The first half of October is a blur. I think I just rushed, without thought.
Jonas had a party. On the way there, we walked past a dry-cleaners with a pretty lady on the window. Odd and funny, thought we, pre-party peppy and tipsy. I asked Jessica to pose with her. I must say, there really is a resemblance.
Ads for a ski resort were put up in the tube. I wish I could have followed their advice. No snow had fallen yet, though, and the other thing was just impossible.
I did have the Christmas themed goodbye party. People brought lots of food and it turned out really nice. I didn’t really possess the presence of mind to actually sit down and talk with that many people, and once everyone had left (most people left at the same time, some kind of weird train timetable related phenomenon), I just wanted to cry. I had been feeling for days that I needed to say a proper goodbye to people, that it was important, that something might happen, three months is a long time. Be it premonition, or just pre-travel jitters (probably the latter), I felt like I had failed.
But the feeling passed, and at least I got to see most of my friends before I left, even if we didn’t have any deep conversations. Some of them I also saw a couple of times in school after the party, and in the end, I think I left Sweden on good terms. Nothing major unresolved, few regrets.
I think I wrote once that the only legacy most of us leave in the world, are the memories of us that stick with the people that we’ve met. This might sound a bit morbid, but I’m not only talking about what’s left of us after we die. I can be alive, and still leave a legacy behind in a person that I meet by being part of creating an important, maybe even life-changing memory. I’ve had encounters like that, both through random meetings on the road, but mostly with friends and family, of course. In the same way, I wish to have a positive impact on the people that I meet, even if it only is through inviting people to have a nice time at a party that will pass and probably not be remembered a couple of years from now. But still there is the feeling, something good.
So, to summarize, I think what I left with people when I stepped on that airplane on Arlanda, were mostly good things. And when I get back, there’ll be more important memories to share. But if, by the randomness of life, anyone of all those people that I said goodbye to won’t be around when I get back (many of them are international students, after all, an infamously unreliable bunch with a tendency to move back home when you least want them to), that is OK too. In the long scheme of things.
On Sunday evening, I put all the stuff I should pack in piles on my floor. And this time, unlike when going to Norway in June, I remembered Mr. P too.
As a nice conclusion to this hectic, chaotic fall of mine, I had a leisurely bikeride home from saying goodbye to aunt Kaarina and Anders on Tuesday evening. It was dark already, and it had rained quite a lot that day, but now it was only drizzling. It’s actually a really nice bikeride, the one I’ve taken to and from university, at least the stretch from my house to the Skanstull bridge, after which the extended city center starts. I bike through this residential area with low apartment buildings and villas built during the 1910’s, ’20’s and ’30’s. A really calm and sweet little neighborhood, with long, maple-lined streets. The last stretch even runs along the Forest Graveyard, a UNESCO world heritage site.
This particular night, in the darkness and the drizzle, there was the smell of fall in the air. The maples had started to loose their leaves, covering the bike lane in a red and yellow slippery carpet. And I thought: Maybe it was this biking that kept me just about above the surface druring this crazy fall. That, and the weirdly winding, burrowing, enlightening conversations I’ve had with some quite unexpected people. All this crazy has made me even more honest than otherwise, and open in a way that has made things spill over, on people that I haven’t really had that kind of relationship with. Mostly, though, it worked out. Sometimes, being unintentionally honest about yourself and vulnerable can make people get a feel for you so much faster. It isn’t always something that will scare people off, it can also be a way to connect.
And the biking. About an hour to university, and an hour back home. Rain or shine. A kind of mobile meditation, the monotonous activity of pedaling. It has been a way to ground me, and I think. To put me in contact with my body, when my entire world has been focused on my mind. When I think back on this period of my life, biking might be one of the things that I’ll remember most strongly.
And I will miss it. Both the conversations, and the biking. It was with a pang of melancholy, that I carried the bike up to the gazebo and locked it.
Oh well. I’ll be able to pick up the biking again once I get back. And I can always start writing weirdly honest e-mails to unexpecting people. Biking is like biking, after all, and I do have a weakness for the written word.
Katja Malmborg 