The heat is compact. I have no problem with temperatures, I’m fine with anything between minus thirty to plus forty degrees. However, the more than thirty that we have now is making things go slower – as if the faster moving molecules in the air are increasing the friction, making it harder to move.
I wanted to write. When having one of those blood-loss-conversations with Ashley two days ago, I said I wanted something to be excited about. Something separate from the worry and the anguish. And it hit me: a short story. That could get me on my feet again. Writing prose always gave me purpose, and until just a couple of years ago, I used to write at least a couple of short stories per summer. I was also thinking: I need to find my way back to Swedish. Don’t get me wrong, I’m having a very passionate love affair with English. I will not abandon it. But. There is a clumsiness, and the insecurity from not having been born with it. I know I make mistakes. There is a detail in Swedish that I just can’t accomplish in English. That is fine for texts like these, but when it comes to prose, the kind of prose that I want to write, there is no room for clumsiness.
So I’m going to write a short story in Swedish. Alternatively, a couple of those prose texts that I used to write a lot of in high school. I biked into Södermalm yesterday in the heat to get started.
On Greta Garbo’s square, in the shade of the trees, on a green bench facing the small elephants, many good things have come to me. I discovered it after having finished “Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix” back in 2003, sitting on the stairs of the library by Medborgarplatsen. The heart-break when Sirius Black died was still heavy in my body, but there was a lightness to me too, the sun was shining and I was walking at random through the streets, headed south-east toward my aunt’s for dinner and suddenly I was just standing there, in Greta Garbo’s square, with the trees and the flowerbed in the middle and the grayish pink elephants and a song came to me. “I wish (a cappella)” from Robyn’s first album. The complete song, every single word – and I hadn’t even listened to it that much. It wasn’t a song that I had acknowledged. But it had been hiding in a corner of my brain and came out here, on Greta Garbo’s square, and it all felt like magic. Like an other-worldly experience.
Ever since, Greta Garbo’s square has held a special meaning to me. I go there, to read and write sometimes, when I need calm and inspiration. But yesterday, nothing came. I wrote in my diary, and I read Nicole Krauss’ “Great house”, but I couldn’t come up with a single story-line, a single situation that I could make a reflection on. The words were there, but they got stuck somewhere in between my head and my hand. I biked home again, with an empty notebook and a hint of frustration in my shoulders.
It’s just as hot today. I’ve been home all day, with all windows in the apartment wide open. Curtains are blowing in the breeze. I still don’t know what to write. So I started doing something else instead:
The name of the handicraft brand that Jessica thought I should start. I’m now making her a pillowcase, per her request, as a late birthday gift. It needed a little embroidered detail. First the practice version at the top, and below what is going to end up on Jessica’s pillow.
And now I’m all excited about embroidering. I’m overflowing with ideas – pillowcases and cloth bags and aprons and purses. I have tens of meters of Liberian fabrics. No one I know will be safe! (Of course, I won’t write because Katja said so on everything. That would be a little bit too self-indulgent, I think, even for me. It’s just a thing, an insider joke between me and Jessica. – – Also, I’m counting on that she doesn’t read this. I want this housewife touch to her gift to be a surprise. She’s been in Belgium all summer, and no one from Belgium has visited this page, according to the statistics that WordPress so generously provides me with. So. I think I haven’t made a huge blunder by publishing this.)
Anyway. I found something to be excited about. I’ll still work on the writing, though. Maybe tomorrow. There is a slight chance of rain then, according to the weather report.
Katja Malmborg 