The Miracle in July

You're my possession, you're the ghost
I'm your possession, I am yours

[Your Indifference] by [We & Lisa]

On the streets everyone is hustling with excitement under their usual coolness. The shops are bursting with holiday cheer and national pride. Behind the glass of the city homes little Danish flags, the [Dannebrog], are strung in the Christmas trees as garlands and traditional little oranges lay along the window ledges. Falling flakes succumb to gravity and snowdrifts blanket every surface of the city of Copenhagen with an unbelievable tranquil. The imperfections of real life are coated with enchantment and purity – a poetic analogy of [self delusion] from pretending a muddied, frozen underbelly won't remain after the holiday season is over.

Despite my best efforts to complete this love story postmortem before Christmas time, I now know I won't. The work flow from home has increased and the time available for contentious remembering is minuscule. But vignettes of memories still come to me throughout the day, as I go about my business crunching snow with my feet and bicycle tires to make the meetings and interviews Sylvia has arranged for me. There is talk of re-issuing a collection of some of the early stories which I wrote in the first months after Daniel and I parted – back when the pain of his absence as my writing Muse still seeped into the pages. I've been editing [one story] in particular that nails my confusion about the signs of romantic love. Reading them again triggers more memories of things I'd forgotten.

It is lovely to visit new places in Copenhagen. A Danish publicist, a bookseller, a casting agent, an actor, all wanting to meet in the [Meatpacking District]. Twice I've been invited to an amazing art house/restaurant/bar called [Karriere]. This reclaimed area of the city, owned by the Municipality of Copenhagen, is where the paper-pushers in the slaughterhouse business still shuffle alongside hipster bars, exclusive contemporary galleries, and visions of a culture/design/gastronomy Mecca. It reminds me of [The Pearl] in my hometown.

The District has three main areas: Brown Meat, Grey Meat, and the White [Meat District], which is where the Karriere is, with its weirdly limited hours and a bar counter that slowly moves from side to side. The bar reminds me of the tables that gently spin or rise and fall in Portland's [Rimsky-Korsakoffee House]. My meetings go well, follow-up plans are made, and after my appointments I steal away next door and visited the contemporary [VI Gallery], which is right next door to the Karriere.

But inside Tivoli, on the train, within White Meat City or the shops on the strøget – throughout my travels in the city for business and pleasure – I continue to be flooded with little snippets of my time spent with Daniel. And now that the holiday season is here, I can't help but compare what I see with home. Portland, sweet Portland.

While waiting for one of my appointments in the White Meat City earlier today, I began to remember the time when I met Søren, Daniel's filmmaking partner, at the pub [Hollywood] in Århus. Daniel and I arrived first and waited for Søren upstairs. We sat next to a smoking area, an elegant box with a tall table and a powerful ventilation system. Daniel stood inside it, drinking a beer, having a cigarette next to a photo of Marilyn Monroe. He posed for a photo, an exaggerated dapper gent, leaning against the gorgeous dark wood of the smoking box. I laughed riotously.

Soft-spoken, shy Søren – shorter, darker, and heavier than Daniel and I – joined us upstairs. The men drank beers and I had gin and lemons to calm my nerves from meeting yet another person important to Daniel. It is here that I had my first gin and lemon, which was delicious the way it was served to us that night – with Bombay Sapphire – but much better served with hometown [Aviation Gin] while sitting on a stool in my neighborhood pub [Leisure].

Søren had heard about me from the very beginning of our love affair, and had even taken a photo for me of Daniel, who was clean-shaven at the time for his role as a WWII Nazi. It was nighttime, just before the two of them headed out to the club [Train], and Daniel had been wearing black leather pants. Both Søren and I made fun of him and those black leather pants. I so wanted Søren to like me, and I instantly liked him.

The three of us sat in the pub of warm wood and red walls and discussed the movie business, Daniel and Søren's projects, Søren's new contract to direct a film. I invited them to come to Portland, to make films there. I promised to have Daniel send him links to the [Office of Film and Television], which lists incentives for shooting movies in Oregon. The topic of Daniel's latest acting gig was brought up; he had the lead in a movie which was due to start shooting the weekend after I left Denmark. I was [homeward bound] in less than three days. The climate of the conversation cooled with that fact; the night ended soon after.

We walked to the corner of the street, where we would separate. "Well," said Søren, "you're certainly tall enough for Daniel." We all chuckled, but it wasn't exactly a seal of approval. Søren smiled at me, earnestly, and in a heavily accented English, said "goodbye." He left us then, with handshakes and cordial noises.

It was very late as my Danish lover and I cut through the chill in silence to the bus stop. The downtown sidewalks around the shelters were crowded with youngsters, many drinking openly. They seemed not to notice the freezing air – or that they were ill-dressed for it – and milled around on the sidewalk [making gestures] of maturity, animating their cold-mottled hands and wrinkling their reddened noses at life.

We had a long wait ahead of us, and Daniel suggested we take a taxi. But I wanted to stay here, in the cold.

"Let me into your coat," I said. "We'll stay warm. No need for that expense."

My gloved hands raised the collar of Daniel's coat and he wrapped me inside of the heavy black wool and pressed me to his chest. I put my hands over his ears, to warm them, and he jerked back and shook my hands away. I  remembered, then, the time just after I had arrived in Århus – even before the kids came to stay with us – when I had climbed into Daniel's lap on the couch to face him. I wanted to cup his large ears, studded, prominent and delicious, with my hands. I had wanted to do that since the first time I saw his photo months ago, to hold them, and so I tried. But he had pulled away from me, saying "Don't do that."

I didn't push it then. But now, with the Nordic air freezing the sense from the teens standing with us at the bus stop, now that I'd finally met Daniel's partner Søren and I didn't feel I had managed to be charming enough, now that Daniel was still pulling away from me, I pushed it.

I steadily braced against Daniel's expression, which was full of irritation about the idea of me cupping his exposed ears with my hands. It made me want to touch him where he didn't want to be touched.

"Do you want to stay warm, or not?" I said in a cloud of low breath.

Daniel searched my face carefully, still holding me away from him, and then conceded. He let me hold him as I wanted to. I snugged into his coat, buried my face into his neck, and again held his ears in my hands. But my feelings had been hurt. They'd been trampled and I was still mad, about a lot of things, so I let one hand slip a few inches to expose him a little bit to the cold.

While we stood there in the bus shelter, holding each other among a throng of moody, drinking teenagers, I thought about Søren's lukewarm reception. I thought about all the lukewarm, guarded conversations I'd had with Daniel's friends and family. I thought about the recent visit to our apartment from Daniel's gaming friend, who extended an invitation to jump in the ocean with him in January and the opportunity to illustrate a role-playing card game. This young man, who brought beers and an infectious laugh, said "You're a lot more fun than the last girl Daniel  introduced me to. I like you a lot better." I registered this, the scope of possible meanings reverberating loudly. I thanked him, instead, for realizing my awesomeness. We all laughed.

As my body molded into shape of my lover's and grew warm inside his coat, I recalled two different times since arriving when Daniel had suddenly blurted his desire for me to stay in Denmark. Both times it was daylight, both times it was in the main room of our apartment. Each time it broke a cozy silence – we were reading or looking out the window at the starlings flying over the rooftops – when Daniel whisper to me "Don't go. Please stay." The first time he said it I got angry. "Don't say that! How unfair of you to say that!" I yelled. I had Ryan to go home to; of course I had to go home. His brutally spontaneous admission rocked me; I, too, had just been wishing I could stay longer, stay indefinitely. The second time Daniel asked me to stay, I said nothing at all. I only let the tears fall and looked into his dark eyes as they turned black.

My mind then wandered to a time just a couple of days before. We were coming home from a shopping trip loaded with groceries and walking at Daniel's fast pace when he suddenly slowed at the approaching figures ahead of us. He shifted his bags to one arm and wrapped his free arm around me tightly. It was his upstairs neighbor, a man whose name escapes me, with someone I didn't recognize. The neighbor was a very good friend whose photos I had seen before, with a tall, stocky build and blond hair hanging in his eyes. This man had helped Daniel secure the apartment, and had recommended him for the teaching job. They worked there together, now.

With Daniel's friend was a dark-haired man with a thin figure and perpetual smile. We all stopped to talk on the sidewalk, a group of four, and Daniel held me even closer to his side. The neighbor stood next to me, but never looked at me. He spoke only to Daniel and his dark-haired walking companion, in Danish. The dark-haired man, on the other hand, pointedly looked at me the whole time we congregated – he couldn't take his eyes of me – and looked like he was bursting with a secret. I smiled back at him once, uncomfortably, and then avoided his eyes altogether until we were off again.

As we climbed the stairs with our sacks of food I tried to break the odd tension by telling Daniel what I'd been up to while he was at work: figuring out how to get back to Denmark. I could get a student VISA, I said. I could make films in Oregon and partner with film companies in Denmark. I could find a job that allowed me to live part-time in Scandinavia.

"Why bother looking that stuff up? It won't work," Daniel's voice barked hoarsely. I stopped and put my hand on his arm, stopping him. A melancholic sigh, [wet and rusting], shuddered through Daniel's body. I pretended to be unaffected by this, but my ire boiled at Daniel's hot desire and cold pessimism. He acted as though finally being together, and the heaviness of our imminent separation, wasn't hard for me as well.

That night I had a vivid, physically exhausting dream. When I woke up, Daniel was awake beside me, searching my expression with his pale face and dark eyes. I told him about my dream, but only while hiding my face in his neck; I didn't want to give in to an urge to stop and calculate things – or change the direction of my narrative – if I saw Daniel's stone face morph into something new as I whispered my dream to him.

"We are together in America, in Oregon. Somewhere. We're in a school or administrative building of some sort. There are very high glass walls, blinding sunlight, and walls and floors of smooth, slick, dark rock. Maybe the building was set into the side of a mountain? It was a cavernous battle of light and black.

"We are there for some official purpose, heading to the lower level. I lead the way, holding your hand, looking back at you. We approach the stairway, which leads to the offices we've been trying to reach, and I see that they are actually part-steps/part-slide, and silver-gray, like polished [hematite].

"We tried to go down the winding and slickly textured stairs together. We got about half-way, struggled hard to make progress, and then gave up, thinking we could find another way down to the next floor. An elevator, perhaps.

"Suddenly we're in the expansive main entry area again. It turns out that the space we're in – we're there for immigration reasons, I'm sure of it – is almost entirely built into a monumental hematite mountain. There are many floors carved into the rock with white walls and dark wood railings on the balconies. The space is protected from the elements, from the evergreen forest and earth smells, by a thick wall of glass that stretches up into the sun. Between where we stand and the outside is a security check-point.

"I turn to you, Daniel, and you suddenly start doing a jig. Like the jig you did for me on the corner when we came home that one night. Funny, limbs flailing, adorable. But in my dream it was not adorable because the police came up to us and asked you to empty your pockets. Instead of complying, you dance again, a [kick-ball-change] step. You're now wearing a fedora, which you've incorporated into your routine.

"The police have drawn their weapons, and ordered you to stand down, to drop your hat and put your hands on your head. You ignore their warnings and my screams. I'm trying to tell you that the States take security very seriously, that my country is not like Denmark, full of law-abiding citizens with free bicycles and babies in carriages left alone outside shop doors.

"You finally notice I'm upset and stop dancing, you've stopped to listen to my fears, but just then you are tackled from the side and wrestled to the ground. You don't resist as you are carted off. Your lower lip is bleeding and curled in a half-smile. It's an evil grin.

"I look around. The building is now deserted. I'm alone, and don't know how to get home. Then I woke up, to find you looking at me."

Daniel said nothing.

"What do you think it means?" I asked.

"It means I'm a terrible dancer," he said, kissing my head, then bounding naked out of the warm bed into the frigid morning air. I caught a streak of his lean, thin body, my eyes drawn to where his bobbing cock joined to his pelvis like a [geoduck] to its shell. I wanted him to come back to bed, I wanted to roll around the sheets and kiss and cuddle, but Daniel was already in the kitchen making coffee, asking what I wanted to do that day.

It was my last full day in Århus with my Danish love, and I would not waste precious hours demanding balm for my fears. It was too late for that.

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The Miracle in July is the work of author Michelle Anderson.