a devilishly beautiful, chaotic pause
#216: when work takes a backseat
On pausing to note and reflect on what is, here and now.
I’m sitting by the balcony window, a crepuscular blue washing over me and the window sill. It’s a little after 5pm on a February evening. It isn’t as cold this week as it was the week before. After enduring through -10 degrees, 6 degrees feels like a mild summer. A guy I crossed on the street outside was wearing a see through tee shirt and a light down jacket. As I type the words out on the keyboard, the screen tries to stand out in this spectacular blue, omnipresent light all around me. In the last few months I suddenly found myself in a place of a forced upon, chaotic, devilish pause from work, from all the ways of life and living I had known till now, from the churning, constantly moving ways of the humdrum. And all of this in a small northern European, Scandinavian city.
Here, life’s cadences and priorities are at a marked departure. And that would impact my approach to life, I would realise in due course. Here, children as little as 6 or 7 years old do their own grocery shopping, women as men walk around the roads of the city and it’s suburbs at all and hour of the day, forgotten gloves, mittens and purses are left in the spot where they are found so their owners can come back and find them as they’d left them. The trees are respected, given space to accrue roots, home and life, as are the animals. There are no stray animals only birds. The seagulls screech low and shrill on grey days like today, singing and sometimes crying alongside us humans. The ravens streak dark and appear like cuts against the gloaming sky. The kids wander off, chasing a spider or a cat out on a walk. There are roads to ride your bikes, to run, to walk, to drive your cars and to ride the trams. Everything (most things, at least) has a system, a dependability, a taxidermy.
All this is to say that here, the world here lies in the pitch of these trees, the pointy shrubs, in the gravely rutted roads and in the shrill and quiet of the birds. The hill we walked up last night to reach our friend’s house, the stairs we take to get to the main road from ours, the sweat that gathered underneath my breasts, the spare glove I found around the bend of our street last week, and those unending, long winter nights of December and January — these are the places where I now live.
At first my days robbed off of the ball ache of work, felt meandering, spiraling out of control. I myself was floundering. The hours became shapeless, amoebic in their endlessness. Dark, long, subdued winter days (or are they just nights) added to the glum confusion. A preternatural sense of chaos.
With the passage of weeks, I was able to parse through in these days and nights, an aching clarity, evoking an expansive stillness. I carved a timetable for myself, starting my mornings early, adjusting to the place, the light, the lack of it, the sounds and the lack of them, the water and the endlessness of it. This passage of time captured, in a way, the essence of these furtive, rare, live-wire moments, that I had never been privy to. Soon, I was spellbound. Almost beholden to the cinematic quality that had taken over my life where time felt at a pause.
I had always wanted a life where I spend time staring at trees, and in Goteborg, I am spending quite a bit of time staring out the windows at the row of trees that separate the villas from the streets that cut through the area. I am new in the neighborhood, in this city, this country, this continent, this way of life and therefore my life and face has taken over a new quality of invisibility. And since I am faceless, there exist an absence in the shape of me who watches the trees. There is no me, then, simply the trees as they are unto themselves. A lot like me, these trees hide underneath their bare branches, an absence where once leaves where. The odd deer here, a smattering of some birds, the woodpecker in particular, drop by, but mostly the tree just exists in its bareness, with the absence of leaves. An amorphousness at the core of both of us — the tree and me. Both present, and yet, absent.
This winter, my first in the Nordics, the skies I see outside are mostly laden, burned and repressive. They take on a character of their own in the twilight hours, in the relentless drizzle that defines Gothenburg winters, in the pouring smog that descends on the resting, rolling hills, and in the first rays of morning sun. But this unending gray also brings out a whole new scale of beauty, colour and complexity to the streetscapes. On some nights, I am wide awake staring into the blue outside the window, as the built form, especially in canal-lined landscapes of the city centre, would take on a beauty so resplendent, overwhelming and sublime of their own accord.
*
Today, I found myself loitering in a part of the city that’s midway between our neighbourhood and the city centre. In its hilly terrain, discovering locked up old houses, boutiques inside some of them, long laid out dining tables inside some, and a deadend with a beautiful sculpture of a young boy, I came across a cat on his perch, sitting majestically not expecting to be disturbed by a stranger on a Saturday afternoon. As I tried to pat him, the cat hissed back at me, pawing me away. In that moment of tiny rejection I felt jubilant.
One thing led to another, and I was nibbling on chunks of tangy Kiwi, when a long phone call with my mother ended and my airpods played Wolf Larsen’s If I Be Wrong midway. I used to listen to this song a decade ago, holding my dear life in my hands. Not understanding much of it, I had held on to it because of a purity at its heart. The melody, lyrics, the haunting, visceral poetry. I had in a way submitted my life to Larsen’s Cohen-esque poetry. With the passage of time, I moved cities, countries, jobs, friends, selves and forgot entirely about the song and my submission to it. And I mean it, I really forgot it, going for years sometimes not listening to it. And then earlier this week, just as suddenly as it had disappeared, the song resurfaced in my mind.
First as a distant memory, a clandestine melody, a vaporous, analogous something that felt unputdownable and yet completely alien. I tried hard to recollect it, but kept running into a knot in my chest. Until it came back to me, first Larsen’s name then the lyrics bit by bit, and then the fog lifted entirely and there it was — “I can hear you tap tapping at my kitchen door, I can hear the river run and the river won’t… .” I remembered Larsen’s Kitchen Door like a childhood poem, and If I Be Wrong like a prayer. Listening to these songs, in this new geography, a new way of measuring time and the self, I can vaguely recall the face of the 2014-15 me, those sunsets with the then me, the sufferings that had then seemed so immense. Here I take a pause, a break to give a warm tight hug to that former self.
On my winter walks here I’ve come across kelp, rime ice, frosted dirt, frozen lichen. I come from the tropics where more often than not, for a long period everything is melting away and for a small moment it freezes back into itself. I listen patiently to these odes from a former self, while writing a paean to my future self, walking into the spring, the meadow, the hopeful siren streets of the present, the here, the now. The now. That is.
Recent publication:
Here’s my first byline of the year for one of my favourite literary magazines, LitHub, Finding Comfort in TV That No One Else Is Talking About, where I consider the pleasures of watching (not-so) old television shows to calm the nerves during a time as jumpy as the present.