I have always felt a little lost. I’ve always felt as if I had a hole in my heart and a melancholy deeper, taller, higher than my age. I’ve always loved the scenery and aesthetics in Poirot, Miss Marple, and especially my favorite childhood movie Amélie, the romantic French classic. I loved romance even though I didn’t understand it at all. When I got older and experienced my first real problem – being very ill – I felt like the hole in my heart got even deeper than before. I think I got too close to life or too close to death. This made me more melancholic. I started writing songs at the age of fourteen and one of the lines in my song Black And White went like this: “From this black and those white. She’ll keep us alive from this sky paradise. She will hold you.” I think my thoughts often went through my head in black and white. Like a black and white analog film-booth.
The time I spent in the hospital, I also spend in my head. I got even more thoughtful and worried, and reflective and analyzing than before. I thought about my life, my mum‘s life, my dad‘s, my friends‘, my siblings‘, my neighbors‘ life, my teachers‘ life and the girl in my go-to foodshop’s life. I took it all in. And I made my thoughts go around it. I got caught up in senses, impulses and in analyzing people. From then on, I never stopped thinking. I had no choice but to accept the fact that I was changing into a sensitive human being.
Photo by Morten Skalstad
Strong Old Heart
But, I wasn’t just thinking about life and what was going to happen. I also thought about the past. I’ve always felt a little bit lost. I’ve always felt like I was born in the wrong time. Like my mum. She walks around the streets of our hometown looking like a crazy lady from another century. I am like her. She made me. Like this.
If you all could see her walk around in her very-different-from-anything-and-anybody-else kind off clothes, you would understand what I’m saying. And I grew up in a house from the 1700s! I was destined to feel as lost as I do in this very modern world. I got my first phone in seventh grade and I’ve always loved my mac and my camera, but I’ve always felt like the surroundings, the smells, the walls, the people and the world are ahead of me. I love to wake up, put on my colorful striped shirt and stripy pants, walk out to my vintage living room with teak EVERYWHERE, put on an Edith Piaf vinyl, cook some eggs while reading a book in my windshield. I want to feel old. I want to sing out every feeling in detail, I don’t want to hide my emotions from anyone on stage. I want to open up the door for deeper conversations and physiology. My voice makes me feel even older sometimes. When I sing, I’m going back to the places in my head. I go back to the streets of a small, beautiful little town from the 1700s while singing like I’ve lived a hundred years or more. I feel as though I’ve been hurt a thousand times more than I have in my 23 years of living. My heart feels old. And rough. And hard. And strong.
It’s hard to tell why. Why do I feel like my heart is old? Maybe I’ve been through enough now to feel old. Maybe I’m just born this way. Maybe it’s a personality trait. I don’t know the answers to these questions. Do you?
Vaarin‘s EP Bitter Taste Of Goodbye is out now via made records.