One summer day a few years ago, I went to the blood bank to donate, and was called into the donor room by a young, beautiful med. student who introduced himself as Magnus. That brief meeting, with him taking my blood and me telling him about my Spanish studies, ended up as the first chapter of a new writing project. The story of Ylvali, an aspiring artist who met the very handsome medical student Magnus at a blood bank, but then left him and everything else six months later to go volunteer working on Zanzibar. Not because she had fallen out of love with him, but because she had a restlessness in her, a feeling that made it impossible for her to settle.
I never finished it. Or, never might be a bit exaggerated – I didn’t really start. I still have half the story in my head, people that Ylvali meets, what became of Magnus after she left. A handful of chapters written, the first two, a few in the middle. I think I’ve always thought that I would take up the story one day when I have the time. I don’t know, maybe I will.
Anyway, somewhere the morale of the story was that Ylvali was running away, just as so many others in her (and my) generation, running, never settling, never feeling quite full and satisfied – and that this tendency actually created more problems for her. She wasn’t capable of finding happiness, because she just ran away from it. This was something that I thought I saw among some of my friends and acquaintances at the time, and I found it sad. The never satisfied generation.
Sometimes I worry. Am I running away? Have I become one of my fictional characters? Not that I have a Magnus to run away from, but I do have a life here, classmates and other people at the university that know me, a job that I actually don’t hate. These are things that I am leaving, and might not be able to get back when I return. My classmates will have graduated and my job will probably be taken by some other ambitious student.
Is this trip something that I really need, or is it just fear? This way, I can drag out my studies longer and won’t have to get out into the real world, being rejected on the job market, for another year. Have I become Ylvali, the girl scared of creating her own future? I don’t know. I really don’t know.
Katja Malmborg 