The light from Stockholm is a dark orange. Even here, a few miles outside the city, it hits the clouds like doomsday. Unfitting, this autumn when the city has started to feel like hope. But out here on the island I’m surrounded by fields, and below my windows wild boars are eating the apples fallen from the trees. I sing when I walk home in the dark, the flashlight in my phone weak and unable to light up the dirt road cutting through the country. One of my roommates is a blacksmith. When she’s out working at night I can hear the sound of metal when I walk home instead. The hammer and the iron, metal on metal, the tool and that which is formed.
The bus journey this morning felt like being in a shower cabin. Condensation covered the inside of the windows. The light shone in and made the walls orange, everyone looked beautiful who sat inside, on their seats, on their phones, their faces colored pink.
(Midsummer celebration, we carried our kitchen table outside)
(The island where I stayed, and the mainland in the background)
(Midsummer celebration)
(It’s been two days since I saw the sun set. Three? I don’t say goodnight to the house. I don’t walk through a dark living room. We’ve gone to bed but the sun hasn’t. Maybe my time here will feel either like time not passing at all — the blink of an eye, the long day — or it will feel like eternity without resting — existence without any borders, world without end, amen.)
I kept telling people I accidentally got a job in Greenland, which is not fully true. I got a job in Greenland because I applied for a job in Greenland. I applied for a journalism job too, but I accepted the one in Greenland before I heard back. Good. I didn’t get the other job anyway.
I think about it, sometimes, on a mountain top close to the house where I’m staying, in the small village in the north of Greenland. I walk up the cliffs in the evenings and think there as the sun doesn’t set. People ask me sometimes, about journalism. Would you not want the kind of job your degree suggests? Maybe. It’s not like it’s entirely self chosen, you know, to not have an amazing journalist job.
But also, I would be less of a journalist if I was one.
Maybe, if I worked my way to the top, I could be allowed to go on a reporting trip to a village like this.
But even then I would be outside the walls, not inside. Now I eat breakfast with my colleagues and learn how to say salt, and eggs, and cheese in greenlandic. One of my colleagues wears a red jacket and a pink children’s backpack, she has a pixie cut and smokes outside the factory doors. She handles the deliveries from the fishermen, drives the boxes up the 20 meters from the harbor. When she’s inside she always keeps an eye on the ocean. Another one of my colleagues talks and sings the loudest, but she gets quiet when one specific person walks into the factory. I’ve heard about the young man who drowned not too long ago. I’ve been in the house of the man who has a whole shelf of dogsledding race medals. I ate whale intestines and raw halibut at someone’s birthday party.
I’d rather be a worker here than any other kind of visitor.
For me, the whole career thing becomes so disconnected from what I want. It’s just about how I want other people to see me. And maybe, mainly, I wish I had the choice. I wish I was offered all the prestigious jobs in the world and turned them down just to be here, even if the result would be no different than being here now. It’s not as much about desire as it is about pride.
I don’t have a good way to sum up this text, because I don’t think I’ve let go of the pride. But I do remember a time before it. A few years ago, before my studies taught me what to want and who to impress, I wanted to study journalism just to incorporate the skills and ethics into things I already liked doing. I’ve absorbed much pride since, absorbed it like a poison that now starts to spread though me. But I do remember a time before it.
There’s an insecurity in me that this blog heals. Heals, because I have to finish things here. I have to publish them. I have to be done. I have to decide on an ending and go with it.
I tend to use several words when I write, trying, searching, looking for whatever is the right one. There’s no right one. I’m just scared to settle on one. I want to avoid clarity, so I write everything as if I’m not looking at it.
I wonder how much is the effort and how much is the flow. I can’t paint if I think about selling paintings. The pressure destroys the creativity. But I also can’t create if I never feel any pressure. Right? Or is that untrue? If I organize everything else around me to be good, if I’m healthy, happy, would I create without putting the pressure on the creative process itself?
(Is the trying necessary, or would it flow out of me like water if I stopped?)
eirians 