Coming back to Denmark is doing what I thought – nay – expected it would do. Memories are flooding over me. Giant waves threatening to drag me into the past. I don’t know why it scares me so – but anything that comes before today makes me wince. Maybe – it just occurred to me as I typed – because I was never true to me. I was never… me? Hm. Of course I was me - but I was a side of me that I do not miss or wish to nurse neither in thought nor reality. In fact, it was not so much a side of me as it was a projection of someone I needed to be in order to protect someone else – someone I had not yet met. Does that make sense?

So, I shiver and cover when I see people whom I recognise from the ever present back then that looms over me. “What’s her name,” Adam asks me when I point out people I “know.” I don’t remember, is the usual answer – usual and truthful. There are people, however, whose names I very much remember and whom I fear meeting more than anything. Fortunately, these people, I know, have long left the environ – clever them. And I don’t think any of their city-smart skinny girlfriends/partners/wives are hankering to go back.

I hate it when people talk of my coming to Denmark as a going back. The opposite of progressing - as though I retreated. I failed and had to back-track. I hate it because it’s too close to the feeling in my gut. There are no positive memories for me here.

… but neither were there any positive memories for me to hang my life on and develop from when I landed in England all them moons ago – or in Canada. So, I don’t want to feel like I’ve gone back – I want to think of this as a New Place – somewhere, where I get to start afresh. Harder when the barrow there or the wind turbine hither reminds me of… well, heartache and broken dreams.

My daughter took her very first unaided steps the day before yesterday. Now there's a memory to make up for a few from before the day before yesterday.