WHAT A FOOL I WAS
TO THINK WE WERE SAFE
FROM THE THIEVES IN THE TEMPLE

No one likes to be the fool. Not Niki and The Dove, especially. Exposes your nerves. Your lack of nerves in being more cynical. Naïveté knocked boots with your need for their nice-looking face and neck nuzzles; and naïveté never works in romance. Yeah, it’s necessary. Human nature ain’t no choir boy. Need to know you’re known on speed dial by only 90% of every not-so-pristine hole on Grindr nine seconds post-login. Maybe need to know you’re not coming tonight, that you’ve found new Egyptian sheets to envelop someone in on a low-energy Sunday. You know, the basics. Not as naïve most people, not bothered by much either. Not a small number of love songs annoy the fuck out of me. It’s like ‘Gurl, no. Get it together. You had to know his knickers weren’t only on your bedroom floor. Really? Really?’ Naïveté is a grenade to the not-so-happy face when it blows up, but that kind of need to trust isn’t what Niki and The Dove are talking about here.

Niki and The Dove’s pain is genuine. I think there’s a certain expectation we all have when we enter into that collective pronoun of you and I. And it’s to answer ‘why do I need you?’ I’m a 95% strong in the face of adversity kind of person, why do I need to open my heart? And I think Niki and The Dove would say that it’s for that 5% of the time when someone shivs you in the kidney, by surprise. When you couldn’t predict, protect yourself. And you’re not so cutely bleeding all over your sheets and looking for someone to bandage you up. Nice to have someone champion you against those thieves in the temple. You thought you were swimming in some bubble sanctuary and they saw you and laughed and said ‘Ha, nice try. Sword to the stomach!’

That absence of your lover, that betrayal of that basic naivete that they’d be there through the good times and the bad, is lonely. It hurts. And Niki and The Dove explore it beautifully.

PHOTO CREDIT: TOM ØVERLIE, NRK P3.

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