Life, with the garden
Location: Uppsala, Sweden • • • Visit: Autumn and winter 2012-2013
I moved to Uppsala to study peace and conflict studies. I had dinners and game nights, often, with Frida, Marita, Hannes, Jocke. I stole fallen apples from the neighborhood gardens – better that I make sauces and pies and dry them into snacks than that they rot on the grass, forgotten by too-busy house-owning university professors.
To choose writing.
I love quotes. Maxims. The idea that one can capture life in a sentence. A handful of words. It thrills me. The simplicity and beauty.
Life is rarely simple. Neither is it always beautiful.
Someone once said that the only reason for being a writer is if you have no other choice.
But how is anyone to know that? There are always choices. From getting out of bed in the morning, having butter or apple sauce on your morning porridge to what to do with this relentless, undefined longing. Some are small, others huge as mountains, but they all mean taking one more step on the path of life. Some choices take unpredicted turns. It’s not always easy to know where a particular choice might lead.
You can choose not to write. You can choose to stop eating. To stop eating won’t make you happier, but it is a choice.
And I wonder, would writing make me happier? Did I make the wrong choice somewhere? Would it be possible for me to make that choice again, make it different – or is it too late?
Snowflakes covering my eyes.
I’m sitting on my kitchen floor, with a perfect view of the top of the birch tree, the light grey sky and the falling snow. I have an exam in three hours, and I really should spend this time doing some last minute studying – but I just can’t concentrate.
Snow has always inspired me to write. I remember sitting in my 9th grade science class writing poems instead of learning about esters and carbon chains. Poems about snow. Or in high school, when I spent entire psychology lessons writing snow filled short stories, not caring about the id or Pavlov’s dogs.
Maybe it’s because of the metamorphic power of snow. How you can wake up one morning and the world outside your window is something completely new and different from the world you went to sleep in. How it can turn the very mundane into a fairytale.
That’s what words should do too. Maybe that’s what I’ve been trying to copy.
So that it’s hard to concentrate on American security policy and the broadened security agenda when it’s snowing, that might not be that strange after all.
And in the freezing cold of January, just a couple of weeks before I moved back to Stockholm, I took an afternoon walk in the snow and found myself in the Uppsala botanic garden greenhouse. Small, the moist air misting on the glass. Breathing in, the air has flavor, soil and leaves and flowers carried on tiny droplets of water.
Not large enough for long explorations, but still a welcome reprieve on a bitingly chilly January afternoon.
It is odd, with time, and how things change and stay the same. How the weather can change your mood and people come into your life without you really noticing at first. And others leave, without saying goodbye.
That it’s possible to like someone, without really understanding them. That understanding someone doesn’t mean that you can stand them. That love and proximity isn’t always the most constructive combination.
That people leave marks in your life, little scars, like souvenirs – and that some of them are so much more sensitive than others. That I’m sitting here with a fresh wound, leaking with memories, that was left there more than four years ago. It doesn’t hurt, but rather, I’m sitting here watching things pour out of it, fascinated. I thought it was healed.
I saw Iron Man 3 at the theater with my brother tonight. On the way home, he started telling me about Silmarillion and it hit me. He just turned eleven. When I was eleven, I moved to Tanzania and had my first crush – both of which were experiences that would change my life forever. And he is there. That little baby who could cry all night through and who made up words for imaginary creatures. I wanted to hug him and cuddle him and sing lullabies for him, but we don’t do that anymore. After all, he is eleven years old.
And on the couch, when I got home, was my roommate, stretched out, watching Game of Thrones. To have someone to come home to. And not being able to stop talking until way after midnight, even though it’s an ordinary school day tomorrow, doesn’t that mean something? This tingling, not being able to go to bed just yet, having to write down these words first – the extraordinariness of it all.
I have trouble motivating myself to dive into the scientific articles I must read. There are so many other trains of thought that cries for my attention, and they all make me feel so alive. Is it okay to fail? Can I say: I didn’t manage to finish my thesis, because I was busy feeling.
Of course I won’t. But the mere thought thrills me like you can’t imagine.
Katja Malmborg 