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.)

arriving

I'm home, finally. (Yes, finally. I was supposed to be gone for ten days but it became almost two weeks. These things happen on tall ships: they needed crew and I needed to keep on sailing.)

And now I'm sat in this empty house, tired and a bit sad and ultimately thankful to have experienced all this. Life throws us in such strange directions and sometimes following the wind is the only thing to do.

The places I've been and the things I've done during the past two weeks seem oddly detached from the rest of my life. And that is exactly what I love about sailing, this chance to leave everything regular behind. I live and breathe the ship and sea. I get to forget myself, completely and without a doubt. Sailing tall ships is one of the most beautiful things in my life and I need it desperately. It is an act of forgetting.

(Also: countless bruises, new scars, wonky tanlines on my forearms from all those rolled-up sleeves, tar and sweat and mud on every piece of clothing. Chipped nails and callused palms and I love it all.)

into the blue

Farewell, dear friends! I'm leaving tomorrow to go sailing for a week and a half. Wish me luck and great winds, okay?

(And oh goodness have I missed sailing. Physically longed for it. This time around it's a smaller ship and a smaller sea, but a ship's a ship and a sea's a sea so who am I to complain?)

friday flowers

Some flowers for your Friday. Aren't they lovely? (My Friday consisted of school and cafés and skipping ropes and sunshine and an impropmtu picnic and old friends and some nice, sturdy beer. What a way to begin a weekend!)

Yesterday evening I did some ship maintenance. I spent almost three hours up on a yard, at about 25 metres, with the Uspenski cathedral to my right, the mostly unfrozen sea before me, the setting sun on my back. It's gruelling work, but the view more than makes up for it. I hadn't realised how much I've been missing climbing. My hands are dry and full of cuts and plasters, but I don't mind, it just makes me feel like I've been working hard.

(more) anchors

There's something about this picture. Maybe it's just my endless fascination with tattoos. But, despite most of my sailing plans for next summer kind of falling apart, anchors bear my heart with them, as do ropes and pinrails and hardwood decks, and those delightful flying jibs.

can you hear that hopeful heart?

You anchor me by the consistently delightful Marc Johns.

Today the sun had almost risen when I woke up. After months upon months of darkness, that's the most hopeful way to begin a day. That, and skipping along the first dry patches in the asphalt.

(Also, I heard the seagulls cry yesterday, which, in Helsinki, is the only reliable sign of spring.)

This week has been made up of baking birthday cakes and wrapping gifts (six birthdays within two weeks!). I've also been taking my sailing plans to a whole new level - looks like I might join up to four crews next summer.

(And finally, things are calming down. I'm still slightly hopeless, every now and then, but I try to treat myself well regardless. I soak in all the sunlight I can get and drink spicy tea and every now and then I listen to this song, because they sing about happiness that can't be stolen.)

on days of combat, the crew would mix gunpowder with their liquor

 I was wandering through a bookshop today and came across a tiny collection of short stories by Jorge Luis Borges, among them a story called The Widow Ching - Pirate. So I marched right up to the cashier with the book hanging from my fingertips. (In a whimsical, childish, almost ridiculous way, I'm still fascinated by pirates. I mostly blame it on sailing.)

And because Borges is Borges, the story turned out to be an impeccable, graceful thing. It's about a female pirate called Ching Shih, who lead the most notable fleet in 1800's China. Battles and gunpowder and opium and liquor, all worded in a way that's bone-chillingly, achingly, haltingly perfect.


"And yet each evening, lazy flocks of weightless dragons rose high into the sky above the ships of the imperial fleet and hovered delicately above the water, above the enemy decks."

this is an introductory post

I was waiting for my crêpes in Paris and my face was doing something weird.

I've been putting off writing an introductory post for weeks. It's high time I grabbed myself by the neck, as we say here in Finland, and churned it out.

Hello. My name is Iida (pronounced ee-duh), I am eighteen years of age and I live just outside Helsinki. I'm Finnish but I was born in England, and I'm bilingual. I attend a high school focused on the arts.

I write, I read, I take photographs, I sail (tall ships, not yachts). I listen to quite a lot of music, jazz and 60's pop and this thing called indie. Pretty much anything with a bit of banjo and whispery vocals.

I am scared shitless by most things in life. I'm a perfectionist to the most ridiculous degree. I'm also inherently lazy and prone to procrastinate.

I'm chronically awkward and ridiculously self-indulgent. It's my second nature to keep a running record of my thoughts and feelings. Like most of us who write, I feel a desperate need to catalogue and define my existence, to pin down my life for fear of forgetting.

My mother wanted to photograph me in front of La Fontaine Médicis and my face resorted to weirdness again.

I've been seeing my therapist for about a year. I've been having a hard time coping with my (truly terribly low) self-esteem, my perfectionism, my difficulties in social situations, my self-harm. It's nothing you haven't heard of before but I have the misfortune of having to live through it. The good thing is that these days I find it much easier to be hopeful about my future

(And the most important thing about me, the reason I write this blog, what it all boils down to: I'm learning to be honest.)

dreams and dancing

Dreams are the oddest things, and in my dreams lately I've been climbing the rigging and then letting go and not falling at all but sommersaulting through the ropes and against the sails and almost flying.

Yesterday we danced and danced the entire day (a traditional ball held annually for second-years) and everyone was beautiful but none more so than my friends. After that we went gallivanting over icy seas and dancing some more (not so traditional at this point though) and I had to run to catch the train home at the darkest hour, between morning and night. And today I woke up to the pale cold sunlight with a raspy voice and hair like a lion's mane.

And tomorrow I leave for Paris. We're living exciting times, aren't we?