Sweden Notes

Travel blog

I stop at Target on my way to the airport, lumber past the evening crowds with my duffel bag weighing down my shoulder. Buy two disposable cameras, and when I stop on the subway platform I throw them in among my underwear, two dresses, running shoes I’m not convinced I’ll use. Maroon and fraying at the zipper, it is a canvas bag I took from my mom’s house years ago, an object that suggests great significance but really just figured prominently in my childhood, this specific color and its rare and somewhat ceremonious utility—packed into the trunk of the Subaru for the long drive to California, slung over my dad’s shoulder. And it matched, or echoed, but only in my own constellated memories, the old t-shirt my mom used to wear—white, navy waves, an insignia I don’t recall—from Hawai’i I think, and it had holes in it, and somehow it was so essentially my mother, of a particular period of my childhood when my mother was like that—my mother—and I was her daughter, young and toe-headed, a bowl cut, a beaded anklet.

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But if I enter these tunnels of pointless nostalgia I will be forever underground and dragging you with me. So anyway I get on the plane. I fly to Sweden. In Sweden it is cold and damp, and my friend meets me at the train station carrying her wedding dress in a bag with ribboned handles. Writing an account of what happened is mostly subtractive, a cutting away. Though it’s not so much actions and events I am inclined to include too much of, but images and details that give way to more unsequenced details: cigars behind glass, a delivery app open on the phone between us, the pink sky over the apartment buildings and the orange lamp reflected blurrily in the window, orange peels in the freezer, the air mattress on the floor. In the morning I discover that my friend has made little piles, which we will soon transport to the wedding venue in the back of a van, while I slept through the lit-up night, and a poster instructing guests on which toppings to use on their hot dogs: Swedish style, Korean BBQ style, Mexican style, Canadian style.

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I do not want my friend to know that I have not yet settled on a poem to read at the ceremony, so I tilt my screen toward the window while we drive through the Swedish countryside—saturated colors and big cartoonish clouds, spires poking out from the hills. I can’t get the James Schuyler line—you my bright particular—out of my head, and nothing else quite compares. I’m not sure if choosing is supposed to feel like knowing or just picking one. Is the poem too simple, too short, sort of cheesy? Will I get nervous and pronounce the “bull frog basses” with a short “a” instead of a long one?

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On the third night I keep track of the light. There is a ceremony with a priest, and it has been moved inside since the sky is precariously grey. I wear a red dress, which I realize too late is a little big—I tape it to my skin. There is a house for dinner and a house for dessert and a house for dancing. There is a house with a taxidermied fox dangling from the claws of a taxidermied hawk hanging from the ceiling and inside this house is a secret room with a bar and velvet pillows. In the dancing house a woman says the trick is to order a double negroni instead of a single. Outside my friend’s mom catches me up on the family drama and the sky is a milky blue, deep and long but not quite dark, illuminated from the inside, but where is the inside? It reminds me of the Meg Freitag poem where she compares the sky to a plum, as if “some needful giant / Was holding a flashlight to it” from the inside. And then this pale gauzy light hovering around the edges of things begins widening, and the night is over.

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I am always leaving the party too early and feeling sad or staying too late and feeling sad. Walk from the ancient bowling alley on the castle grounds where everyone is setting and resetting the only four dusty pins, yelling at each other to get out of the way, back to my cabin. So quiet out here. For hours all the pink light floats on the water.

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Wanting to take notes and not, wanting to read and not, wanting to think about the James Schuyler poem, how its first sentences set up an easy narrative which then seems to slip, just a little, when after those “afters”—”After / swimming, after sup- / per, a Tarzan movie, / dishes, a smoke”—comes not whatever it is the presumed couple does but this short fragment: “One / planet and I / wish.” How you think it’s going to end there before that last word, one planet and I, this suggestion of mutuality, being a part of the world, but then it tips into desire, a hazier feeling which does not quite cancel out the initial sentiment but complicates it, becomes a part of the planet, of I, of us. And now I’ll always see this poem in that particular blue shade of not darkness in the middle of the night, and not, not not not, though that begs the question what am I doing while I’m here, what fills the hours I fail to spend writing? How the texture of the day is at once both more and less real than the texture of a sentence, how I can never get past this, how everything returns to this, how it does not, cannot, end, and the short poem seems to unravel beyond itself into the “expanding / universe,” the “so many / galaxies.”

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I drive back to the city with my friend, her sister, her mom. I feel like I’m in high school again. We gossip, whine about our hangovers. They argue with each other and I laugh quietly in the backseat. My oldest friend recently had a baby, and I’ve experienced something by proxy I’ve heard new mothers say—that you expect motherhood to transform you into a new person—that other thing, someone who knows, a Mother—but really it’s the same confounded, clumsy old you, now with a baby in your arms. I have this feeling somehow here in the car driving down the Swedish highway, as though I should feel a little different, know a little more than I did the last time I listened to my friend and her mom fight over which road to take—we are in Sweden, I am in my 30s, I remembered my passport without anyone telling me to. We reminisce about the dinner my friend hosted in her living room once before a school dance, the long table we’d set up in the living room. I asked my secret crush to that dance. I wore Janey’s blue dress. I was so shy then. I nearly caught my bracelet on fire reaching for something across the candlelit table. I am still, even now, even here, myself.

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In Stockholm I stay in a houseboat hostel in a neighborhood someone told me was the “Brooklyn of Sweden.” Traveling alone makes me feel very young. Very from the middle of nowhere. I begin to have the old feeling of everyone looking at my weird walk, my wrong way of opening doors, my obvious lostness and ignorance. I am thinking about myself too much, I know. Stockholm’s muted warm color palette in the rain. Yellows, faded orange, rosy almost-pink, and these tiny cobblestone streets that curve uphill. I buy a bottle of sparkling water at a grocery store and recite its funny name in my head.

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Later I sit at a bar drinking Swedish gin. Navy strength is too strong for me but it was what they used in their classic martini. I am planning my return—I always do this while traveling, as though when I return everything will fall into place, it will all be different and new. I remember doing this as a kid at the end of every summer, setting my goals for the coming school year: be kinder, be braver, make new friends. The bartender gives me a list of Stockholm bars I know I won’t get to. It’s already getting late.

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In the morning I zip up my duffel bag, arrange my books in my backpack. I wear my clogs to lighten up my suitcase, and the heel strap keeps slipping off my foot. People walk very fast here. The morning light is indiscriminately grey, flat and dull compared to last night’s holes in the clouds and the buoyant orange light reaching through, making a few buildings, thin spires, appear as though pasted into the grey landscape from some brighter color scheme, some sunnier planet. Alone, I am buried very deep inside of myself, it is like standing at the bottom of a deep well, very separate very far away from the whole world I do not speak I move quietly through the city, but here it is a new city, all new, I am moving across its grey waters, through tunnels of yellow, I am looking out over the dock at the buildings in a neat line, sturdy and elegant, I am falling into my own echoey silence and I am looking all around.