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.
January. The bright, white cold. Minty enough that I feel it in my teeth. I sleep on my loft, right under the angle of the beams, where the heat has risen to.
Climbing down the ladder feels like dipping your feet in ice cold water. Like a summer lake that’s only warm on the surface. I stand up straight and stretch my hands back up and feel it in my fingers, the heat that’s risen and left the floor boards cold.
I’ve been enjoying running. When I come home I’m overheating and warm to the bones, and I can sit out on the porch as I cool down. I get about ten minutes to look at the stars before I start shivering.
And last Friday I spent a few hours making dinner for the people I live with. And we all helped out with the dishes. And there was music in the kitchen. And then I met my other friend in a wine bar where we’re trying to become regulars, and the owner gave us stickers with a picture of his dog.
And there was a bit of a storm outside, and the snow flakes landed on my lipstick and I was laughing when I walked home. This week I’ve spent every day in my painting shirt and I’ve helped my friend decorate her walls and in the mornings I have coffee in different cafes and in the evenings I fall asleep earlier than usual since I started to work out, and life. Life is shaping up. Ups and downs, there’s been a few, and it doesn’t really matter. I’ve been happy for quite a while. The faster life starts running, the slower I walk.
In the middle of Stockholm there’s a stadium, originally built for the 1912 Olympic Games. In the winter they open it up for skiing, for free. You can just go there and ski in circles on tracks laid along the 400 meter running tracks.
I thought I’d get dizzy from just going in circles, but 400 meters is still enough that it’s not too annoying. The difficult thing is keeping up with how far you’ve gone, after a while I started doubting if I was counting the laps right. I should have made lines for it in the snow at the starting point. Like counting how many days you’ve been in prison on a stone wall.
Anyway. I made it 23 laps before the clock reached 21.30 and they closed down for the night. 25 laps would have been 10 km, so it was annoying. But that’s okay. I’m very happy these days.
Thessaloniki. November. Down by the ocean the restaurants were pleasantly empty after the summer crowds had left, and you could find a table to have a cheap glass of wine and look straight out at the ocean. Mount Olympus was right there, the pale shape of it half hidden behind the clouds.
We went hiking, not up Mount Olympus, but by some random mountains a bus ride away. We could see Mount Athos across the water, which is an autonomous region where women are not allowed. And they haven’t been, for like a thousand years. The only people who live there are the monks in the monasteries on the mountain.
But we hiked on our little peninsula, next to it, past olive trees and places of prayer. We were a bit frustrated, me and my friend I was traveling with. That feeling you sometimes get when you travel — like you want to find something. Like you’re there for a purpose, but you don’t know what it could be. Hiking helped. And the bus ride there helped, a couple of hours of just listening to music and seeing the landscape pass by.
We’re already looking for tickets back. March, maybe?
I’m in a cafe in a city the south of Sweden. They serve specialty coffee, todays special has a citrusy hint to it or something. And they’re surprisingly kind about my big backpack and the suitcase I’m dragging around, letting me take up space in their clean, modern cafe.
I’ve been staying with a friend for a couple of weeks, and I left her place this morning.
Now I’m in the middle of nowhere. People keep calling me and I keep not answering because I don’t want to explain that I have nothing to explain. There is not a lot to my life these days. A lot of things have been taken from me. And it’s fine. But I have nowhere to stay. No job. Less and less money left. No set path for my future. Whenever I want to start something, I feel God uprooting it. I have left a lot of things and not entered a lot yet.
But also, here’s the thing: this evening I’m taking the night train to stockholm. In the morning I’ll head to the airport. And then I’ll fly to Greece. I booked a cheap hostel, and a friend is coming with me. Im going to walk the streets and swim in the oceans and read the letters to the Thessalonians in the actual city of Thessaloniki.
I’ve been in a time of not having a lot. But at the same time I have had, constantly, just enough of everything. The lack is not actually a lack at all. I have had food for every day. A place to rest my head every night. My life will become a bit more stable, and I will like it, and I will be grateful for it, and I will rest. But I also rest here. In the sun shining into this cafe. In Greece, tomorrow. Everywhere. Everyday, is fine.
The dichotomy of it makes me think of one of my favorite poems, We were emergencies by Buddy Wakefield. The last line goes like this:
You call 9 – 1 – 1. Tell them I’m having a fantastic time.
October. My hands hurt from the cold when I don’t keep them in my pocket. I went on a walk down by the water, and it was so windy that my eyes teared up completely. On the way home I stopped by the supermarket. People looked at me weirdly as I bought milk and bread. I think I looked a bit crazy, windswept, hair messy from the wind and eyes like I’d been crying.
I haven’t caught up completely with the cold, and neither has nature. The moss down by the water was summer green. Most of the leaves as well. I took photos, because there’s something about it that I like so much. The sun, the water that starts without a border. There’s no beach, no rocks or sand. It almost looks like forest, and then just ocean in it. When it’s windy the waves rise and wash over the moss. I want to live in that little place.
Anyway. Blue autumn skies. October is cold, and sad, and bright.
eirians 