In the night, fallen so abruptly, surrounded by luggage ready to be closed, drinking coffee with Baileys for fault of milk, playing again and again Paavoharju, those songs sounding like the memories of a brilliant summer which would have never happened.
And however...
I can let autumn come now. There is renewed strength and beauty to tap in. Pure, simple emotion makes me cry more than sadness.
This is not an end. Crammed suitcases around, and music going through me, and this feeling piercing me right in the chest, lifting everything up.
The neverending journey, and a home in our hearts.
I wish I could never forget that. I think I understood something. And I love, love, love like never before, in joy and untold words.

The neverending journey, and a home in our hearts.

Haven't felt that lonely for years. It is not paradoxical. It is only that no one sees it as I do now. I would trample with anger on anyone's attempt to show commiseration, should it be the most sincere, since--I do address to the very most of all you--you cannot understand. A very few could ease it but don't.
Not that I would really be in touch with people. There are some levels of sadness which you can display out in the open, and receive with grace and gratefulness any signs of sympathy. There are other levels where it is much too serious to be told, and where one withdraws behind a mask of insensitivity. A wall too fragile, about to explode under the pressure if ever exposed to any communication.
I'm struggling against the memories, barring the way to everything that fatally rises and comes up when about to leave. Trying harder than usual to forget things more vivid than ever. It feels like I could have the strongest bouts of anger, and in a second fall into complete apathy, and not feel anything at all. I feel like rocks washed over by the sea. I cannot do anything to that, I cannot help anything.
And I am overdramatic. It is not pretty fair from me to say that. I'm just getting ready to throw it in the face of the first one to suggest half of it. Terrible to think that for a while now I can't help expecting the deepest wounds to be made just where it hurts the most, by the only people to which the fragile zones are accessible. A threat from the inside, or heart side.  Even sadder is the idea that I don't see myself able to make up any meaningful answer to it, an answer in which I would be right--rather furbishing arms, and hitting back. I'll be hard to disarm, though I doubt the very few who possibly could would even be aware they can try, or even care to realise.
Or maybe I just fear not to be taken seriously. Or fear this is in fact not to be taken seriously.
Sadness sometimes strikes me down, besides how it continuously empties me from any will or energy, it sometimes brutally takes all basic, simple living energy away, removes the ground from under my feet, and I have to lie down and am lying in my bed half-sleeping for hours.

Writing still helps, a bit,
This is here for one to acknowledge, and for the others to know they ought to stay away,
Not say a word, not have read it for it does not exist, for nothing exists, and for I don't exist myself.

Until further notice/

Hundreds of photographs, decapitated bodies, children standing amongst ruins, or dead, or starving, and mourning relatives; then the parallels between conflicts, and their absurdity, the reasons and forces behind them. Humour breaking into the representation of power. Patterns of belief, trances and worshipping of dozens different gods. The outbreak of technology progress everywhere, to the points where major issues grow sensible and visible. The State of the World. A sensible pictorial portrait, heart-rending on one side and cold, dizzying on the other,  just out of realizing to be only one in this world. Instants have now this bittersweet quality, bursting sublime into strange beauty, one that could reach the numbest of hearts.

Here am I, standing in this world.

I hardly have time to sit down and write, what no one understands really. In a sense I don't want to look at things any longer. I'm just doing and doing, an overdose of doing. It brings a lot of strength, some sort of constant moderated anger. None from just not seeing others following--this is past behind, I don't wait for people anymore. And I could feel this overwhelming force running through me. Drop the methods and get back to the source--I don't wait either for anybody to heed my warnings, I watch with Cassandra's fatality the things happening and think oh how tragic it is to be always ahead and having one's oracles believed by nobody, even oneself, by lack of self-confidence.
The other side of the coin is the loss of any reference. No one will believe you! Fair enough, I'm not gonna believe anyone in turn. I lost myself a bit on the way, I realise, but now it is getting back, even though I can't deny I also found myself on that way. The Fire!

We were six sitting around the table in that fancy Italian restaurant, halfway through the Paper Summit, I got answers to questions I maybe wouldn't have dared asking--"...and she has been of an incredible help!..." "If you still have the same kind of scholarship, please, let me know!"--so, yes, my work had been more than appreciated, and I was good, very good. What I had been putting down to a non-coincidental occurrence seemed finally a very simple result of personal skills. Things are never that simple, I know. Especially with regard to the horizon opened to me now.
Considering the idea, it might look like a step back--but only from a way which had never been really mine. Drop the principles and get back to the source.
So it seems I'm investing the position of power, even less visible than the one I once destined myself to. A structure drawing its immanent force from strong principles and rules--not so different then.
And a double life. I once wished I could be entirely one, to something or to someone; maybe this way will prevent myself to ever be so. And it wouldn't be without regret. But it feels like it had ever been so.

In the plane, I looked at the clouds and craved for cold and snow. Wrote the beginning of a letter, abandoned since then. It seems things are moving too fast to be fixed on paper. Interviewed with genuine interest the Mieskuoro Huutajat guys after a performance in a squat, the post-apocalyptic place anyone would exactly imagine, and no one would imagine being so much inside the city, hidden behind wooden fences. There were weird people dressed in outfits of all colors, immense metal sculptures of Jesus and insects, and paintings all around; in the middle of this, two dozens men dressed in suits and shouting European community law. The conductor was of a deep intelligence and sparkling mischief--I recall his hands moving in the air while we were talking, the missing tips of his major and index.
Met Jari and the Uumenet guys, slightly high after the previous musical nights. There was so much to regret not to have been there. I had a long conversation with Jari about magic and all that had been ever happening, until the conclusion that Oulu was a mindfucking city. Did Something-contests. Waved to the Moon and cheated on the beers. I would not have seen from the Night of the Arts much more than hundreds of youngsters apparently from the same range of age, gathering outside the fast-food corner.

In the dark, lying alone in the double bed of the hotel room, my back turned to an useless minibar, the hand clenched on the linen, I let the feeling slowly rise in me like a tide. This missed presence I was trying to forget washed softly over me.

Been hanging out most of the next day with a Swiss music journalist, from the incongruous lottery in a room full of eccentric air guitar champions to the upscale buffet in Town Hall. Coffee, tea, champagne, white wine, and then stuck to work with the rushed cameraman of ours. The weather could have been less hostile, but more too. I ran to every corner of the area to find organisers, climbed barriers to make pictures, pushed people to make my way through--this decidedness and fire are things you easily enjoy.
We were a few lifted above on the platform, mostly cameramen and -women. Thinking back at that, it was cool. But it did not have this wonderful marvel of any second, the brilliant edge all things used to once have. We carried all the material through the area, shot the interview of the winner, and Atti left to his hotel to edit the material--to drink beers actually.
I stayed. Maj Karma was already playing. All the songs sounded familiar, for so much I had listened to them. It was really good. And then Sodankylä came, and drew tears to my eyes. "It's a song about lovers living far away from each other." And hardly grasping what Herra Ylppö was telling to the crowd of young girls, thinking with a chill of dread the lyrics could mean something as much as the very opposite, I wondered, as I so much did lately, did I misunderstood? Did I only understqnd what I wanted to? What does it really mean? Se on surullista, tai ei oikeastaan... Maybe is it.

The empty stage and soon empty area looked sad and alone in the night mist. The band vanished straight after the end. I got back to my lonely room, had this article to send as soon as I could. No time for sorrow or catharsis.
Jaakko called in the night and told me a secret, since I was leaving early the next day. Upon finishing the article, the Sun could be already seen rising, by my upper-floor window. The rubbons of rosy light through the dark clouds, this vision overwhelmed me. There in the North summer was not completely gone. In other times I would have stayed up, maybe climbed on the windowsill to watch it. I did not have the courage. Turned away from the dawn, I closed hermetically me eyes until sleep swallowed me.

The morning was terribly melancholical. My hotel was one block from the PSK and I stared at the wall for a few minutes, seeing in it all the pictures taken there. My heart heavy as rarely, when thinking at everything running under those faces and images, the pain and the sorrow, all those things I already felt, since ever.
Said goodbye to the sea, and left the sun-bathed city of all Light.

The fire in the sky surprised me, and I was eagerly running from window to window to catch the last rays of the Sun, two evenings from now. The bloodred edge of the city, from my window; in a direction I stopped looking to, or locating on my mental map. There was like a sudden influx of blood in atrophied organs, and a forgiveness of everything ever done. I had stopped looking at the sky weeks ago, for it made me immediately burst into tears.

I don't want autumn to come before I forget what this summer could have been, and never will anymore. I already started to forget. These are not things to fix like fixing oneself, this is a brand, and one always forgets everything after some time, which is good when things can't be undone or repaired. 

There are good encounters, there are projects and endeavours; there are friendships tightening and there are depressions, diners in restaurants and final parties, events missed and persons missed. There are sunsets in a sky of fire. There is heart numbness. There is exhilarated joy. Places and times are never definitive, they are interchangeable. There are houses that will never be rent. There are babies that will never be born.

Candlelights will burn again, standing for the ancient fires at the altars of the temples.

Uncommon enough to see the earliest hours of the morning, when the nightsky turns to intense blue, and soon afterwards white from the light bathing the surrounding concrete blocks. The luminous mist wraps the scenery for two days now, and one could believe again there's nothing beyond the farthest tower to be hardly seen through it.
No sound but the humming of a nearby building airing system, the calm of a Sunday, and the deceptive light of a morning we wouldn't think so early give the feeling of an abandoned city.
I think a hint of curiosity pushed me to the kitchen the previous evening, where I found Topias gazing at the microwave.
"You make porridge?"
I had never tried it. I still recall Anne's peremptory judgement about porridge, and never went further than it.
Toby took the bowl out of the microwave, after the strange mixture raised a couple times dramatically fast. I stretched my neck to see what he'd do with that. "So how do you make...?" "Can you pour cacao on it? Apple pieces?" My weird ideas made him laugh, as he turned down all my proposals. Not many ways to do it. Butter, sugar, milk. I just learnt a few days before puuro is mostly made with water. I was not expecting that.
He explained how, as a child, he'd imagine the oat flakes floating above the milk level to be continents, and simulate plate tectonic with his spoon.
It looked interesting. I declined preparing one for myself right away and turned back to my room to finish typing another long and tedious summary of house research. Which however turns out to be a house finding, or nearly. The list of tasks, papers, people to call and letters to send is clearly displayed, black on white and cautiously written, in my mind. Looking really professional. Down to the slightest detail. Guarantors, sublet contracts, co-securities,all things unfamiliar but as always challenging enough to ignite my interest.
And so much more to do in a given time. I painfully recalled next day's lunch, and the pies to bake; and everything I was planning to do, and above all everything I could not plan to do. Next week would be so packed. I ought to get everything done about the renting by Tuesday, have another lunch on Monday, another again on Tuesday; people to call besides my work, and the paper summit to prepare along with the features, and all the rest for the end of my traineeship. Only one week to go already. And a week ending on Wednesday evening, as I take off to Oulu on Thursday afternoon.
It was so late already and I hadn't been doing half of what I wanted to. I went back to the kitchen, and Toby popped up immediately, eager to see how I was doing when coming to porridge. I purposefully prepared it with childish innocence. "Do you think it is enough? And, and, what do I do now? Do I really pour water? That much? Shall I mix it now?"
Done the right way, it was terrific. I had to call my mother and then first took the bowl, but gave up going to my room and stayed with Topias in the kitchen, devouring the thrilling-looking dish while discussing about different sorts of porridge and other Finnish things. She rang my phone, I called her back, for four times longer than needed as I had to repeat everything over and over again. Topias was drawing faces and spiral plants, psychedelic forms on a sheet of paper abandoned there by Marina, who was packing to leave for over a week.
We laughed about our parents' slowness of comprehension afterwards. I was so struck down by exhaustion, vaguely unwillingly whimpering at each step. Nothing more done, and I had to sleep. We'd see then. Couldn't do more at that point.
I barely slept. I barely sleep these days and scare myself looking at a mirror. I had been harrassed by insects for the whole of the night, and had no rest, but nor was I really willing to rest. It is not time to let go, anything. I am yet yearning for stopping doing for a while and being instead. But I cannot do it now on my own.
Sentences arise continuously to my mind, emerging from complete silence with a stunning concreteness and as alive as when first pronounced.
"Have you remarked how incredibly much of these white feathers there is along that path?"
"...when you look at someone so closely, that you cannot recognize that person"
"Look at the mirror!"
I start disliking here very much. Not the place, but all those people who arrive, cramming in the lift, all cheerful and new. They make parties. I got so far from that... This place is no longer my place, it is full of unknowns instead of comfortably empty. Those new people are exiling me.

A Moon revolution. We try, we seek; we trust at last. The control upon energy levels has changed. Many things have. It's about being in the world.
Gathering and charging, raising energy. Will. Even in pieces, ill and tired, sore in every muscle, still it holds high. The emanation of the resulting force is spectacular.

I return in my nightly domain, ever-longing for the brilliant foreign realms of the Sun. No longer the one taken care of, but the one to take care, fulfill duties and have the hand over the course of its estate.

And my dreams are flying swift to the remote light flickering at the horizon, which could as well be a mere fancy of the mind. Still to be believed to be there. The mild and calming Moon still is watching over you, tomorrow at the peak of its influence; sending wishes and thoughts, energy and care, along its gentle silver beams.

The feeling is pretty much the same. It's not a feeling, it's a mood. The bleak light-heartedness and moderated go-for-it impulse, the no-tomorrow and no-longer-care. I'm on the go maybe, and quite differently, on the leave.
However it is not as it has been. Nothing retains me here but me.
It feels like I found my connection again.

I am so tired. I don't feel exhaustion, live independently from it; I don't feel pain nor hunger. It is already so dark. Maybe a bit up North does it not feel dark so much. Words are difficult and tedious. I've been pushing everything further inside down, for now; so deep inside it has invaded sub-liminal zones, certainly taking there a life of its own. As if I was made of it.
I have this acute awareness to slip further down into nonsense and absurdity and that I have far too chances to be considered like properly mad and taken into some sort of mental prison where I'd be caged outside of myself instead of being confined inside. I know that I see everything deformed around. Which does not make me see things right.
Today was such a demented day. One shot of caffeine and my body did the rest. My eyes are far too wide open behind my sunglasses. I am spontaneously slightly hyperventilating and all my muscles hurt. Rushed. Dancing?
Is really the end of the world so close? There is war. There are Olympic games. It is intimately related. I feel like I'll suddenly stop walking, once, in the street, and that I'll shout my heart out among the frightened passers-by. Tear off my hair, the eyes staring at the unseen and rant about things no one will understand. A bit like in Twelve Monkeys. We would glue false moustaches to our faces and wear wigs. Or Wise Blood, but in another way.
Mind you, it's not as worse as when I felt so nervous that I feared I'd kill anybody by any brusque move of the hand.
I read somewhere about spiritual emergency crisis. I'll stick that to it for now. Spectacularly absolutely everything feels true. Some things are floating on the sea of absolute and contradictory truth, shining of a slightly more stable, solid light of trueness. I try to catch them when I see them, like brilliant golden fishes, into nets woven with words. I am piling syndrome upon syndrome. Impostor. Cassandra. Bipolarity. Maybe I am just a clown. Maybe I am someone else's dream. This would be nice though to stick to something for a while, just having an enough solid ground to bend reality again, and returning to a multiple-paradigm reality afterwards.
I recall a scene of a book, a fight involving a metamorphic animal, caught and struggled, and changing form every second to escape the grip, finally defeated and so exhausted it fell into its real, or most usual form--something of a certain trueness. So what is that so strong it survives desolation but faints before nothingness? A single star shining in the sombre sky, and a open wound I maintain open, as overwhelmingly strong in positiveness as in negativeness; it is the sweetest thing turned into a physical strain, innermost elongation, an ever-present dull pain; and would the inside world view be stripped off of all its unnecessary excrescences, the vague longing would ever remain. And as I toast to the past elusive moments of perfection and being-in-the-moment, to joy and inebriation, out in an alley impacted between concrete towers, in a party dress in the late afternoon, there is for an instant an unsubstantial shadow of happiness spreading over the scenery.
Missing from the deepest of one's heart, even in weird ways, even now withdrawing inside to the image of people swiftly bringing the picnic inside when the rain breaks, is the brightest sparkle of truth I could find. Shining like gold in the deep waters, or like a fallen star in the bottom of the sea. Some deep place nets made of words can hardly reach.
What's real is on hold for now, mending for the both of us; in the meantime, furniture and walls are dancing at the limit of my vision, and the back of the reality's skin is seething with energy.

All is full of love
You just ain't receiving
All is full of love
Your phone is off the hook
All is full of love
Your doors are all shut
All is full of love!

And now a thousand of letters waiting for their reply

It feels good to be back, at least in one's own heart. Time is flying now. I am not sad anymore, nor afraid, or so do I feel until I feel it. I wouldn't have yearned for so much clarity, this straightforwardness of everything, the solidity of reality--not doubting yet a second of the nature of its essence. There still are these issues bigger than me, the little girl, which I wouldn't even dare having a glimpse at. For these, a bird's eye view, insight, or mere presence would be greatly appreciated. But what have you done? It feels like I lost my connection, and to my absence of overwhelming panic while considering it, a safe trust in the all-potentiality relates more than the earlier loss of sensibility.  It heals me every time; past tricks make me smile again. Still missing, now like an old, past, sweetest dream. Things unravelled I yearn to weave again.

First and foremost, so as to prevent anybody to be mistaken by my strange idea of birthdays, I have to disclaim that yesterday was my own birthday. I'm still younger than you thought.

It is a chance I accept with a sort of relative indifference becoming insane, at that point where normality and absurdity are the very same. So I put on a dress, changed my handbag for a fancier one, put on lipstick--oh my, hadn't been doing it for ages it seems--and headed downtown for an imaginary birthday dinner with myself. A colleague at work had pitied me and given lunch coupons, so--at least the dinner would feel like a present of circumstance.

At last the storm had broken on that day, the office although fully staffed felt so much like Friday, so more relaxed, not really busy, talking about this and that and standing by the window looking at the welcomed rain and obscured light.

In the evening, only the relieving remained, and a fresh wind at last. There was far too many people for that time in the city centre, as shops are open until late. I walked for a while, lazily undecided about which restaurant to choose. This is not as if I was in the mood for any special kind of food, this also I lost, and making up my mind upon criteria such as vegetarianism proved not very effective. I wanted something really nice, not a packed-up place with noisy people staring at a dressed-up girl eating alone, some place with softened lights, regular table service, and atmosphere, somewhat French way.

As I walked along Aleksanterinkatu, and perhaps that's the only reason worth telling all this, I thought back of that day which I had spent calling analysts, and eventually meeting some of them at a presser. Strikingly similar young guys with their suits and their ties. I imagined calling them for dinner. Hello, can I speak to...? He's in a meeting at the moment? Fifteen minutes? Okay, thanks a lot, bye... Hello, Julie Breton from Reuters, would you be available for dinner? We would sit face to face at a lover's table, he'd be all nervous in his suit, and I would ask: Can you comment on that pasta dish? And he would give me his outlook for the pasta market in the second half of 2008 and his estimates for 2009 taking into account a possible further rise in the ECB's interest rates, and the loss of profitability for pasta dishes in regard of the increasing raw material costs such as of tomatoes and pork, and detail the risks ahead for the pepperoni production, and how the Finnish parmesan market is pressured by Italian imports.
I bursted into laughter in the street, and fortunately no one cared around. The idea sounded tremendously funny to me. The laughing came from a bit deeper than before, lasted a bit longer. Felt strongly insane though.

My final decision stopped on Rafaello, in the same Aleksanterinkatu. They had salmon soup and fancy desserts as expensive as the main dishes. I was seated at a single table near the door, but it was nice. Not many people around. Quiet. And on top of all, it felt like a real restaurant where you have to wait a life to be served your dish. The salmon soup was decent, not the culinary extasy I imagined, but perhaps I am wrong thinking there could be much more or better. Maybe I'm happy and I just don't realize it. The bread was fantastic nevertheless, Frenchy baguette straight out of the oven. In contrast to the dish, the dessert was notably excellent, a top in restaurant desserts so far.

While waiting between dishes, I read through the messages on my phone, the oldest dating back to almost two years ago. I like keeping some as benchmarks, as receptacle of the whole memory of the moments and events they're about or around. Or just because they make me smile, touching, recalling friends. They were gaps of several months between some. I had to stop at some point. "You make me happy." I held back the tears and took a sip of ice-cold water to chase the memory away.

I stood up to pay as soon as it was done, and as I was waiting at the nearby checkout, I looked back to my table now bathing in the passage's yellow light, to the rest of tap water in the glass wine, the only plate. It looked so very sad.

I paid with the lunch coupons, calculating that the rest would be fine to invite friends later--whenever they'd be able to stand on their foot or hold a fork, that is. Out in the street, the sky was already so darker. Young people were playing melancholic classical pieces at the streets' corners, as always. The echos of the melody followed me to the harbour. As every Friday, people are gathering there with collection cars, but outside of the neat rectangle of the marketplace, it was all quiet. A ferry-nightclub was mooring, broadcasting eerie dance music through the silence that was floating over the water. And then a grand sailing boat came to moor. I was alone next to the old markethall, and it was gliding straight to me, sails down, in the silence, as if no one was on board, a ghost boat, the Finnish flag only floating on top of the mast. There actually were a lot of people, tourists or guests of some sort, on it, and I escaped as soon as they started singing to thank the company.

I walked back slowly to the train station, detailing the shopwindows of Pohjoisesplanadi's design stores. The faint light in the northern sky shrank into a tiny orange line by the time I was back home. Here we are then, the night is back, and I can hardly believe that exactly one year ago nights seemed so vividly and amazingly bright. Much brighter than where I was coming from. You get too used to these things; it makes me quite sad.

Aug. 1, New Moon

At that exact moment one year ago, my plane landed on a runway of the Vantaa airport. I sighed out of bliss, smiled, and watched the trees from the shopping gallery of the airport.

* Edit: OU PAS

It does not look like the best day  for a birthday. This is but not something one can choose, so we'll celebrate nonetheless, against all odds, we'll gently smile through the drizzle, we'll try to lighten our heavy hearts.
Back in the early days, there seemed to be a blackout and infinite void beyond a certain point, the end of a cycle. It is finally not true. New perspectives always spring up, to the image of stairs, or boards, gathering under the feet of someone walking above a bottomless pit, navigating by sight in relative darkness, cautiously going forward as there's no other way, step by step.

But back in the early days, there had been wonderful days for a birthday, which for once felt like true days of birth. A long way to here and now, from first words to deep, so much it sometimes hurt, entwinement. Memories still clear and neat a few months ago have strangely vanished, and I cannot any longer get a recollection of these first moments, now resting as dried flowers in an album. A lot of things along these have lost their emotional load. Perhaps for the better.

Looking back to the time past, it feels slightly like would feel an actor used to play a role and suddenly thrown into the real life in that very role, much different that he expected. That's the real thing. Looking back to the naive marvelling of before, it now just blows up the mind. If you thought that was it before, oh so wrong you were.

Life is ever-mutating, from one paradigm, one construction, one order of cycles to the other, to finally just be as it is.
Everything is. 

Finally, if it isn't the best day for a birthday, it really feels like a birth day.

It feels like a dead person dreaming of her past life as if it was her present, a bit like in Lynch's movies, like in Mulholland Drive. The opaque curtain is drawn, outside the window is only an infinite blue, as immense and terrifying as the sky, with the ever-dying immobile light. Nothing exists outside of the room. The Sea Priestess does exist much more. It reminds me a collection of short stories, for kids, about Lovecraft, a book I read too young enough to have nightmares out of it. In one of the stories, a boy found a copy of the Necronomicon, and invoking a formula made the whole world disappear and dissolve. He was watching from his window the buildings and roads break in parts, going away forever. This room is a furnace. I feel already dead.

While you are away
my heart comes undone
slowly unravels

so when you come back, we'll have to make new love

if you weren't there
to show me it's true
never ever I would believe it by my own

I had been expecting each new access of shattering desperation, each further of these heart-wrenching, soul-wrenching, accelerated downward spirals to draw me too close from the sanity borders, and that I would once fall without return or salvation, and forever walk in an endless living nightmare. The sham and sultry appearance of life took an even more absurd edge. The lie in my head, mensonge, men-songe, I was so terrified to sense as if it was concrete, spilled over into reality -- to a relieving point in a way all the more absurd, when finally, the whole world twists and whirls in an obscenely pressed tango to the same beat as the chaos pounding in one's head.
Mensonge, men-songe. I've been misled by a treacherous dream, illusion brought through a gate of ivory.
I still struggle to make sense of it all.

Time got distorted on the news, if I had ever though it had been before. A day felt like three, which helplessness did not help. Walking down the streets to the train station after leaving off work, after calling everywhere, spelling ten times the same name to foreign correspondents, surprising myself recalling exact addresses I had never been to, getting at last a feverishly written number on a fragile piece of paper, I realized I felt as if an immense wave of nothingness had been washing over me. Everything in the surroundings looked faintly funny. Emotional zero point. There had been too much in the previous hours, going in too many directions. Stepped on the train, dropped by my flat, took books and forgot various things ten times, returned there and back again. I absorbed myself in short fictions and wonders on the way, onboard the old train and mild summer light flowing through dusty windows. I guess the difference of language is a substantial one coming to appreciate these short stories. Wonder though if I might not be right feeling like each of them contained such a great deal of sadness; most of them, about wounded love. A same nostalgic sepia tone tainting the whole collection. But perhaps it was only the colour of my own sunglasses.

I stepped off at the wrong station, cared so little for where I was exactly heading. It was so little about that, at that point I felt myself slipping off reality so utterly and desperately. The axis around which the concreteness of this world was revolving and crystallizing was lying somewhere on a bed, in a small anonymous room of a remote hospital, suffering from the consequences of a most absurd injury, and the idea itself sounded too absurd to be true or believed. A living, tepid nightmare, much less frightening than twistedly, horribly slowly unsettling.
I walked in streets having no relation with the mental map I had been drawing, would have noticed it much before in other conditions. It was after all not the strangest thing in these days if places were also twisting and changing places when one's eyes were not on the map. I anyway just needed to head toward anything, just couldn't remain paralysed and suffocating, whatever I would head toward, however long I would walk or wait in a corridor and however little were the chances I'd be welcomed there, in any sense, so I took that train and another back, walked in unknown places and unnamed country road under the blazing sun, not even caring about how hot it was in my formal suit and how much my high heels were not made for walking.

On the way I thought about the Schrödinger cat theory applied to hospital rooms. There would be a closed door and all the possibilities behind, only one of them realized when opening it and the multiplicity of all kept true until opening it. The exact half of a girlfriend. Some random parts of relatives, legs, arms, spread over the room standing or holding a glass of water, or another hand; a trunk sitting on the armchair next to the bed, and a fraction of a bunch of flowers on the table. In the middle of this, an avatar of Kali, sleeping, eating, reading a book, talking on the phone, staring at the ceiling in silence.

The way was insanely long and the surroundings surreally nice. The premises were small and lost in the flowers, some I plucked on the way. The hospital itself seemed to have been designed for children, like all hospitals maybe, where most people fall back to their earliest age, fed with a spoon and unable to walk, in need for care of any kind. I was told to follow the white line among all the colours on the plastic floor, and the small-feet-shaped and flower-shaped stickers leading to the children unit. I wondered if there was bastardized departments for innovative maladies. Children's psychiatric unit. A brown straight line and flowers and footprints twisting around.

I took the lift to the fourth floor and inquired with a somewhat ridiculous discretion about the room, afraid that someone would hear me, or the nurse, and think oh so foolishly I was going there. It was not supposed to be like that. I sent a single message, sat down on the corridor sofa, regretting immediately not to have chosen the corner chair, so that no one would notice me, all dressed in black, in formal suit and high heels in a remote countryside Finnish hospital, and reading books for hours. The calling alarms biped every other minute. Guys were rolling slowly in round, along the corridor, their wheelchairs squeaking as they passed by me. I concentrated on my book as much as I could, and it was not as if I had no interest in what I was reading. It was yet a sort of very polite and intense interest, striving to be genuine. The voices I couldn't help listening, entangled with the constant sound of the restroom TV, my heart was missing a beat any other minute when one rang closer than the other, sometimes on the edge of a plain and simple stop if I thought having identified Swedish. To the point I would afterwards feel sick only staring at the bilingual boards of the train station.

I'd have pretended being anybody, there for any reason, and threw some pretexts and weak explanations when I've finally brought to you. I guess I have been acting like a robot, or someone just drawn from bed, or out of a book on which one is concentrating as if concentrating enough would turn the reader into a piece of furniture. Did not care, once again, about having been so easily recognized in spite of all the attention given to the said book. I only saw in a dreamlike haze the door, the room, the green curtain, and through it I saw you lying there, and all of the nonsense fell down and collapsed like demolished towers and faded away upon the crash into reality. All this pain and all this grief, how nothing else in the world mattered but what was going on in the little room of the countryside hospital; your fragility hurting me as an open wound, a pain challenged by the utter way I could see how sad are birds confined in a cage, be it the cage of their own body, and all the more when used to fly freely. And on top of this mountain of sorrow, striking me so hard in any of its incarnations, the profound, gnawing sadness to see you so faintly there, suppressed by a medication yet given for a temporary better. Your arms barely flitting, with effort, and then falling limply on the bed. And us standing there around, not caring for anything else in the world. All of us pounds of bare pounding flesh, sore, and trembling, and nothing else.

Illusions were dispelled, and I felt deeply out of place, deeply wrong, a caricature of myself, a drawing amongst real people -- like in this ancient dream, wearing my face as a mask in my own mental masquerade, a black shape only made of lines, black glasses as the only face, standing stiff and still besides that bed and not able to say anything bright with my black thoughts and black magic. I had been wondering again before whether I was finally a Chaos or Order agent; and realized being a double agent meant being on the Chaos side in any way. It is not tinted with fatality as it could have been before, though. I left the room and the corridor my flickering sanity hanging from a single sentence, the yelling guy of Hysteria shouting silently in my head as if trying to overcome the silence of this hospital; followed the white line back, going out in the melancholic late afternoon light, among the sepia flowers; took the first bus I found going to any train station, sat down, and cried my heart out behind my sunglasses, not even knowing anymore why or for whom at all. Sorrowing for the entire everything and yet feeling acutely empty. The immense clouds in the vast summer sky were actually there, I knew; but the entire scenery I saw as flat as a theatre set, even worse, an entire life on a movie screen. The tears I shed along the way back I wiped relentlessly. I thought: My love is gone with my lover.

I am now trying to reverse the process. I am still trying to make sense of it all. Reality, as strange as it may be, is standing a bit more by its own. I wonder which role I held in this subtle divine affair whose whys and wherefores escape us. I still wonder if sense should be made of it all, at all.