six months

Six months of complete silence. My apologies for that.

Six months, which were somewhat unintentional and somewhat completely intended.

I don't really know what happened and I don't really know what's happening right now, all I know is that I've missed this, so much, and the words have been bottled up for long enough, building up in the bones of my fingers.

So much has happened, you wouldn't even believe me if I told you. I've moved out into this ridiculously perfect apartment (like something out of an Astrid Lindgren book, something that should not exist so close to the centre of Helsinki, but somehow does, and somehow here I am), and I am living alone, and I'm studying at a university, and it's not what I had planned but it's somehow pretty darn good either way.

(And, I won't say more than this, and I don't want to jinx anything, so touch wood, but there's a possibility of a place beginning with L and ending with an n. And every time I think about it I feel like puking and laughing out loud, simultaneously.)

I don't know if anyone will be reading this, I don't know what I'm going to do about this whole blogging thing, but I needed to say something, so here I am, ending this radio silence. I hope you are all well, and I hope the past six months have treated you with all the kindness you deserve.

July

Tonight the fireflies
light their brief
candles
in all the trees

of summer—
color of moonflakes,
color of fluorescent
lace

where the ocean drags
its torn hem
over the dark
sand. 

Linda Pastan

thoughts on the wind

(I wouldn't mind it right now if someone whisked me off my feet and took me someplace by an ocean.) 

Summer — summer — summer! 
The soundless footsteps on the grass! 






John Galsworthy: Indian Summer of a Forsyte 

do not look for me

Maybe one day I'll stop torturing myself with pictures of the sea, but that day is not today. 

(The white curtains in my room look like sails sometimes when they billow in the breeze and
I find myself coiling things like the cord of the hoover just to do something familiar with my hands.)

Those who fear the border
do not know they are walking on the sea. 




Luis Benitez, from The Pearl Fisherman 

i leave my rage to the sea and the sun

Liz Clements's illustrations are spectacular. 

This is the kind of girl I'd like to be, if I were brave enough. 

Pictures on my skin and wings in my hair. 

don't ask me why, i'll tell you no lies

Yes, I know. Months of near-silence and no explanations.



There are no proper explanations, I guess. But then what is there? Unfinished posts festering in my drafts. Lots of late nights working. (I have a summer job at a cinema.) Lots of nights spent watching films in the comforting darkness. (Summer job at a cinema, bring it.) Friends and music festivals and all that.

Getting into university. (I'll be studying English at the University of Helsinki come autumn. Not my original plan, but I'll take what I can get. I'm actually very very pleased, and relieved.)



The truth is, I've been feeling blue for quite a while now. Like I've misplaced my happiness and peace of mind and can't for the life of me remember where I put them. Like I set them down for a moment and turned my back and suddenly they were gone, and I keep telling myself to look where I last saw them but they simply aren't there.

In part I think it's anxiety over my future, but mostly I think it has to do with this being the first summer in four years that I don't get to go sailing. It's painful, almost. A cut in my finger, constantly there, constantly aching. And I can't help but poke at it.



I'll be okay. I know I will. Things pile up and suddenly you look around and realise you're not where you thought you'd be. But it turns out to be okay, I think? Tonight I went to see Le Skylab, the new Julie Delpy film, and leaving the cinema in the evening sunlight with my shoes untied felt like a rebirth. Or maybe not a rebirth, a re-reckoning.

night's dream

Traditionally, on Midsummer night, you should gather seven flowers and place them under your pillow for the night, so that you could see your future spouse in your dreams. But I think I'll rather go dancing.


I feel like I've finally caught up with summer. This morning I woke up early and walked the almost-empty streets of Helsinki. Summer mornings are what I love most about Helsinki. The sea, the breeze.

thursday links (sculptures, whistling, falling in love)

A song for warm summer days.


A sweet Brazilian short film.


How to find out who you really are?


Children meeting sculptures.




(Days are warm and windy. I've been working and travelling by train and sleeping in. And playing the ukulele and listening to a lot of bossa nova. I've been reading The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides and Anil's Ghost by Michael Ondaatje, and rereading Katherine Mansfield's short stories and a lot of Salinger. What have you been reading lately?)

after the quake

Here we are, then. Is this how one is supposed to feel afterwards? After the end of life as we know it, after twelve years of education.


Far too many flowers and presents. A silly hat and ultimately quite painful shoes and the most beautiful dress. And in the evening, dinner with friends over the rooftops of Helsinki, drinks, dancing, wandering about, crashing into bed with the birds singing at sunrise.



free, adjective
1 able to act or or be done as one wishes; not under the control of another
2 (often as complement) not or no longer confined or imprisoned



A confession: I'm scared.

I'm trying to find my footing, trying to find something to do, something to be.


But first, a summer. I'll find myself a ukulele, get back to playing. Take up swimming. Do the things that make me happy and try to figure out what exactly I plan to do with my life now that I'm almost unbearably free.

on graduating

This is my chosen theme tune for my graduation. Hopeful, wistful. Beautiful. 

I graduate tomorrow.


I can't believe how fast those three years passed, and how much I managed to grow in that crackle of time.

So allow me a few moments of nostalgia. 



The past few months have been all worrying over exams and summer jobs and everything that comes after graduation, after our lives are blown apart. After the end of mapped-out, planned-ahead life.

The past few days have been tears and rehearsals and disbelief. Cleaning and cooking and receiving far too many cards and flowers.

But the past few years. Three to be exact. They have smashed me into pieces and helped me build myself up again.

I have become a better writer, I think. A better student, maybe. A better friend, certainly.




These are the things I will miss.

My teachers.
The classrooms and the corridors, the stages and the stairs.
The performances. The endless enthusiasm, the constant outpouring of ideas.
The buzz beneath the mundane, the excitement of being a part of something.

That sense of belonging.
 
The streets of Kallio: the drunks and the hipsters, the cafés and the dodgy bars, the flowers and the vomit stains, the erotica shops and the beautiful library. The trams and the seagulls.

And, finally. My friends.
Because the friends I have found in and around Kallio, the people we've gathered into our mutual orbit, these are the people I don't want to let go of. This is the most difficult, terrifying thing about graduating. This fear of loss.

(But I think my fear is mostly unfounded. A bit premature. We have all summer, after all. These three glorious months.)



Before I start crying: I think these are the years I might miss later on.

When I was little, my mother said about missing things and people: It's how you know you care. It's how you know you had a good time. It's a sign of love.

until they forget

by Richard Siken

final days

I graduate on Saturday.


Yes.


I don't think I've ever been freer than this.

I don't think I've ever been more terrified. I am scared shitless.


These past few months have slipped by and suddenly we're on the cusp of summer. The maple outside my window has leaves of rich green. The lilies of the valley hang their white heads at the side of the road.

This spring was slow and grey and I still haven't cast off my winter skin. I'm pale and I haven't yet dipped myself in the achingly cold sea. Have I told you about the sea climbing into the lap of Helsinki?


I surprise myself over and over with this ability to bounce back. I never knew myself to be this defiant, this capable of lifting up my chin as if begging failure to throw another punch. It's fantastic. To be quite frank.




(I promise to tell you about my two days in Auschwitz and Birkenau and my single day in Krakov. I promise to write about my plans for the summer and for my gap year. I promise to write about my feelings regarding my gap year. These are the things I need to write about.)

what we're afraid of when we talk about anne frank

Last week I went on a school trip to Auschwitz Birkenau. This is my final essay of the course (and also my final essay written for school ever). I thought some of you might enjoy this. Here goes. 

What We're Afraid of When We Talk About Anne Frank 

"Because of a religious education, my sister and I were raised

 with this idea of a looming second Holocaust. We would play the 

Who Will Hide Me game, or the Righteous Gentile game." 

Nathan Englander (Guardian Books Podcast: Anne Frank, 24.2.2012) 

"No, it's not a game. It's just what we talk about when we talk about Anne Frank." 

Nathan Englander: What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank (Knopf, 2012)

In the short story, two Jewish couples engage in a macabre thought experiment: in the case of a second Holocaust, who would protect their family. Who would hide them, bring them food, who would face the risk of death for their sake?



I had been thinking for quite a while about my feelings regarding the Holocaust, this interest bordering on the obsessive, this umbilical cord I've built between myself and the victims. It is of course understandable that Western culture keeps returning to the Holocaust in art and in research. But what about it reels us in, us as individuals? Why do we flock to cinemas to watch the latest Holocaust film, why do we keep reading the latest books and articles? Why do we keep talking about Anne Frank?

According to author Nathan Englander, we treat the Holocaust as a symbol. ”What we’re talking about today is the legacy of the Holocaust, the idea of it. It’s not just that there’s the historical thing, the genocide; there are these pathologies behind it, this idea of how fear works. People were comfortable in Berlin and in Paris [during the Second World War]. Your world can snap at any time and just become a world of betrayal.” 

The Holocaust has become the ultimatum of our capacity for evil, ground zero for immorality. We use it as a measuring stick for our own moral integrity. This comes down to two questions that we could call games if they were not so endlessly serious. We have Englander's question of who would save us, and we have the possibly more dangerous one: who would we save, and would we really?




And in the end, it is not about who would help us, but about who would not. It is not about who we would help, it is about the possibility of remaining passive, of being a silent witness -- and worse still, of becoming a perpetrator, a killer. 

Talking about the Holocaust hands us anger, fear and sorrow. These are the feelings we acknowledge. There remains a feeling we rarely address, a feeling that hides so deep within us we rarely notice it: guilt. 

When we talk about Anne Frank, who has become a symbol of purity and innocence, despite her unabashed mischievousness, we feel the same secret guilt. We fear our own darknesses, our own weaknesses. We fear the way we cling to our safety, our loved ones, our comfort and our routines, over helping the persecuted. We fear the version of us who avoids the gaze of the homeless man asking for money, who stays silent when a person of colour is treated to a round of verbal abuse on the bus, who does not join Gay Pride parades, who cannot converse casually with a physically disabled person. We look at the smiling young girl in the black and white photograph, and in her eyes we find an accusation we have no answer for. 



I do not know if there are people in the world for whom being good comes naturally. I do not think so. Doing the right thing is a choice. The Righteous among the Nations recognised in their reflections their capacity for evil, they looked their own darknesses in the eye and turned away. There are no good people. There are only those who are courageous and honest enough to do the right thing, and those who are not. 

It is dangerous to think of people as either good or bad. It is just as dangerous to use the Holocaust as our moral thermometer. Remembering the Holocaust is vastly important, but we should not let it overshadow the discrimination and the disadvantaged of our time. It is too easy to repeat the mantra of Never Again and neglect our mistakes and our hidden persecution. It is too easy to light candles at Holocaust memorials, to read Anne Frank's diary until the pages crumble, to cry furiously during the end credits of yet another film, it is too easy to beg for forgiveness for sins we have not committed. We have the responsibility of recognising the sins of our time, so that the generations to come will not have to feel our guilt.

  

glass in the park

time lost

The longer I put it off, the more difficult it will be.

So here I am, after all this time. All these unfinished posts in my drafts.



First there was a laptop that stopped working. Then there was an old laptop, unearthed from some cupboard somewhere. It huffs and puffs and shuts down unexpectedly.

But then, these things wouldn't really have stopped me had I actually felt like writing.



I lost my calendar far too many weeks ago. I've lost track of time and of my plans, of birthdays and weekdays and dates and of my body.

I'll find it, I thought. As soon as I go out to buy a new calendar, I'll find my old one. 

So I've struggled by, and suddenly it's May and I don't know how I've arrived here. I haven't kept a diary, I've lost my calendar, I feel like I've slipped out of time. I can't remember what happened when, I can't remember where I'm supposed to be and when and why.

I've met people and got a job for the summer, I've opened the season of nights in parks, I've read poems and novels and textbooks and it all spills out of my head if I don't write it down.



Enough now. Tomorrow, a new calendar, a new diary, some fresh pens. The familiar loops of my own handwriting. A homecoming.

For Grace, After a Party by Frank O'Hara

Meditations in an Emergency, 1957

thoughts on failure

I feel like I'm writing about the same things over and over again. Which is why I haven't posted much lately. But there are heavy thoughts I need to kick around a bit. So bear with me.


This spring I failed to get into university.

Right. I said it.


Obviously I don't know what you think now, but I doubt it's Oh my goodness what a pathetic little girl, probably the most witless of all the witless, why am I even reading this idiot blog, if I saw her I'd point and laugh. (If this is what you're thinking, please do not consider it necessary to inform me.)

But this is very much what I think.


I am bad at failing. For the past month or so I've been holding my breath. Waiting to wake up.
So far I haven't.


I haven't talked about not getting into uni with anyone at all. I didn't want to. Still don't. I just went out and bought the books I need to study for the entry exams of the University of Helsinki. And remade my plans. I've done the mature thing and still I feel more like a child than in ages.


My worst fear all along has been the pity. The pity, the surprise. The disappointment. I have feared the reactions of my friends and family because, and I know exactly how irrational this is, I thought they would no longer love me if I failed. So I've kept it all to myself.

Can I be completely honest with you?
I'm really lost with my life right now.
And it's terrifying.



Also, it's good. In that annoying self-help kind of way, that disgustingly cheesy rebuild-your-life, have-a-gap-year, figure-out-who-you-are-and-what-you-want-to-do way.

I'm not going to lie, not anymore: it's a constant gruelling uphill battle with a voice in the back of my head calling me names. It is no fun.


But it is necessary. It is, on that self-help level, good.

I'm drawing up a map from scratch.
No, not from scratch. From everything I know about myself. I will find my way.



After all, what I needed to hear was that the people who love me still love me.
And guess what?
They do.

(Also, a friend of mine sent me this video, in which the brilliant 

Hank Green answers questions about growing up and adulthood. 

Someone asked, How do you get past your insecurities?

Hank's answer: If you fail, I will like you more. 

Which was exactly what I needed to hear today. )