Grey clouds hangs heavy over a Stockholm that is buzzing not out of excitement, but out of necessity. For those that hurriedly head between the metro to the store to back home again, the wind tucks in hair and open jackets. People are not afraid of the pandemic, but there is a heaviness in the air that is not exclusively based on the weather.
As the air becomes increasing parts water, people run with their faces contorted as though in pain, tucking their jackets tighter to their bodies. Shielding oneself is a reasonable response to the forces that surround us. But what about the defence mechanisms that comes from having no external forces effect you at all?
As many times before, I am at at my favourite cafe in the local vicinity of where I have been camping out for the past 8 months. What once were my father’s room when he lived with Granddad is now my hideout as history repeats itself like a scratched record. The cafe is run by a guy from Peru and the constant flow of Latino dance music is conquered by offering a more than decent cup of coffee, excellent empanadas and the biggest pieces of cake in town.
I am here escaping the confined space of not only physical walls, but that emotional box that has buried my soul alive. On repeat I am shrinking, smothering my feelings with rational. Knowing I can’t do anything to change this, I can’t do anything but accepting life as it is. So I block my instincts, my frustration, as best I can by eating too much, watching another show on Netflix and brutal self-denial. It feels like I have morphed back into someone I perhaps was once, but who provides an ill-fit to what my mind contains now and my body has experienced the past 20 years. As the wrinkles keeps accumulating I am like that teenager I was, subdued and self-inhibiting, passionate about all the wrong things and ignorant towards myself.
I know it’s not fully fair, but have grown tired of not having a particular reason to get up in the morning. After this shit-storm of unemployment and rejections I want to find a meaningful job. I want to have an income and no longer have to rely on my parents. I want a social life. To have someone other than blood relatives tell me “good job” or “you matter” or “yes, I’d like to do that with you”. I want to sit on a train to somewhere exciting for no other reason than arriving, or maybe just leaving. However, even as I am writing this down I ask myself what right do I have to complain? I am blessed by circumstances that I have had done nothing to deserve. And should I get all of that, would I not simply revert back into the stressed and unhappy person I sometimes am when I am most myself? It’s a circle argument, and I know it serves no constructive purpose, but I can’t help but getting myself lost in what the meaning for anything and everything actually is.
I am a firm believer that we are responsible for our own emotions, of our own reactions and that we are the only ones that can change our pain into something else. But at the same time, people are real shits sometimes and sometimes things happens that lies outside of our control. How that fits into the equation is something that I am still working on.
Some idiot of some sort or another, once claimed that everything happens for a reason and it has haunted humanity ever since. What is this cosmic order? Is it God’s plan? Is it karma? Is it self-fulfilling prophesy? Or is it just a load of *beep*?
Despite me finding fault in the idea of there being some massive meta-physical order to the chaos that we know as life, it does provide a sense of bittersweet calm to lull yourself into the idea that all, both good and bad, that takes place does so for a reason. Even if that reason is only for you to delude yourself into that calm in the first place.
