(notes from October 28th)

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.