After writing a page on my thesis this morning (I ate breakfast with Hannes too, he spent the night here on the couch after playing board games with me, Lina, Frida, Kirke and Felix last night – awesome evening, seriously, this board game party idea of mine was brilliant and it will definitely become a thing in my home), I went into town to meet up with Jenny.
Jenny is one of those wonderful people who I meet, like, three times a year, because she lives in another city and I’m so Stockholm-centric that I’ve actually never visited any of my friends who study in other Swedish towns. Except in Uppsala. But Uppsala is like a suburb to Stockholm, so that doesn’t count. (Instead, I go to visit them in Edmonton and Brussels – that’s much more convenient!). Jenny and I went to high school together, and I always have a nice time when we meet, talking about politics or the state of the Swedish school system or our futures.
Well, anyway, what I was supposed to write was, that at the end of our walk we went into the Kulturhuset library by the central station. She had to catch a bus, but I stayed at the library, walking among the books, picking them up, feeling the roughness of the pages, imagining. I haven’t been in a library for ages, except for the university ones, and they don’t really count because they are so tightly associated with studying and I can’t fully relax in them. In a real, fiction-filled library, probably not since I came back from the States, I can’t remember.
But it is like pushing a button. I become a child when I am around books. All the infinite possibilities. It is freedom.
I know I’ve written about my love for libraries before. But the fact that it surprised me so, this feeling that hit me between the shelves, just confirms that memory is a tricky thing and that I need to repeat these library love letters with regular intervals in order to remember what a free and genuinely not-harmful-in-any-way happy pill I have in libraries.
Katja Malmborg 