Another quote from Andersson’s arbitrary conduct. The painter stopped answering calls and for months the poet lives in despair. Then they run into each other, and the painter says, as if it just occurred to him, that he has to contemplate this thing about him and her. Hope blossoms in the poet, and just a couple of days later she calls him and asks: Do you know now? The painter answers:

– Contemplating isn’t that fast. These things take time, you know.

Of all the things he could have said, this was the worst, because everything that exists wants to live and hope is not an exception. It is a pest. It eats and thrives on the most innocent of body tissues. Its survival lies in a well-developed ability to overlook everything that does not favor its growth but throw itself at anything that feeds its vitality. Then it ruminates these crumbles until every trace of nutrition has been extracted. Now hope gnawed with heavenly frenzy. For a couple of seconds she was completely weightless.

– I give you all the time you need, she said

It’s said that the last thing that leaves the human body is hope. Oh, what torture that can be. Hope is a double-edged sword, giving the ability to go on when everything seems lost – but also making us hold on with all our might to things that should be left alone. Moved on from.

I have a very well-developed and strong sense of hope. I do not give up. Like the tell tale badger that bites and doesn’t let go of your leg until it hears bones brake. I need to be told to stop – and even then.

There was supposed to be a book club meeting on Sunday. We were going to discuss “Egenmäktigt förfarande” by Lena Andersson. But when one out of three decided she was too pregnant to go traveling across the city, we decided to cancel. There will not be a book club on Sunday. I will have lunch with Hanna instead.

Having lunch with Hanna is not bad. It is not bad at all. But I also don’t really know what to do with myself. I don’t remember the last time when a book made such a strong impression on me the last time. Physically, to the point that I found it hard to breathe sometimes. I think telling someone else might have helped me get perspective. Separate my life from the life in the book. So let me tell you about it instead. Inarticulate and incoherent as I might be, at midnight on a Wednesday. Even though I should be sleeping. I have a full day of lectures, thesis supervisor meetings and computer labs ahead of me tomorrow. But I just wanted to get this thing off my chest.

The book is about a youngish poet who falls in love with an older man, a famous painter, and they have a brief affair. The poet falls head over heels, she is consumed, possessed, her thoughts move in small circles, always returning to the same place. The same person.

Lena Andersson uses the Swedish language lightly. To the point that I didn’t notice how complex and singular it is until I try to translate it. Already in the title. According to Google Translate, it translates to arbitrary conduct, but even though that is the right translation for the two words separately, it doesn’t feel right. It is impossible. I cannot possibly do it. But, I am going to try. I have to. I need to.

The poet and the painter have just had their second night together. The painter did not have any breakfast at home, so they went to a 7eleven around the corner and he left her there, saying he needed to start working.

Nothing had been said about the continuation and nothing about having entered each others lives or the silence that had followed. Nothing about anything.

They had stopped talking the moment their bodies started to. Love needs words. One can trust the wordless feeling for a short while. But in the long run, no love can become without words, and no love with only words. Love is a hungry beast. It lives of touch, repeated assurances and an eye looking into another eye. When an eye is very close the other eye neither eye will see anything.

She sat there for quarter of an hour, then she took the bus home. The air did not get off the ground all day and he did not call. Neither did she, but when she did not call it meant something else than when he did not, because he was in charge, he had the power. There was no proof that that was the case and no doubt either. The one slowing down always decides. The one who wants the least has the most power. Not calling hardly meant him thinking: Now I have to hold back and not call all the time.

This is hell, she thought the next morning when 24 hours had passed. This is hell and this is the hell that exists. She was burning up from inside.

And I probably was not very clear-headed while reading this. I was there, in the book, feeling as if I was the poet. In hell, translating the feelings into rash actions in my other life, the one where I sleep and breathe and go to university every day. So maybe I’m not the right person to judge the qualities of this book. Overly involved, and all that. But isn’t there a quality in that too, a piece of art that makes us lose our grip on reality, making lines blurry between the words on the book pages and the ways in which we formulate our everyday lives.

I can only say: I’ve been there. It is true. And it is painful to relive it, even if it is in written form.

I will translate some more quotes from the book, but on another day. I’ve finished the book now and my grip on reality is firm again, I’ve completed and turned in a literature review, had a discussion session on our thesis proposal work, had a long talk about relationships with Ashley and done some aerial photo digitizing and been to French class. Eaten an entire creamy blue cheese and watched Girls with Lina. Efficiency and indulgence. A way of healing. I’m feeling the entire day in my body. I have to stop now.

Yesterday, I woke up early, got dressed and walked to the tube. It was light, but sparsley, as if the light particles hadn’t found their way down to Earth yet. At an empty café by Nytorget, I met Hanna for breakfast.

My crazy two-hundred-percent-and-extra-evening-class-on-the-side-schedule combined with Hanna’s evening shifts at the grocery store hadn’t allowed us to meet for ages, and would not for ages still. But everyone has to eat breakfast. Or should, at least. So we decided to meet up for an eight AM café visit instead of a six PM one.

The bread was good, newly baked and crisp. The orange juice felt luxurious, freshly squeezed. And the coffee was incredible. Intense. Such a chock of tastes for my sensitive early morning taste buds.

It was such a lovely way to wake up. It felt exclusive, like something extra, like giving myself a treat in the middle of the week. Having high class breakfast with one of the best people in the world. Talking about life.

That the café was almost competely empty when we arrived, the owner still setting things up, the milky light falling in through the windows from quiet Södermalm streets. It made me feel like I was doing something good.

While we were sitting there, people slowly started dropping in, and by the time we left just before nine thirty, it was almost hard get out for all the breakfast-eating Söder hipsters. Media people and freelancers, setting their own schedules, free to have breakfast way after nine if they wanted to.

Walking back to the tube, on my way to my ten o’clock lecture, I walked past several pieces of cute little street art. Sofo at its finest.

It was alltogether an incredibly agreeable morning. My first ever breakfast date. It will not be the last.

An unfortunate combination of circumstances has placed me in a position where I have felt forced to choose to enroll on three courses at once: two full-time university courses (the obligatory thesis prep course for my master’s and a method course in landscape ecology, which is what I want to do my thesis on), and an evening class in French (because in Burkina Faso, where I want to do my field work, they speak French and not English).

In a way, it might be very tactical and smart – I’m spending every waking moment working toward the same goal, namely, to turn my thesis into something good. But, in another way, it might also be the most stupid thing I’ve ever committed to (and this is coming from someone with a long history of making poor decisions). I’ve already complained about being tired, exhausted, completely drained. What I should be doing is decrease the number of commitments that I have, not take on a bunch of new ones.

Well, things are the way they are and I have only myself to blame if I fall apart completely. Crash like a Malaysian airplane in the middle of the ocean, thousands of kilometers off course.

I will have to remove anything excessive in my life. No TV, unless it’s to help me sleep. No trying experimental recipes. No late night parties. No surfing around on Spotify, randomly listening to recommended or not recommended tracks. No small talk with random people in the Geoscience building. No getting lost in emotional roller-coasters. Studying, exercising and sleeping well. Everything stable and ordered and on track. The coming five weeks will have to be pure focus.

Jessica is vegan, but still she can’t keep her nosy tongue to herself.

Spring scream Ronia the Robber’s Daughter style.

I had just published the previous post, and at the bottom of the ‘this is what you just posted’-window, there were links to three other older posts that I’d written. I clicked on this, and was surprised at how smart I was. Not in any way amazingly, but just enough, comfortingly. Especially for my present state of mind.

Persistence, not giving up flat out, but tacticly. Making sure I don’t end up in a free fall. That’s what I’ll do.

Like the blue anemones Lina and I saw on our walk on Sunday, beautiful and drenched in sun. The first signs of spring, almost holy in their symbolic value.

By Monday morning, they were buried in snow. But now, the snow is melting and we’re expecting another sunny weekend.

*

Or the two oaks that we met, that just refused to stop growing, even when solid rock got in the way.

For the third time this week, I’m sitting up late, studying. Me, the computer screen, a bar of chocolate and outside only darkness. Not because I haven’t studied in the day, study is all I do, day and night, now. Or that’s at least what it feels like. That’s what it has felt like ever since I started this master’s program in September. Full speed, all the time, everything is a state of emergency.

While the layer of dust is getting deeper on the furniture in my room. Soon, I’ll have to wade through it.

It’s been worth it, though. Things have been so interesting, what we’re being taught is something I really believe in. And I have wonderful classmates.

It’s been worth it, until now. Slowly, my walls have been worn down, all the protection I once had, gone (even though, I must admit, I’ve never been very cold or distanced to begin with, even if my behavior might suggest otherwise). Now, though, it’s like I have no skin at all. Red and raw, every single thing felt like a stab in the stomach.

A word from someone simply being concerned leading to me snapping.

Almost everyone going on my nerves, leading me to pick fights over completely unnecessary things.

An unanswered text message from someone I don’t even know leading me to sit down on the floor, crying.

A bad grade on an assignment leading to me questioning my entire existence.

It shouldn’t be this way. Have I passed that threshold, so incredibly close to the finish line? Is it time for me to give up? I’ll give myself a weekend in the cabin to figure it out. Tomorrow evening, I’ll be driving to Hundby.

A friend of mine is making a documentary about fathers. She has asked if she can interview me for it. I’ve said yes. It got me thinking about my father, and situations, memories, things that could say something about him as a dad.

My dad is a big man, and he has the answers to everything. He doesn’t cry. Except for in the case of death in the family, I only remember seeing my dad cry once. I was eleven, and we were in Venice. It was our last day, and I really wanted to travel by gondola. I had seen them in movies and I wanted to try it myself. But all the gondolas we could find were either busy or shamelessly expensive. It seemed like I wouldn’t be able to get a gondola ride this time.

I didn’t throw a tantrum or anything. I was just disappointed. And on a narrow bridge across a back canal in Venice, I suddenly realized that dad had tears running down his cheeks. He wanted to make my first visit to Venice perfect, and now I wouldn’t get to do the gondola thing. He felt so helpless and sad and frustrated that the emotions simply overflowed into physical form.

That’s how loved I was.

*

By chance, when we’d already given up, we found an affordable gondola with a very chatty, very Italian gondolier, and I got my gondola ride. The photo dad took of me, excited, big-eyed, with the gondolier in a striped shirt in the background, ended up on the front page of the biggest news paper in Sweden. As most trips I’ve done with my dad, this was research for an article.

The time was about nine thirty in the evening. I was sitting on the tube reading Agaat by Marlene van Niekerk, on my way home from French class. The book is for the book club. French class is because I, for reasons unknown, have decided I must do my master’s thesis with a project stationed in Burkina Faso. At the moment, I might just as well end up not doing any thesis at all. Desertified inspiration, so to say.

I hadn’t slept more than a couple of hours a night during the last three nights. The last month has been ridden by insomnia, this counter-evolutionary condition that I haven’t really suffered from since high school. The day had been a long struggle trying to stay awake, keeping my thoughts on track, accidentally snapping at classmates. Ask me how I am, and I’ll cut you with words. Collateral damage.

I was sitting on the tube, reading this long tale about South African inter-racial relationships, and a girl sat down across from me. I saw her socks first, the high, checkered, blue and red English style kind. Boots and dark blue riding trousers. She had been to the stable, breathing that pungent air, feeling the warmth, the calm, tangible presence of the horses.

I remember sitting on the tube after riding lessons. Years ago, almost all days of the week, Fridays and Thursdays and Tuesdays, Wednesdays. Feeling dirty and kind of awkward about forcing my smells on my fellow passengers – but most of the time also filled with a happy tiredness. Content in my exhaustion.

I was sitting on the tube, on my way home from French class, ready to drop – but oh, how I suddenly wished I was on my way home from a riding lesson instead.

It surprises me, every time, how light writing something not university related makes me feel.

I should do it more often.

Art in the age of DIY.