel how I am healing, a little bit more every day. As I become stronger, more confidant, I lose dimensions of my old self. I feel completely naked in front of myself and in the world. Sensitive, like every impression of my new life is transforming into an expression inside my mind, my heart and I collect all these overwhelming expressions inside until I feel like I’m about to burst… They all want to be born through my art, poetry, through my laughter, tears, my fire and thunder I keep inside. It all wants to be unleashed into the world outside myself, as if I am so much more than just a breathing body – a vessel of breathing dreams.

My lungs are filled with clouds and airplanes, escaping wind, butterfly rockets and raindrops. I feel so complete. Loved. Moved by what life looks like beyond the metallic shadows.

I am so much more than I ever could imagine. And yet, I’m just a detail in this world. My new life is all about finding the balance between the two realizations.

 “Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them.” / Margaret Attwood

It is like I am slowly waking up to a world that feels like mine again. A world where I’m not a guest in my own life, where I am not owned by a man’s will to control or manipulate, a world where I don’t have to be perfect for anyone, not even to myself. I am perfect in every moment, with all my flaws and truths.

I am painting again. I’m not very excited by the fact that I’m finally painting again after all the years of self doubt, blockages and mentally paralysis. It just feels so natural. Like coming home. I’m not even that rusty or artistically in bad shape – but I do get tired easily, almost exhausted, after only a couple of hours of working.

And my head is full of new ideas! They are mostly slightly perverse or at least sexually bizarre. I am dealing with things that happened to me, things that’s been haunting me for a long time. It’s time to get rid of it, and using my art as a place for it to find peace at last. A place to put the humiliation, the pain and the rage at rest. All the forbidden feelings. Or at least, emotions that I don’t welcome into my life. I am not wallowing in self-pity anymore – I’m letting go and moving on. I have to face the victim in me, through my art and recognize that it’s not who I am anymore. I will say goodbye to the Lolita, who was the perfect marionette doll to the men who wanted to feel stronger, more powerful or better than me. I will not seek vengeance through my art, but closure and reclaim my self-value and power.

By just being everything I am.

I love violent beauty – a beauty that can destroy something inside me in order to change my inner landscape a little, I am not interested in things that are flattering to me or to my eye.

I once told you; “if you’d ever bring me flowers, please bring me dying ones, not fresh ones – fresh flowers is an illusion of something eternal that doesn’t exist, but don’t bring me dead flowers either – that’s just rude. All flowers are dying as you put them in a vase. I crave honesty. In everything.” You smiled and looked at me from your time machine and said I was slowly falling like Angel falls. I couldn’t feel it then, but yes – I am falling through a thousand wet rabbit holes, ancient wormholes, and through my own stinky, dark holes, all at the same time. You show me little pockets of air to breathe through as I’m losing my way and finding it at the same time. Fumbling with the horizon. Trembling as I am falling through the shadows. Rushing through the restlessness with my will, but in slow motion. Wondering, if the light will break every bone in my body when I’ll finally land. Your heart is waiting, I can feel it. Or perhaps it’s mine.

Right now, I am working with my fear as a guiding light and I am trying to stop avoiding things just because I’m scared or worried, I am trying to understand that the only way to be in control of my own life is to stop trying to control every outcome by worrying and obsessing about it – and to understand that the perfect state is to stop trying to be perfect all the time! Ah, the wonderful paradoxes of life!