Elin Cullhed - Euphoria

From the depth of my heart, I would like to thank Jennifer Hayashida, Christina Cullhed, Gunnar Ardelius, Maria Sthe, Astri von Arbin Ahlander, Rachel kerstedt , Therese Cederblad, Sara R. Acedo, Lena Endre, Amanda Bergquist, Matilda Fogelstrm Johnsson, Jamie Byng, Hannah Knowles, Leila Cruickshank, AaIshah Hawton, Lorraine McCann and Rafi Romaya for creating the pillars of this novel. A very special thank you to Jennifer Hayashida for merging Sylvia Plaths tone with my own within your exact and fine language; and for doing so with such empathy and care. Thank you to Mom for reading and translating Sylvia Plath together with me and thank you Dad for binding all my diaries that would one day turn into a novel. Thank you Astri von Arbin Ahlander for your delicate and dedicated handling of Euphoria and thank you Maria Sthe for our friendship and your willingness to stand by me in this publication and to always push it in the right direction. Thank you also Sara Parkman and Hampus Norn for creating the music I listened to while writing, leading me into deep inner forests of feeling and reality. Thank you, posthumously, Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes for living and writing so courageously and with such honesty, and for letting us hear your voices through eternity. Thank you to Lana Del Rey for directing one song to Sylvia Plath and thank you Patric Kiraly for posting this song on my Facebook wall when I most needed it. Moreover, thank you Marie Darrieussecq for writing so engagingly about Paula Modersohn-Becker, lending her more life and inspiring me with the courage to do likewise. Thank you Sveriges Frfattarfond for trusting me with the grant that took me to North Tawton, and thank you to all my lovely readers how could I have guessed that you would become so many? Thank you lastly to all who in their writings have contributed to my knowledge of Sylvia Plath and who are out there constantly keeping the arrow in motion: Karen V. Kukil, Heather Clark, Peter K. Steinberg, Rebecca Alsberg, Carl Rollyson, Frieda Hughes and more. Of course, the gratitude I feel towards my children and Gunnar, the love of my life, has no end thank you for being there with me in the story as well as outside of it, in the grace and glory of life.

The Gods (published in Sweden as Gudarna)

7 REASONS NOT TO DIE:

1. Skin. To never again feel the skin of ones beloved child. Nicholas when he becomes a clown in bed and I nuzzle his behind. Frieda who needs to be tickled in order to feel alive and grows calm with a laughter that cleanses her, afterwards. My skin as it strains against theirs and knows that we are the same flesh for ever and ever in all eternity Amen. Oh, to never again feel their throbbing pulses that sprang from me. I can never cease to live for them no matter how much of Teds skin they also possess, Teds snakeskin, he who opens his maw and presses the prey whole into his mouth until you choke.

2. Time. I want to see my children grow up and scrub their knees as they learn how to cycle, I want to pull the noose off my neck and laugh in his face as he is already (and very alone, snakes are pathologically self-absorbed) on his way to the next prey and I am busy living. I want to lick a lollipop and feel how sugar and time dissolve inside me, I want to wake to a summers day, coffee in hand and an urge to write like hell until time also stops and is preserved and ebbs like seawater and forgives me. Time, I want you to forgive me. I also want to feel how time makes everything so fucking forgiving, how it makes strawberries plop out yet again (even though death is so close, decomposition next), makes people awaken on their pillows and once again imagine that everything is just fine.

God, I feel so good now, now when I am going to die. I see everything more clearly than ever before. I should always live to die; its like heroin, like the kick of seeing ones former beloved run out of oxygen since he has consumed all the air that surrounded him in his armour. Snakeskin is something you shed; the skin pales like a forgotten rag on a British beach. I prefer immolation: I am convinced of the superiority of fire as a metaphor for my own life. Oh, fire that could not be greeted with open arms. Oh, alarm, as the fire got hold of a living mans writing which he mistakes for Nobel Prize material. I say: the future will remember me. So, I dont have to be skin and time and the early sixties, since time will be transformed into me but without my involvement. Pristine, like a sublime word on a gleaming page of poetry. Ted will wash my book pages as I have washed his ugly shirts. He will shrivel like a paradise apple in the autumn dirt. One of the Japanese crab apples we have here.

3. Never to fuck again, to feel the heat of the stake as it pushes into my flesh and turns me into animal and obliteration. If someone wanted to fuck me every day, I wouldnt have to die, haha. Dont quote me on that, but feel free to show my mother, the most unfucked human in history (and therefore so sour, so parched, so banal to see through, like a glass of water; my mother is a glass of water, impossible to go without but so thoroughly boring and blandly predictable and who has made me so contemptuous of death, so hateful of other women when women are the ones who could possibly help me; she has made me feel as though I do not need water, as though I am beyond water, I am not a water-needing creature not a mammal, I stand above you with your common mortal thirst for water, I hate water, spare me my daily glass of water!).

4. GIVE him that. Give him that I die and all his prophecies come true. It would be easier if you were dead, as he hissed at me this summer in order to get set to dare to leave me. You and your death ray, you have a particular bite for death all his groaning that I kill everything. I dont want to give him that. I want to stand at the centre of the circle and glow and live. If not me in my life, who else? I dont want to give him the story of my life. For him to declare: Yes, children, your mother was a special person, she was not always well, she loved life when it flowed toward her like gold but life is also hard edges and cold and bacteria in March and being broke. We must tend to her memory, children, we must tell her stories and every year when the daffodils emerge from the ground we can pick a bouquet in her honour. Your mother Sylvias voice was deep and strong but it never managed to make its way out of her body and onto the page, that is why she so badly wanted to turn off her body and only let the spirit live on. What she has written for posterity was worth more to her than life with us. Blah blah. Fuck that! I dont want to give him the finest pieces of cake from my life. For Olwyn his older sister to stand there on her iron legs with her arms crossed and assert: Oh yes, Ive said it since the first time I saw her, you wont get far with that woman, Ted. Her fragile strength, that mourning veil across her face so temptingly easy to pull away with a sarcasm that makes her entire self-image crumble, the wide smile grow into a grin. A little devil-girl, Ted, a little hottie, a weak American with cellophane wrapped around her heart. Youll keep her for a while, then she will melt like sugar in rain. Trust me!

And he will listen to his sister and grow stronger and think: Yes, I was a fool to try to love her, for she could not be loved.

When the truth is that its his home that has no room for love. His home, where he comes from, where you work and grin and bear it, where the senses and aesthetics and the way you interact DO NOT MATTER. There is no culture in his home, nothing noble, no refinement; there, you are coarse and foul-mouthed and have bad manners and how is it my fault that I was someone who could love and could be beautiful and who entered his house, his home, his England, his crude inheritance of coal and stained clothes.