East of Childhood: Another Desire

Another Desire

I didn’t know what it was at first, only that something changed when he walked into the room. He said nothing. He didn’t need to. He stood there with his black hair and brown eyes, with shoulders that looked as if they could carry everything I didn’t even dare to say aloud. He was from the East, but in my head I called it Persia—because it sounded like something from a fairytale, and that’s how he felt. A world without guilt, without the gaze I knew from home. He smiled like someone who had nothing to hide. And in that smile lay an entire existence I had never been offered.

He struck me in a way that could not be translated. It wasn’t infatuation, not just desire. It was hunger. A hunger for something I had only met in dreams or in the quiet dark, when everyone else was asleep, and I touched myself without daring to give my fantasy a name. He became not just a person to me. He became a symbol. Of freedom. Of shame. Of the sweet and the forbidden in the same breath. I imagined the taste of his skin like ripe mango, figs in the shade, spices from places we never read about in Danish class. There was a warmth about him that crept into my blood and settled under my skin like something dangerous. I could taste him without touching. And that was perhaps the most terrible thing—that he didn’t even have to do anything. Just be. And I was already lost.

At home there was no fruit. Only control. Silence. Shouting. I had learned that desire could destroy everything. That it could be a fire that swallowed up what felt safe. So I kept it hidden. Not from him—he probably never knew anything. But from the world. From myself. I smiled when he spoke. Listened as if he were saying something important, even when it was just about homework. I read his lips and imagined them close to my neck. I felt ashamed before I had even finished the thought.

At night he became something else. Almost animal in my imagination. I lay with the blanket pulled up and imagined him climbing through my window, lying down beside me and whispering words in a language I didn’t understand, but still felt in my spine. I touched myself like a ritual—of desire, of longing. A longing for someone to touch me without it feeling wrong. He became the first one I loved without making love to. The first one I desired without ever daring to reach out. I carried him inside me long after he was gone.

It took me years to say the words aloud. To tell someone that I didn’t love in the way they expected. But when it finally came out, no arms opened. No one said: “I understand.” Only nods. Silent nods, as if I had said something they would rather forget.

I thought it would be a relief. But instead it felt like standing naked in the middle of the room and realizing that no one sees you anyway. I didn’t learn to love myself. I only learned to carry it. The desire. The confusion. The constant unrest. I learned to balance on the edge of what I could be, without anyone noticing how close I was to falling.

Artist’s Statement

The poem collection East of Childhood is about hidden desires, unspoken truths, and the silence that shaped a childhood. These poems move between longing and shame, between hunger and restraint, giving language to feelings that were once forbidden. They are fragments of survival, but also fragments of awakening—the quiet fire of discovering something in yourself the world told you to deny.

The artwork for Another Desire mirrors this intensity in abstract form. A blurred figure emerges in deep crimson and shadow, as if burning from within yet still dissolving into the background. The warm reds and oranges evoke longing and hunger, while the dark violets and blacks suggest secrecy and fear. It is a portrait of desire that cannot be named, existing between danger and beauty, shame and freedom.

Together, the poems and the paintings bear witness to what lives in silence: the pulse of wanting, the fire of forbidden dreams, and the resilience of a voice that refuses to disappear.