Abortive reflections on Swedish happenings

In the dying days of my year studying abroad, I had vowed that I would write something coherent, almost meaningful. It would attempt to reflect my experiences, drawing together the anecdotes of what became my everyday life. Yet for months I felt I couldn't, trapped between the fine details that together felt too abstract and disconnected, and the gently fading clarity I held towards the details even as they slowly pulled together. This isn't novel, merely the process of memory twisting and evolving as my brain continually tries to adapt towards the world around me. 

But I also noticed my own passivity that seemed to impact my thinking, removing myself from the life I was leading. In messages and in conversation, I would increasingly draw on phrases that distanced my role as an actor in my own biopic. Life was 'accelerating away', 'happening too quickly', even drawing on lyrical references in 'happening to me whilst I was busy making other plans'. For really too long, I tried to work out if this is a result of my own unwillingness or inability to process the unique unconventionalities of living abroad. The answer is irrelevant, yet the thinking persisted.

A summer has since passed, a uniquely busy one between newspaper responsibilities, commissioned writing projects, and the occasional procrastination that makes the rest of time infinitely more urgent. Only now, en route to Edinburgh for another year of study, have I dared myself to extrapolate what I can from what remains of my thoughts of the first six months of the year. Undoubtedly, it will turn itself into only a warped series of anecdotes, a perspective of my own memories. What lingers in my present mood will be twisted into something at best mildly interesting, but ideally still personally resonant. Consider the below my attempt at a warp, albeit a rather late one.

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My last piece, written around a month before leaving Sweden, touched upon the same sense of passivity I felt, even sharing in its quotation of a John Lennon lyric. However, I appear to have been preoccupied with deeper self-evaluation, examining the cynical voices in my head that, mercifully, have hardly troubled me since. Either they have reconstituted as stresses in other forms, or they have just dissipated into the ether. Perhaps key to my thinking then was my social environment, an extended period where those around me were largely on different timescales, approaching life with a unique urgency and purpose that I, a year-long exchange student, couldn't match. Friends from before Christmas largely departed, their semester-long 'replacements' subsequently on different timetables to me, reset in their adaptation and immersion to Sweden that I couldn't share in. Then, as my own bubble abroad neared bursting, stationed friendships reached a peculiar ending, goodbyes reduced only to the broadest intentions to maybe meet again in the indeterminate language of the future. It was not the concept of a nation that bound me to the goodbyes but the people whose lives will, and indeed have, continued to spin away from my own. Finality felt unnecessarily bound to an otherwise organic process.

Having thoroughly enjoyed the landscapes and language-learning in Uppsala, it feels inevitable that I will return at some point, my final ending undoubtedly postponed.  My fear of missing out, though not as strong as in Edinburgh, will persist. To run through the snowy silence of Håga, to cycle and sunbathe beside the Gulf of Ekoln, to live in a properly insulated building - such memories are fond, consigned to future replication and imitation. 

Snow in Håga on 1st April

By this point, it is almost tradition for me to end the year with a marathon - Stockholm's event would attempt to be a poetic denouement that brought in family from overseas, and more excuses to describe the symbolism upon completion. Yet such reflections fell away on course, first under the intensity of my starting pace, then the complete exhaustion of the final kilometres that saw me narrowly miss my goal, victim of my earlier overexertion and enthusiasm. Not that any deep reflections were ever likely, for running was always the thought tranquiliser, the means by which my head could, if not empty, then at least slow down, alleviating itself from the struggles and banalities of modern life. Not escapism from the real world, but short-term suspension within it. That and the intangible sense of inner pride it brought.

***

English classes in school used to love the caesura, the concept of a pregnant pause that halts the rhythm of the language before it, adored by poets and playwrights alike. In my mind however, the caesura is obliged to sit alongside other literary banalities - alliteration, iambic pentameters, and even the rule of three - as things worth highlighting on a page, ripe for a later drift into everyday irrelevance. But finally it is apt. In describing my medium-term memories, I have temporarily drawn blank. Unable to stir additional emotion or stories of vague interest, instead I am here, forced to reckon with what in my head existed as great prose, but instead languishes against the numb reality of my recollections. 

In lieu of further menial fluff, I will ponder the admittedly uninteresting conclusion that life has gone on. Time cannot be retraced on demand. Memories pass on into the library archives of my mind, its curator typically unreasonable and unreliable as a source of precise memory extraction. At least relative to how he used to be. In time, emotions will hopefully emerge from the mundanities, passivity will be passed on in favour of living in the moment, either seizing or attacking each day dependent on which motivational quote takes the fancy. I exist still trapped between details, clasping on the fading clarity of past memories. Only now, as the summer intermission and writing process today has maybe taught me, it is not the details that trap life in a fixed prism of perspective, but my own stubbornness to chase every last memory. It is an internal struggle, one not worth struggling over. It just may take time for my curator to realise it.