Tove Ditlevsen’s Worn-Out Language

While I write this, my husband is cycling through the rain, taking our one-year-old son, who last night yet again wouldn’t sleep, to nursery school, and I am thinking of Tove Ditlevsen’s poems. I, too, want to write lists of my quirks, vices, unattractive traits, that which is me but is not me. Those I love but don’t love. What I ought to do and be, but neither do nor am.