It’s summer and I’m on my way to the French Riviera. In the SAS lounge at the airport, I sit comfortably with the fife. A family comes in the doors and sits down. I’m actually sitting in my own little bubble. But then I hear someone say grumpily and a little too loudly: – Ouch! I don’t want to live with them! My head thinks: What’s going on? It is the daughter in the family who speaks. The mother sits next to her and listens. – I have to fix this now. I don’t want to live with them! The daughter will move out for the first time and begin studies. I understand that she has arranged a place to live, but now that she has found out who she is with, the mood is completely different. There is a crisis atmosphere in the lounge. Bloodyshock! (Fyttirakkern). – The housing market is tough now, but we’ll see if we can buy something for you, says the mother. The father arrives a little later, sits down with a few bubbles in the glass and a light blue handkerchief in his jacket pocket. He continues: – We can check the possibility with a hotel or Airbnb in the meantime. It is impossible not to follow this show. I imagine a 19-year-old living in one of Oslo’s best hotels during the godfather week. Suite, bubbles and a bunch of drunken students at a toga party who call for room service is not a combo I’ve heard of before. The father tries another solution to calm the situation: – You can agree to the collective, and then you can move out when we can buy you something. The daughter is not receptive. – Remember that they are disgusting! She has pink eyeliner and green bangs! Shit. It also hit me, who sits passively listening on the other side of the room. I start thinking about myself. Could I have said the same? When I was 20 years old, I moved into a proper collective for the first time. I had gone to folk college and chose to move with my three best friends from school. It was warm, sunny and like a real Oslo summer. This year was going to be the best in history. From a good day in the collective to Martin. Photo: Privat After a few weeks, the glossy image cracked. Firstly, we furnished the apartment with all the ugliest things you can find on Find and Give Away. The sofa was split in half and the dining chairs looked like they could have belonged to a brothel. But it wasn’t just the things that started to fall apart. Suddenly, the mayonnaise you bought two days ago is empty, the hair in the shower is lying there for the seventh day in a row and the drying rack is always busy. Phew, that got on my nerves! The irritation peaked one afternoon in January. For several months, there had been no clean glasses in the kitchen cupboard. When I found out that all the glasses were next to Henriette’s bed, it went black. In the middle of the kitchen floor, I screamed at the glass thief that she should go back to Bergen, or even better: far out in the world somewhere! Here in Oslo, no one wanted to see her. Stories from the collective never end, because what about she who always has to meditate on the living room floor, he who has learned a little guitar and who always has to play Coldplay, over and over again – and who doesn’t have a single social antenna to tell that everyone around him got enough long before it got dark. And then she’s the one who always brings home a one-night stand on Saturday, while the random guy we never see again, wanders around in a tired box and sticks to the apartment all Sunday. Or when you have a party and someone throws up behind the big plant from Ikea and it takes a few days before you start to smell it. The parents in the lounge this summer evening in July took their daughter’s side. It is simply a disservice. In life you will meet people you don’t like. And you will meet people you don’t like at first, but who you will later like. And you can move in with people you thought you’d like, but who you still can’t stand. Collective is a bit like the first service. You have to go through it. And it is beautiful, in its own way. You learn to get used to people who are different from you, and who have different habits than you are used to at home. Maybe you’ll learn to adjust a little. And that it is not so smart to judge people by first impressions. It will come in handy later. Then move into a collective with she who has pink eyeliner and green bangs, he who airs his socks in the window and he who never refills toilet paper, even if they use the last dried one. Suddenly it turns out that they are not so disgusting after all. And remember that you are allowed to move, but at least you have tried. You actually benefit from living with people you don’t like. PS: Today me and Henriette are best friends again, but she lives abroad. I’m not sure if it’s my fault.
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The accursed collective – Speech
