The cotton bud paradigm

When one goes as a student or intern in a foreign country such as Finland, there's one thing never to care about, to buy or to expect missing when the small amount of the travel stock is out. Something that, of course, one only learns living through it, something which can seem futile, but not in the way the evidence grows on: Cotton buds. One explanation would be a wrong estimation of how often one cleans one's ears, or a relative inappropriate packaging size, another one would have something to do with the accumulation effect in question here. Without shedding light on its starting point.

There were two full boxes and a half of those among the dozen of crammed bags I found myself with, amazed and helpless, a few days ago. Aida had been calling me late in the evening as agreed to hand them to me. She was a sauna-mate of mine in this now half-empty and drifting ship of Junailijankuja 5, where we used, she and I and a couple of others, to hang out on the last floor's terrace - more than a better-than-nothing here, the cheap luxury of the best we could ever get. Aida had been open and talkative the first time we met, she was halfway through her stay and I was in the early days of my life in Helsinki, and I talked about how it was, here, in Tampere, how strong my desire for other horizons was, nearly desperate in its abnegation and radical readiness, in a luminous way tinted with melancholy as it seems everything gets tinted with in this country. She seemed somehow relieved. "It is good to meet someone so optimistic." It had to, I thought staring somewhere beyond the concrete buildings surrounding our perched stronghold.

Aida proposed to give me the food and some stuff she did not wanted to throw away when leaving. She brought me one full bag already two weeks before returning home, after a funny episode when she took by accident my own shoes to her place. I was expecting the same amount, or possibly a bit more, as I went down to her flat to pick up the rest, on the evening before her flight back home. And I was given a whole life instead.

We hardly fitted ourselves in the lift and carried the dozen of bags up to my place. My flatmates glared to the unloading in the freshly cleaned kitchen with a visible hint of concern. Aida dashed off to finish packing and I followed her till the threshold of my flat, puzzled by her generosity and weighed down with a gratefulness I did not really know what to do with. She told she was so excited to come back home, and that it had been good but that it was now time to go. I stared at her waiting for the lift, in the corridor soon to be renovated, like all walls and floors, another layer of painting of a different colour, white-blue, white-green, yellow, through all years and through all which would have been lived there, all the arrivals and departures, all the hearts broken and all the instants of eternity. She smiled, still handy and her hair perfectly dressed, that girl with Croatian roots and living in Austria, her story I did not know more than that, and she rushed into the cabin and disappeared forever. The instant I stared at her in the corridor would stay forever, very precise and alive, in my memory, I knew it then and forever and knew also I would stare at this mental image again, after the last traces of my own stay would have been erased - when images would be the only remains of my life here, instants fixed and still for ever, and whose faint echoes of joy and nostalgia would yet resound from afar.

I closed the door and walked slowly to the kitchen. I began to unload the bags, a task which would take me hours; there was much more than one, or two, or three need to live for four months in a foreign country; tons of paprika, herbs and spices of all sorts, so much that our already cluttered shelf threatened not to take them all; flour and baking powder, white, brown, vanilla sugar in grains and cubes, everything needed to bake anything sweet and indulging, even two colours of sugar icing to write names on birthday's cakes; enough tea bags for a siege and a half; pasta, rice, instant soups, lasagne sheets and weird things I did not even have any idea what they were used for. She handed me a basket of bottles of cosmetics along with neat towels, one hundred of postal envelopes and a Finnish dice game; among this bunch of things, three boxes of cotton buds.

I had to throw away the one in which water from a bottle had been dripping in. On the shelf, in my room, were already two other boxes. The first I had bought back in Tampere, sometime in the autumn, when everything was still different, and imprecise, although there was things I already felt back then - but there were the late dawns in the colour-fired sky, and an all-instant amazement, and not too much of a close look on the future, and still so much more time to run. The second one I had been given by my first Polish flatmate and friend as she left, in a basket full of bottles of cosmetics and other stuff, in early December. I thought by then I should have waited instead of buying a new box. Boxes are passed from someone to the next, handed through our lives, piling and piling as people leave and leave behind a window of their lives, their hearts broken and moments of eternity. I shall hand the boxes to someone else, some new girl, fresh and amazed, to whom everything would look new, before time hollows out its mark on her. She might not read out from my eyes. She is very likely to have bought a box of cotton buds in the first days of her stay, another one to join the pile of boxes just opened and abandoned.

Anne was also leaving from our flat, on the same day as Aida, and she packed and cleaned until late in the night. As I was sorting Aida's stuff, she came to me with a small fat plant in pot and asked if I wanted it, as it needed only a little water and not to much care. As Asia was leaving from Tampere, she also gave me her plant, just about to bloom. I did not have the time to take a picture of the flower before it withered, so busy I was, and regretfully, as I promised myself to do it for Asia who was back then undergoing a heavy medical treatment. Cycles and repetitions. We joked and said the plant would still be there in five years, in a vague future in which we would visit the place again, and find it on some windowsill, older and maybe dried up, but still there. Anne's plant was taken to one of the open rooms before I made space for it on my desk, but it does so little matter now.

I gave up in the middle of the night, moved the unsorted rest to my room. The whole flat felt like departures and endings, the night was sultry and I was feverous. Fever made things looking strange and different, impressive and leaving their imprint on my hazy mind. I unloaded the last bags, those containing the papers and non-comestible items. In a notebook, some writings and scratches in German, very neat and organized. Aida was much to be admired, I thought rummaging through the cosmetics basket, hairspray and nail polish. She seemed to have an outstanding will. She was cooking like a chief as one could tell, always well-groomed, doing twenty things at a time, while I am struggling to complete anything within the weak and inconstant deadlines I even gave up trying to set me. "It is good to meet someone so optimistic." Strange. Surrounded by all those things which belonged to someone else, I felt for an instant looking from the standpoint of this stranger's life. The night still sultry had turned cloudy and black, and the fever sweating. I closed the door of my room on Anne, still packing, and drowned into anguished dreams, wrapped up in someone else's carefully ironed towels.