Kronborg castle, with its boardwalk suicide ghosts that wear nostalgia as mourning dress- that was where Hamlet and I grew up.
I came back to the country that had given us refuge during the war. Denmark with its warmth emanating mirages in the middle of winter, those stuffed date stands along the Strøget in Copenhagen, its technicolour sailor’s district and always blossoming frost bitten flower pots. But Kronborg had no warmth. I was smashed and hurled about by a torrential downpour at the port town of Helsingor. I was lashed at by Danish winds like whips, stripping me raw, chipping at my exposed face that was bunching up all swollen with the pain, raindrops dripping along all the wrinkles and folds of my skin. Every breath of air exacerbating the swelling flesh, every gust a nightmare from which I couldn’t escape. I was looking for somewhere to hide, all alone on the miserable trip I made to the city of my childhood. Lonely because it is lonely to wake up each morning and to try, it is lonely to facilitate a recovery that never comes, to grin and to bear it and know that that is the best you can do, in uncomfortable hostel beds the same as wrapped in your own too-familiar sheets.
It was a lonely thought that drove me here, that maybe if I travelled to where I remember last being happy I’d find some profound joy here, or even that my having travelled so much would imbue me with some way to recreate it, that happiness. This was the place of my memories, the ones that sustained me, from before I figured out my father’s post-traumatic stress disorder and before my mother’s paranoia deepened. Their war-afflicted mental maladies that had coloured my upbringing, and were draining me in adulthood. When I’d left for Denmark I’d been desperate for a solution that would save them. And myself.
Drying my gloves, I kept on trying, having chai and some sneaky dry biscuits (that I’d lifted from the hostel’s free 7am breakfast spread and kept in my pocket) at a sailor’s café until it was obscene for me to stay any longer with only my cappuccinos. I proceeded cold and wet to miserable Kronborg, haunted by its boardwalk suicides. A medieval thing in the dead of winter, and I thinking that I would find joy there. My parents took me there as a child and, though it was a grey and silent place, I remembered laughing with them.
I wandered for hours ascribing meaning to the tablecloths and the tapestries. But I did not find profound means to happiness there. It wasn’t what I’d needed anyway. Just like a warm dry hiding place free from the onslaught of the wind, piercing through my flesh that turned so numb I couldn’t feel the snot dribble down it, I needed a respite. Respite from the onslaught was not weakness, it made me stronger to rejuvenate. The stronger for having suffered it, the wind and the enervating lifetime of struggle that is coping with mental illness. Kronborg was no tragedy if one read it right.
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