If it weren’t so beautiful outside and I weren’t so keen to get out, I would tell you where I am (two floors up, beneath a dome lamp), what I did yesterday (it was so windy), where I will go in just a few minutes (another island), but of course I would tell you much more than this. Maybe I would tell you a secret, I don’t know which one, I’ve learned quite a few since I moved here, such as the real reason why so many Swedes walk through the cemeteries during the winter. I don’t want to give it away, but it has something to do with how snow piles up on the crosses like bad hairdos. Some look like women with big teased hair; others like men with those bowl cuts, or mushroom cuts, whatever you call them, just think Moe Howard and you’ve got the right idea.
Snow drapes the outstretched arms of each cross too, white blouses and coats, and fills the crevices of its embellished face, giving them each a mouth and a pair of eyes in which to express themselves. The features are quite deformed by human standards, so that when a person enters through the black iron fence, they can behold another world: a field of scarecrows, the Moai of Easter Island, a land of ugly dolls, the options are endless when it comes to imagination. Kids point and laugh outright, but not the adults, not in Sweden, thats just too expressive. But no one can fully hide their amusement either. I hear their snickering, muffled between their dropped faces and the snowy floor. No one speaks publicly about it, but everyone knows that everyone else knows, and they make sure to pass through the cemetery each day, if possible, just to have a good laugh. You have to find things to laugh about in the winter, and things to fabricate too, and what have I done? Now I’ve given away the secret.
The beauty of writing is that I can take my pen and scratch through that last paragraph. But if we were talking directly to one another, I’d have said it, and the secret would have been out, for good, there is no way to scratch through air. And sometimes, like today, I prefer to think that you are here, that we are having a real conversation, and these words are more than characters etched on a page. That we are sitting across from one another in this second floor room, lingering over this breakfast table, big enough for twenty people, but I am only one, and by the way, I think we can turn off the dome lamp now. There is plenty of sunlight coming through the window. I can’t decide whether to go out in it, or to just curl up with what I have here.
Do you know what it feels like to curl up in the sun? Ah, of course you do. A bit like sinking into a warm bath, yet without all the wetness. And without the transparency of water too. Just because there’s so much light doesn’t mean that you can see any better. In fact, you have to close your eyes. Let go of everything and just sink down. It may become darker than ever, a pitch beyond black, but if you can just relax and wait, your vision will start to fade back in. There can be flashes across your skin, like a big dance, a ballroom of feet capering across your scalp, and gradually you sense a rhythm. So you join in. It feels like floating. You just float. And by the time you realize that the light is dancing in one continuous direction, you open your eyes, blink, blink again, and see that it has moved on to the next building.
