I got home on Friday night and started baking karjalanpiirakoita, a kind of Finnish pastry. I felt for some music, went to my CD shelf and picked out a few that I hadn’t listened to for a while. Not really thinking, I started with “More modern short stories by Hello Saferide” and then went on to listen to “9” by Damien Rice. And it was like being transported in time.
I remember the fall of 2006. My grandmother was dying of cancer in Finland and I got “9” off the internet the day it was released. It was the fall semester of my last year in high school and I felt as if the pressure would choke me. I remember getting home from school, putting on the record, lying down on the kitchen floor and crying. I see myself doing this for weeks, but maybe I remember it wrong. But I know that for days and days, “9” was the only record I listened to. I even dreamed “9”. Later, over Christmas, I went to Finland and helped my mom and aunt take care of my grandmother. I read the Bible to her and sang Christmas songs and for once I was happy for her rigorous faith. When I left to go back home just before New Years, I still felt sad but somehow better, calmer. She would die in her sleep a month later, in her own bed, in the house where she had raised seven children, with my aunt and uncle in the next room. That is what I think of when Damien Rice sings “Is he dark enough, enough to see your light /…/ do you miss my smell?”
And I remember October of 2008, I had a fever and my phone rang. It was the guy I had begun to fall in love with. He said that we wouldn’t work. We hadn’t had time to become anything at all yet, so it wasn’t even a breakup – but still I felt like my world was falling apart. The next day, I took the subway train in to the city, in spite of my fever, and walked through the beautifully red and yellow leaves on the pavement. I went to an old record store and found “More modern short stories by Hello Saferide” on display. It had been released that very same day. I bought it and returned home and already at the first line she had me dangling from her every note, Annika Norlin, “People are like songs, it’s true. /…/ and God only knows and you have this one sad similarity that every time it’s over, I want to press play again but the only difference appears to be I can force it on one of you, and on the other I can’t.” She helped me through my fever and all the other, more unidentifiable pain.
These memories became my Friday night, and even though they were sad, it felt good. Because it is a controlled kind of sadness. I can always choose to stop the music. These songs made me remember parts of why I am me, now, here, today. And I think that in order to know the right direction on the journey ahead, you need to remember the path you’ve put behind. Before I went to sleep, I lay on the floor listening to Damien Rice playing on wine glasses after the last song on the record, and felt achingly whole.
Katja Malmborg 