Post by KRISTJAN GUNNAR RAKELSSON on Dec 19, 2010 21:50:55 GMT -5
KRISTJÁN GUNNAR RAKELSSON
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KIT , TWENTY-ONE , NEW TORK UNIVERSITY STUDENT , ANNIE/BEWILDERNESS
The Lord is my light and my salvation. Whom shall I fear? The Lord is the strength of my life. Of whom shall I be afraid? When the wicked, even mine enemies and my foes, came upon me to eat up my flesh, they stumbled and fell.
I am Bad. It’s not my fault, but I am. Some people are born good, to mothers who bake cakes and wear curlers in their hair, to fathers who work in middle management. I was born bad. I don’t actually know who my father was and most of the knowledge about my mother is speculative. Social services took me from her when I was a baby. I was told she had been a drug addict funding her habit by working the streets, that was why I was so sickly as a child. That was the start of my punishment, my atonement for her sins.
I have been branded by her. Rakelsson. Son of Rakel. Most people in Iceland have patronymic surnames. Instead I was named after her. It was a Lutheran care home in Mosfellsbær I was taken to and they renamed me Kristjan, shunting my original name Gunnar to second place. Kristjan Rakelsson. What a fucking joke. Christian son of a whore. Every sin I commit is doubled, no virtue is quite enough to redeem me.
My only real distraction from my imminent damnation was music. It was encouraged like hell when I first showed an interest; I suppose because it’s hard to sin and play the violin at the same time. It worked though, something clicked inside me and suddenly nothing else mattered, I had found a way of absolving myself, at least in my own heart. Everything smoothed out and simplified and each note slotted into place, one after the other, tumbling out. There was no god, no morality, no piety. I thought it was an escape from my guilt and boredom, and it was, but there was more to it than that. It was shelter from the endless crusade of religion being poured over me, it allowed my own thoughts to grow in the gaps around the notes. As I got a little older I started to go out walking in the rugged hills around Mosfellsbær and on a diet of fresh, freezing air the vague, gossamer whispers of ideas expanded and grew teeth. I had room, finally space to tear off the dirt and pain and free myself of my mother and the Virgin Mary’s absent gaze and the sins that had never belonged to me.
Aged 16 I moved the 8 miles from Mosfellsbær to Reykjavik. I packed all my possessions into a charity shop pannier, slung it over my second hand bike and cycled. I’d saved up enough to stay in a hostel until I found a job and could afford a bedsit. Two jobs and I could afford a flat with damp up the walls and a bad smell in the summer. I made friends, I spent too much money on instruments and sheet music and almost starved but always mysteriously found enough money for alcohol and cigarettes and nights out and vintage clothing. 2 years passed and I started sending out applications to universities across Iceland and the English speaking world, pledging to go wherever I got the best scholarship from. New York University won.
Looking back I appreciate I really should have thought the whole thing through a little more carefully, but it sounded so glamorous, so exciting. New York… It hits you like a wall of smell and noise the minute you step off the plane, jetlagged and still queasy from the flight. You can’t escape from it, either, even in your dingy room it bears down on you, the suffocating claustrophobia of a concrete jungle. It dawned on me, eventually, how spoilt I had been in Reykjavik. There I could leave the city and head into barren, untamed landscapes of craggy hills and valleys and fjords. Walk for days, camp over night and keep walking. It was country for thoughts and ideas; New York cramps my mind into small, petty compartments, gridded like the OCD outline of the streets. You need space and silence to fashion ideas sufficiently carefully. Thoughts get twisted if you try and create them without enough room to let them grow.
I long for that old freedom, deciding to go, perhaps grabbing a friend by the hand and dragging him with you. Leave the washing decaying in the sink and the bread going blue in the cupboards and the toilet that needs cleaning. That is for another day. Today is for escaping, packing haphazardly and running before anyone else asks where you’re going. Perhaps the person I brought with me is beautiful and clever and if we’re scared we can just hold hands and watch the stars at night, making up our own constellations because why should the astrologists have all the fun? If we’re brave, though, stargazing will be abandoned in favour of searching hands and lips forming soft pleas. And in the morning there will be a slyer, self satisfied cast to our smiles and I will make up tunes on my harmonica to make him laugh.
All the same I have managed to scrabble together something of an existence in New York: friends, a flat apparently furnished entirely with instruments (violinclarinetkeyboardtheraminbongoesguitarmandolinaccordionharmonicaetc…), university, a part time job. Sick of the various painful, stumbling pronunciations of my name it got shortened to Kris then bastardised further to Kit. I had considered reverting back to Gunnar, but it felt alien, and frankly part of me enjoyed the twisted, wry humour of a boy like me being named after our saviour, born by a virgin and who gave his life for no damn reason at all.
