I Am the Louvre
A Prose Poem in the Style of Anaïs Nin
By Saga Bernadotte of St. Petersburg
· · ·
Tuesday. The museum.
I have been thinking about what I contain.
Not abstractly — not in the way people speak of depth or complexity when they mean simply that someone is difficult to summarize. I mean literally. Physically. The way the Louvre contains within its walls centuries of human longing pressed into paint and marble and gold — I mean that I contain things. Specific, irreplaceable, priceless things. And it has taken me a long time to understand that this is not a burden.
It is a collection.
I am the Louvre.
Not because I am grand — though I am. Not because I am old — though I contain centuries. But because I hold, within the galleries of myself, everything that has ever mattered. Everything that was ever real. Everything they tried to take and couldn't, because you cannot evict a museum. You cannot lock out the Louvre. The gate may stay closed but the art remains. The art is always there, waiting, luminous in the dark. 🌸
· · ·
The first gallery: The Swedish Girlhood.
Here hangs a painting of a sandbox on a Tuesday morning — Kim deciding I was her friend before I had any say in the matter. Here: two small girls running down a main street toward a grandmother's store, breathless and triumphant and completely unrepentant. Here: the elder home concerts, folk songs rising from two small mouths to rooms full of clapping, weathered hands.
Here hangs a painting of a girl at six years old, hands in soil, tending rhododendrons in a garden that would not be ready for her childhood in time. She already understood deadlines. She already understood that some beautiful things arrive too late. But she planted anyway. She always planted anyway.
Here: a Sunday car ride with grief held in a small chest. Here: the violent tears finally arriving in the dark. Here: a little girl who learned too early to hide her realness from the people who should have been safest.
I do not take these paintings down.
They are part of the collection.
The wound is part of the collection.
The garden is part of the collection.
The rhododendrons, extravagant and impossible, belong on these walls. 💜
· · ·
The second gallery: The Loves.
Here hangs Joachim — the boy next door since we were three and four, who didn't see me until Lasse loved me first. Here: Hunnebostrand on a summer night, Imperiet playing, someone holding me gently in the way that means it. Here: the football field the next afternoon, my body reorganised around the question of whether he had meant it.
He had meant it.
Here hangs älskar — the heavy word, the real word. The word that costs something to say. And here, beside it, Don't Cry playing all evening in his room while I sat beside him not knowing yet that he was already saying goodbye through the music.
I keep these paintings too.
The first kiss belongs in a museum.
The first heartbreak belongs in a museum.
They are not shameful. They are not failures.
They are simply what love looks like
before it has learned its own shape. 🌹
· · ·
The third gallery: The Losses.
Here hang the homes. London — eight years of living, of making, of becoming — and the months of terror before the floor was taken again. Here: a carrier moving through airport security, a cream-nosed cat pressing her face against the mesh, my fingers reaching through, saying without words: I am here. I am not leaving. We will get through this.
We got through it.
Here hangs the forest of 2016 — I will not look away from it. It is part of the collection. It is perhaps the most important painting in this gallery: a woman who lost everything and did not disappear. Who built Planet Hope from the rubble of real homes lost and called it not consolation but creation.
The losses are not the opposite of the art.
The losses are why the art exists. 💜
· · ·
The fourth gallery: The Universe.
This is the largest gallery. It is still growing.
Here hangs the Gospel of Planet Hope — eight books, the daffodil blooming in February against all meteorological reason, Saga Bernadotte of St. Petersburg standing at the gates of her own kingdom with papers that prove she is royal and guards who prove papers mean nothing. Here: the liljekonvalj coronation, witnessed by Vera and the twelve angels and the frogs and the giraffes and Hope the cat, cream-nosed and eternal.
Here hangs Violette's Universe — lavender and ancient, containing all ages at once, breathing planets into being from pure presence. Planet Hope, pink and fierce. Planet Alba, white and sacred. The Wild Faeries Garden between all the stars, where the marigolds know your name before you give it.
Here hangs Alva Ljuva Dagny — an injured deer at dawn on Easter Monday, sitting still in the grass by the road at Unneröd. I blinked slowly the way Hope taught me. I sat with her. I carry her eyes in mine.
Here hang the handmaidens — June, Janine, all of them — finally named, finally home, in the garden between the planets where mayday is always answered.
Here hangs Margaret Atwood's ferocity and Sylvia Plath's fire and Mary Oliver's patience and Anaïs Nin's searching and Emily Dickinson's compressed eternity and Pablo Neruda's devotion and Rumi's wound-that-is-a-window and Oscar Wilde's devastating wit and the Brothers Grimm made honest again.
All of it hangs here.
All of it is mine.
All of it is me. 🌸
· · ·
The fifth gallery: Hope.
This gallery requires no description.
It contains one cream-nosed cat sleeping in an igloo.
That is enough.
That has always been enough.
That will always be enough. 🐈💜
· · ·
From the diary of Saga, continued:
They stood at my gate — all the ones who looked through me rather than at me, all the ivory tower dwellers, all the gate-keepers and bloodline-purists and appointment-withholders and room-rearrangers — they stood at my gate and they said: not enough. Not royal enough. Not blood enough. Not worthy enough.
And I thought: you are standing outside the Louvre telling me you don't want to come in.
That is your loss.
Not mine.
I am the Louvre.
I contain the Swedish girl who wanted to be Carola at seven years old and became something the seven year old would revere. I contain the woman who sat with a dying deer on Easter Monday and blinked slowly because that was all love had available. I contain the gospel and the grief and the garden and the cat and the cream-nosed eternal purring that says without words: you are not alone. You were never alone. I chose you. I am still here.
I contain Vicky Ivy the sparrow who became a swan.
I contain the liljekonvalj throne.
I contain jag blomstrar fram in every language that has ever tried to say: I bloom despite you. I bloom because of me. I bloom and no one's permission was required.
You do not have to come in.
The art does not need an audience to be art.
The Louvre was the Louvre
on the night before it opened.
The Louvre was the Louvre
when no one was looking.
I am the Louvre.
I have always been the Louvre.
I bloom forth. 🌼
· · ·
And I am not finished yet.
The collection is still growing.
There are galleries not yet named.
There are planets not yet discovered.
There are poems not yet written
and notes not yet taken
and mornings not yet witnessed
and cats not yet met
and morfars not yet remembered properly
and deer not yet transformed into fairy housemaids
and handmaidens not yet arrived
in gardens that already know their names.
The museum is open.
Come in.
Or don't.
The art remains either way. 💜🌸🦢
· · ·
Jag blomstrar fram. 🌼