A Chameleon Shows Her True Colors
by Birgitte Bang Bregnedal

I close my eyes and begin to cry when the ambulance door slams shut. Strapped to the stretcher, my thoughts revolve around my little children. They have no inkling as they eat their yoghurt with daddy. I think back on the previous year. Nausea racks my body.

Etched into my consciousness: if I ever get another chance, I will choose another path.
This, a moment of vision, a confession from my thirty-five year old life, where I have followed the rules, got the best grades, received all the benefits of a first-class citizen of virtue. Where has this gotten me? To the top of my present career, yet utterly faithless to myself, assuming I ever had a relationship to myself or have ever even known myself. Do I really like the person who has taken up residence in my body? Surely, on the surface I do. But what about inside?

Tears flow down my temples into my ears, hair, making the pillow damp on either side of my head. The door pops open. I have arrived at the hospital. A white wailing in my ears as though I were “reset”. The pain in my stomach is a sole reminder of any link to my body. It is particularly my stomach, a stomach that has emptied itself again and again this past day in a mosaic of colors and shapes. I open my eyes. The hospital is white, has nurses in white, and pallid doctors. I pull the white sheet up under my chin. My case sheet is as glossy as my tears.  The sand of the hourglass of my daily life has finally run out, sparing me an even more perilous collapse.

I am caught in my own web. A web of rules, duties and a very bad conscience.  A universe where should is the key word whipping me around the circus ring. My memory has simply disintegrated. Thus a notebook tucked under my arm for the last three months becomes proof of my existence, of what I have done, promised and heard. The names of my most intimate colleagues come and go. The ability to concentrate on one thing at a time is totally evaporated. These were the indications I overheard until my stomach rose to take power, chucking everything out.

Discharged from a sterile universe, my insides gallop now to the tune of silence; turning down the outer circumstances of your life is sheer agony.

“She is not to be contacted…has to have peace”, the man repeats, each time the telephone rings. I sit there in a universe that is cut off from the surrounding world—work, friends, family. Only a husband and two children are allowed into my igloo. The white Bang and Olufsen telephone is no longer my province. What was previously a red-hot nerve has been clipped over like an umbilical chord. I have to take a breath all by myself.

The first signs of life are the snowdrops, making their attempt to decorate an increasingly circumscribed universe. The sun is melting the snow, revealing the lawn’s vegetation. Crocuses, eranthises and hyacinths all want to come up, be admired and present their scents. I notice blood pulsing through my body. My fingers are tinkling. Red and blue…combine…filter out… into words that sprout from my head, combines into sentences, filters out through a play of fingers on a keyboard.

I write myself into she who lives in my body. Now is the time we shall get to know each other, should it take an entire lifetime. I keep going until I have slackened, not liberated but slackened, my bonds to the past. All the while thinking about the resolution I made in the ambulance. With an uncertain trembling of the body and with a self-assured smile, I hand in my resignation. Head home, write, until the laptop succumbs to the play of my fingertips, switch to the stationary computer, shackle myself to the screen. Oblivious as to where this is all leading, I write myself away into a lava of garish words. Spinning a narrative from real life to fiction then back again. For both young and old. Ladies and gentlemen. Determined to write so that I may live, I dip the pen into my heart’s blood and view the past ten years of my life in living color.

I had been a fledgling prospect in the blue world of finance. The Logos were blue, the suits were blue, the CEO’s automobiles were blue, blood was blue blood, and the future was blue. The sky was blue. The sky far above me. Beneath the ceilings, modern Poul Henningsen lamps illuminated blue bones, casting light over the blue suits protecting the trembling bodies of financial experts. Bodies that endeavored, as best they could, to amplify the suits embracing them. Behind the blue façade, I was red. Yet I did what I could to fit in so as to melt into the blue background. I wore blue, had blue irises in my bloodshot eyes and my breath was as fresh as peppermint. Blue glistened over my pale skin. Blue-spotted thighs under a blue crease.

My wedding was bordeaux-colored. Lipstick bore witness to hasty intimacies with my newly acquired consort. Bordeaux roses with thorns brightened things up, while pink- fried venison was quaffed down with Bordeaux. The band imitated the Red Hot Chili Peppers, while the faces of those who had been invited grew more and more hot, more and more damp, drawn, as they were, to the magnetism of the dance floor. The wedding car with the heart-shaped license plate was bordeaux and it drove up to a hotel foyer that was clad in a velveteen get-up of lustrous folds.

Rhythms from Moulin Rouge and the red lips of my marriage opened onto vistas of motherhood. In the maternal realm, the color red was triumphant, engulfing everything. Totally red in the morning with all of my emotions externalized: love, sensitivity and compassion. Red cheeks matched the blood-red obverse side of the living room’s oil painting, changing me into a chameleon on her way to work, enabling me to fit in at once into the blue premises of free-enterprise’s surroundings. And thus I did what I was best during work hours. Calculations, laws, analyses, logic, were fully blue in my head at day’s end. I grew purple-colored on my way home until I was entirely red by the time my husband and children embraced me on the home front with red wine and strawberries and with green flower stalks.

For negotiations, I wore a black jacket, buttoned up to suggest that I meant business. Blue wasn’t serious enough for such purposes. Funeral attire implied earnestness. My demands were to be satisfied. My hair was scraped back, my smile well plastered. A solemnity drowned out by the potency of licorice in my mouth. Black eye-liner on my pallid face emphasized the seriousness of my intent, my methodical approach. It worked every time. With black, great personages listened, obeying my orders as they wrote out their black signatures.

Yellow’s relation to my nicotine-colored upbringing. A family with nicotine-colored fingers visits a house of pale yellow brick. I stood there in yellow from top to bottom, vainly endeavoring to brush the gnats from my outfit. Drew my lips over my yellowing teeth. With the norms of generations in the back of my head, I apologized for the odor of lemon-scented Ajax. Salmon with a dash of tart lemon ran down the corners growing viscous with Elderberry-flower juice the color of urine.  My blue eyes cut through the en famille atmosphere like angle grinder.

The bottle-green compost container, tried to outdo the nutrition pyramid in the matter of bulging. Splaying goutweed and dandelions bien rangée by squash, cucumbers and peas from my garden of spices. Served without microwaves, with carefully chosen meat from my organic supplier. Historical sourdough bread rose to fill the children’s mint-green lunch boxes. Non-aromatic detergent created foaming green bubbles. Cardboard and newspapers were bound with green yarn for recycling. Batteries were either recharged or relegated to the various containers under the purview of the county. Five hundred and fifty-eight square meters of freshly cut lawn exuded the scent of green following a rendezvous with a manual lawn mower. A bike, driven to the station, is replaced by a train, while fungus creeps onto the bordeaux-colored automobile in the driveway.

The living room is decorated in white, the things of nature, the earth, grey and every tedious color my home-decoration magazine prescribed. The front page of the living room painting resembled a defoliated autumn wood, clad in newly strewn snow. Jesus it was so boring. But oh so modern. A distinctive aroma of freshly-roasted coffee beans and cinnamon sticks spread out into the room between ornamental candlesticks. Vanilla ice cream from transparent desert plates melted onto the palest of tongues.

And yet, even chameleons need time to transform. Switching onto life at home had become fraught with emotion. Caring for the children had become too blue. I was fuchsia on the job, black in bed, yellow in the kitchen, green in my head. Pre-cooked meals in the kitchen, socialist at work, authoritarian in the matter of raising children, newspapers or glass in the rubbish bin. Myriad colors flickering before my eyes, a grey tonality wailing in my ears. A mosaic of vomit in a white bed.

I close my eyes and begin to cry when the ambulance door slams shut. Strapped to the stretcher, my thoughts revolve around my little  children. They have no inkling as they eat yoghurt with daddy. I think back on the past year. Nausea racks my body.

translation.  The Copenhagen Review