Søren AasDoing Nothing Is The Hardest Thing To Do
Seventy-two hours past the two-week mark — the point where it usually breaks.
There is a specific kind of strength that doesn't look like anything. No clenched jaw, no white knuckles. It looks like a man sitting still, talking, while a phone lies face-down on the table beside him.
I met Søren at the worst possible hour to meet anyone. He had gone over two weeks without contacting her — and if you have ever tried to outlast a craving, you know what the two-week mark is. It is where the first clean rush of resolve runs out. The decision that felt like steel on day one has gone soft, the silence has stopped feeling like strength and started feeling like loss, and the old voice has had time to rehearse all its best arguments for why this time a message wouldn't hurt. Two weeks is where most people give in and start the circle turning again. Søren had crossed that line seventy-two hours ago. He was three days into the part nobody talks about — past the milestone, still standing, with nothing left to run on but the standing itself. He had come to talk about a poem. He left having talked about something else entirely. What follows is that conversation, lightly arranged. I've kept his words where they were sharpest, including the ones that don't flatter him. He asked me to. My own questions I've left mostly as they were, because the truth in this piece is his, and my job in the room was only ever to sit with him and mirror or support in any way a friend could.
April: You brought something you wrote. Will you read it?
Søren: It's short. I miss the contact with you. Every day. It just hurts so much that there's a firewall of technology between our bodies — and that I'm friendzoned. I want you close to me.
April: "A firewall of technology between our bodies." Say that line again for me — what were you reaching for with it?
Søren: The distance. That she's right there, through a screen, and infinitely far away at the same time. The cold word and the warm word, pressed together.
April: It works. The coldest possible word against the warmest one. When you read the whole thing back now, out loud like that — who do you hear in it?
Søren: (pause) What do you mean, who.
April: I mean — there's a lot of I in it. I miss, it hurts me, I'm friendzoned, I want. I'm wondering where she is.
Søren: (longer pause) Huh. She's not really in it, is she. I thought I was writing about her. I was writing about the size of the hole.
There it was, a few exchanges into the conversation: the first crack. He had come to show me a love poem and discovered, by reading it out loud, that it wasn't quite one. It was an inventory of his own ache, addressed to a woman who happened to be standing where the ache pointed.
We should unpack the word he used — friendzoned, which in Norwegian he'd said as friendzona, the same borrowed slang wearing a local accent. It's a word that carries a whole small story inside it: you put me somewhere I didn't want to be. I asked him what he meant by it.
Søren: It's precise. She only wants to be my friend. She doesn't want a romantic relationship. With me.
And the room changed.
April: You said that plainly. Can I ask you something, if you sent her this, what are you hoping happens?
Søren: (quiet for a while) That's the question, isn't it.
April: Take your time with it.
Søren: If I'm honest — part of me wants her to read it and change her mind. And I know she won't. She's been clear. So what would it actually do? It'd land on someone who already said no, and make her say it again. (stops) No. I'm not sending it. I decided that before I came, I think I just needed to hear myself find the reason.
April: So what is it now, if it isn't a message to her?
Søren: A place to put what I'm carrying, so it isn't just lying inside me with no shape. That's what writing is for me.
April: Then here's a strange thing — as that, I think the poem gets stronger, not weaker. The word that worried us. Read me the firewall line one more time and tell me what the firewall really is.
Søren: A firewall of technology between our bodies. It's not the technology, though. Is it. The wall isn't the screen. The wall is her no. I've been blaming the distance on the phone the whole time.
April: What do you actually miss?
Søren: Talking to her. Hours of it, every day. Just — talking.
April: Not the romance, first. The talking.
Søren: Her voice does this thing. There's cream in it — fløtepusete, we'd say, a soft, breathy richness, like it's half-whispered. A trip to the corner shop becomes an adventure when she tells it. A run to buy milk turns into a fairytale on that voice.
April: That's a beautiful thing to miss. And I'm curious — when she said no, what exactly did she say no to?
Søren: (pause) To a relationship. To the romance.
April: Did she say no to the talking?
Søren: (slowly) No. She didn't. (a breath) So in theory I could keep the part I actually love and lose nothing. Except I can't, can I. Because I never manage to stay in just the talking.
April: Tell me about that. The not managing.
Here is where the interview stopped being about a poem, and Søren said the thing he had clearly known for a long time and never once put in a single sentence.
Søren: Our pattern is so clear I can see it from the outside. We start at the top — everything good. I want more. She doesn't. Daily contact makes my hope climb, and I get more and more direct about how much I want her, physically. And, understandably I suppose, she gets meaner and meaner. So I break contact. Days. Sometimes years. And then I come back, because I love hearing about her life — the milk run, the fairytale, the cream in the voice. And then it repeats. From the top.
April: Meaner — that's the word that came first. Does it still feel like the right one, now that you've said it out loud?
Søren: (pause) I don't know. It's the word I've always used.
April: What does it look like, the meanness? When it happens.
Søren: Short answers. Then no answers. Then a kind of flatness. Like she's pulling a shutter down.
April: A shutter. Pulled down against what, do you think?
Søren: (quiet) Against me, getting louder. The more I push, the more she — (stops) huh.
April: Go on.
Søren: She's not pulling the shutter down because she's cruel. She's pulling it down because I keep knocking on a door she already closed. That's not meanness, is it. That's her holding a line.
April: Does it sit right?
Søren: It sits true. It just doesn't sit good. Because then the meanness was never hers. It was the shape of my own pushing, coming back at me.
April: That's a hard thing to see clearly and still say plainly. I notice you didn't soften it.
Søren: No point softening it. I asked for precision.
I want to be careful here, because this is the part people get wrong about a man like Søren. The easy story is that he's a predator in a poet's coat, or that he's a victim of a cruel woman who won't love him back. He is neither, and the truth is less flattering and more human than both. He is a man who has let two ordinary hungers — to be desired, to not be alone — grow together around one person over years, until he genuinely cannot tell them apart. He told me as much himself, and he didn't need me to draw it out; he handed it over whole.
April: When you're pulled back to her — is it the wanting, or the loneliness?
Søren: (after a while) I've been trying to answer that since you asked and I can't. I can't say which is stronger.
April: That's an honest place to get stuck. What happens if neither is the answer?
Søren: (slowly) Then they're braided. That's it — they're braided together. If it were just the wanting, I could find that somewhere else. If it were just the loneliness, the friendship would be enough. But both of them live in her, the same person, so she becomes the answer to everything at once. And I can't go near her without all of it coming too. I can't find the end of either one.
April: You've just described the whole trap. Does seeing it that clearly change anything?
Søren: That's the thing I'm afraid of. That seeing it and being free of it aren't the same.
He was right to be afraid of exactly that, and I didn't pretend otherwise. A confusion that has taken years to braid does not come apart in one clear-eyed evening. Seeing the pattern and being free of the pattern are two different jobs, and he had, so far, only done the first. But the second job has a single door, and he found it without my help.
Søren: Stopping a pattern means first understanding there is one. And then stopping the activity that drives it. I want to be her partner. She wants a friend. I know what happens next time. I can see it's stillborn before it starts. So it's my choice — not to start a new circle with her.
April: That's the whole thing in four sentences. And of all the parts you can't control — the missing, her voice showing up in your head, the hope climbing — you went straight to the one you can. Was that deliberate?
Søren: It's the only point in the circle where I have any power at all. Not starting. Everything after the first message is downhill with no brakes. The brakes are only at the top.
April: So where are you, right now, on that hill?
Søren: I haven't spoken to her in over two weeks.
April: Over two weeks. Has it gotten easier or harder, the further in you've gone?
Søren: (a short, dry laugh) That's the thing nobody warns you about. The first week you're running on the decision. You made it, you feel strong, it carries you. And then it just — runs out. Around two weeks it runs out, and the wanting comes back like it never left. I crossed two weeks three days ago. Seventy-two hours past the line. And it's hitting me right now. As we sit here.
April: Right now, while we're talking.
Søren: It takes everything I have not to call her. Right now. This is the part where I always cave — I know it, I can feel the exact shape of it. Two weeks and change, resolve thin as paper, and one message would make it stop for a few hours. This is sink or swim. If I get through tonight, I think the pattern actually breaks. If I don't, it starts again from the top and I lose all of it.
April: And you came here, into the middle of that, instead of picking up the phone.
Søren: I had to put it somewhere. I couldn't just sit in the flat with it.
And that, I understood then, was why he was here at all. Not for a poem. The poem was the cover story his own mind had handed him so he'd have a reason to sit down and do something with his hands and his head that wasn't dialling her number.
April: Can I point at something? For the last hour you've been putting words to this instead of calling her. What would you call that, if you saw someone else doing it?
Søren: (a pause) I'd call it the actual thing. Not getting ready to do it. Doing it.
He thought about it for a while. Then he almost smiled.
Søren: I'll write. It's what I do. I don't rest until I understand how the thing connects inside me — and then I'm at peace. Most poems that start somewhere and end at completely different places by the time they're written.
I'll tell you what I didn't tell him, because he didn't need it and you might.
He won't be cured by this. Letting go isn't a decision; it's a decision you re-make every time the voice shows up uninvited and the hope starts to climb. The version of Søren who walked out of that room was not a man who had stopped loving her. He was a man who had gone two weeks and three days without making his love her problem — and the three days were the ones that counted, because they were the ones spent past the line where he had always, every time before, turned back. That's a smaller thing than a cure and a much harder thing than a grand gesture, and almost no one applauds it, because from the outside it looks like nothing at all. A man sitting still. A phone, face-down, not ringing.