Sunday February 21

Maja:

I’m in London. It’s a surreal fact to me and every time I try to reflect on it, it hits me forcefully by surprise. I am quite excited about being here. I’m not really sure what life has in store for me here, but that is of less concern. Right now, I’d just like to rest and talk. I spend most of the day with Mark, staring at the ceiling, telling him about who I am and listening to his stories as well. All while looking out the window at the beautiful tree. We joke a lot, and one of our favorite subjects here is that since I can’t go out at all due to the enforced isolation, I could be anywhere. I could be in Brazil for all I know. And we continue to joke about how cold it is in Brazil this time of year. 

We have a garden I can use even though I am in isolation, which is lovely. So we go out there, just for a little while. But apart from that, we’re just in bed. Resting. Talking. 

Mark: 

Today, as we again hang out in the bedroom all day, mostly just staring at the ceiling, I hear story after story of Maja being held back professionally in her career and in music. Stories of people not wanting her to succeed or move away. Stories of her being bullied or ostracised at school. It all builds up a clear picture for me of people feeling they have to hold her down because they’re scared of her. Maja really cannot get her head around this concept. ‘Scared? Of me? Are you serious? How? Why?’ My explanation: scared of what they know she could really become if she was allowed free reign. Scared of her huge innate talent and intelligence. Scared of her drive to use both to their full potential. Scared that she could raise to levels they never could, thereby amplifying their smallness. So they hold her down, back, and discourage and psychologically beat her at every turn and opportunity. For many people, seeing anyone around them succeed only makes them feel more like failures. So rather than do something about this, they try to block any path to success for those around them. Or mock or denigrate their success or efforts with any verbal weapon they have. Basically, they’re terrified of anyone showing them what their lives could have been if they’d only tried and maybe believed a bit more. Maybe they never even had the opportunities to be fair, but that doesn’t mean they should try to remove those opportunities from others, but they do. In Maja I see an absolutely classic case of all of this. I’ve used the following example so many times when considering similar situations and it comes from a Counting Crows lyric. ‘It’s a lifetime commitment recovering the satellites/All anyone really wants to know is when you gonna come down.’ Yep. All I see is that people are terrified of Maja. I think that once she’s recovered from wherever she is emotionally and physically right now, and is able to direct her energies to where she wants to direct them, world, just get out of the damn way. This machine will be unstoppable. The people were quite possibly right to be frightened. They were every million ways wrong to try to stop it. I’m starting to see now that my job is to ensure Maja’s total wellbeing and to do everything I can to give her a safe space in which to relax and recover. To feel absolutely no pressure. And above all, not to tell her she can’t do something she wants to do, which is mostly musical endeavours after mentally breaking down and largely losing her professional identity in a field in which she continues to hover somewhere near the very top. This has been a really big part of how she’s got to this place in the first place – having to fight a constant battle to be who she wants to be. So hard that she’s lost the very sight of who she is. In just this second full day together I’m getting a growing sense that a big priority of mine is to make sure she discovers that again.

In between all this talking there is a little flurry of activity sometime mid afternoon as we remember, just in time for that day’s post, that Maja has to do the first of the two Covid tests as part of the legal requirement of her quarantine. It’s a good job there are two of us as it takes both of us to figure out how to do this thing, mostly how to put together the flat-pack cardboard box she’s been sent to post it all back in. In between this and intense conversations, we eat nothing at all until evening, totally forgetting to do so as the idea of food just slips off both of our to do lists. Again.

When evening time does come and we realise we should probably eat something, Maja decides it’s time she gets into the spirit of being in England a bit and wants to try something typically English. Hmm. What could that be? And given that it’s quite late by the time I’m going out shopping, options are limited. What is typically English food anyway? I’m really not sure. I browse the shelves of the supermarket and there they are. Supermarket bought so not fully authentic, but nevertheless, English. I bring back small individual pork pies, scotch eggs and a quiche. In case you don’t know, here’s a little introduction to all three. Pork pies are characterized, at least as far as I see it, by the type of pastry used to make them. So you have kind of minced pork meat in a dense crunchy pastry very rich in pork fat. Scotch eggs are a full egg wrapped in sausagemeat which is then covered in breadcrumbs and deep fried. So yes, these two things really do have quite high calorie counts. Then there’s quiche, described by Maja when I get back, as an egg pie, but sorry, no. But it is again a pastry based thing containing cooked egg and usually some kind of meat and cheese. And onions. So again, quite high on the calorie scale. I introduce all these to Maja along with that great cornerstone of all things British, brown sauce, a kind of rich, spicy vinegary sauce without which bacon, eggs and most types of British sausage are somehow incomplete. That might just be me, but you get the picture.

Maja:

By evening, I ask Mark to go buy me some English food, I think it is time for me to try something English. I’ve been here for two days now, and haven’t really tried anything yet, so it’s time. Off he goes, I fall asleep and when I wake up he is back. He’s bought a couple of things and is in the kitchen preparing them. When he’s done, he calls me down and we eat. For the first time today.  And we didn’t eat anything at all yesterday. We just had a little bit of sushi yesterday. What I didn’t expect is that English food is quite heavy. And I’ve been really bad at eating recently. So I sit in the kitchen and Mark serves me this decent sized meal, so the polite thing is to eat it, which is what I do. It’s good, the pork pie, scotch egg and quiche are all quite nice. Although not really any extreme flavours or anything which is great, but just quite fatty. I eat maybe half of the meal, and then I sit back, waiting for Mark to finish. Doing so, I can feel how my stomach starts to act up. It starts to cramp. Slowly at first, but soon more and more violently. I’m getting cold sweats and am really wishing Mark could finish up his portion so I can excuse myself. As soon as he does, I tell him that I want to go rest, and I hurry up upstairs and lie down. It’s painful. Really painful. I can’t remember what happened any further than this, everything that remains is the memory of pain. My consciousness must have faded away.

Mark:

I get back and she’s very interested to see what I’ve brought, and keen to try everything so we get to it. So far so fun, and I’m really quite tickled that she seems to really like it all, especially the brown sauce which many foreigners really don’t understand or remotely like. Then, as soon as we’ve finished eating, Maja says she needs to sleep. This, I will discover, will become a pattern as her body recovers from barely eating for the past however long it’s been. But right now, I am in no way prepared for what is about to happen. Almost as soon as we’re in the bedroom the convulsions start. I ask her what’s wrong but she can barely speak, at least not enough to tell me anything useful. Her whole stomach seems to be contracting and as it does, her head flies back, her eyeballs also shooting up and back as it does so. In between is the most horrible, at times high pitched hyperventilating. I try to get her to concentrate on breathing normally, at least, but I get little reaction to that. 

Otherwise, there’s absolutely nothing I can do but watch, horrified, not even sure yet what could possibly have caused this. As I watch helpless, my hand is on my phone and I wonder at what point I’m going to just call it and hit 999. This goes on for about five minutes but it feels like 55. Then slowly everything starts to slow down, back to normal-ish. Her breathing slows and she looks at me like, ‘What the hell happened?’ Like she’s just arrived in the room to the aftermath of some dramatic scene she played no part in. With that she closes her eyes and falls into a sleep I’ll best describe as restless. But asleep she is. I am not. I stay awake for an hour or so until she wakes again, all the time watching and making sure functions are all normal. Or at least normal enough that I don’t have to return to my phone and thoughts of 999. Those thoughts are with me almost every second of that hour.