A (love) letter to Stockholm
Complex feelings for the city I grew up in.
Dear Stockholm,
You and me, we were not a love story.
We were brought together by circumstance, by a whirlwind of events at a time when I was too young to understand who I was. My parents were still at the steering wheel of my life, guiding us to security, comfort, a better life. Guiding us to you. I came to you from another place, a place I was rooted in, but that will never be home. “Russia” was becoming just a word to me when we left it, my hazy homeland turning into foggier and foggier memories in my pubescent mind.
For those first formative years, Stockholm, you were a brand new world. You were dark mornings on deserted bus stops. You were children taunting me in barren hallways, new schools every year, getting used to never fitting in. You were bright, sunny summer evenings that never quite warmed up. You were my friend’s hair dyed pink. You were grass so green and skies so vast, air clean and icy sweeping into my lungs. You were my sisters’ laughter. You were home, but at the same time you weren’t. I did not know home, and I got used to a life where home was wherever we made it. But as soon as I could decide, I told myself that you were not it.
All I knew was that I needed to be elsewhere. Far away, where the waves crash over the shore. Where the sun warms the dusty pavements and palm trees sway in the breeze. Where dreams are made and broken. I needed to be someone else, and how could I become her with you all over me, reminding me of who I really was?
So I left you, and never looked back. Priding myself on being the one who took flight, I rambled over continents, getting drunk on being as far away from you as possible. I danced until the sun came up in Los Angeles. I walked over cobbled streets in Florence. I let strange men take me to dinner in Milan. I sat in hipster cafes in London with my laptop, pretending to be writing a masterpiece when, in reality, I was doing soulless copywriting for yet another fashion brand. I had Prosecco on the beach in Brighton. But I always came back to you. Sometimes unwillingly. But I always did.
I felt free in the many new realities I had chosen for myself. Did I miss you? Perhaps, but I never let on. Not even when darkness fell and all I could hear was my own breath in the silence. I still run back whenever I need a place to hide. You might never have been my haven, Stockholm, but so many times you were my only safe space.
I stand in the square in Gamla Stan, its colourful architecture towering over me. How am I really different from all the tourists milling about? You’re still not fully mine and you never will be. I pull my gloves off, tapping on my screen for Google Maps - yes, I grew up here. No, I don’t know where that place is. Ah, it closed down? I had no idea. I am vaguely familiar, a local but somehow still a guest. Memories of here and there filling up a fragmented mind. You’re still a mystery, Stockholm, and I guess you always will be. After all these years, the distance between us lingers. Whenever I get closer, I’m reminded of your cold heart. I burn my fingers on the ice and retreat, like a wounded animal.
But there are the odd moments when I shiver with a cup of coffee on my mum’s balcony at sunrise and recall a time when you were all I had. When my dreams lived under your skies and nothing else existed. When I did not yet know how to hold the pen in my hand to write my story, you were the first blank sheet of paper in front of me. I think of all the things I have now, that I dreamed of back then. When you and I dreamed together, Stockholm. My breath catches in my throat and I push the memories to the back of my mind. Perhaps because I’m scared of how much I still love you.