It was always 6 a.m. when I returned to Uppsala.
The centrum was deserted and I could see Eastwood’s ghost at the taxi stop, cigar in mouth whispering into the morning wind.
Not even a bird in the sky,
and the only thing more dead than my legs was the battery on my camera,
which was a pity since the orange red houses are at their best at dawn,
As slumbering Sweden rises into the day.
But this is a city.
Not the italian riviera.
And if spring is come here it does not smell of pine trees, nor feel like salt spray on my face and sand between my toes.
The cold remains.
I make it to Arlanda somehow… too early or too late, doesn’t matter, and in my delirium I sit by the bus stop and hum Stan Roger’s tunes
Last Watch on the Midland
Northwest Passage
McDonnell
Until I know that I am insane.
The last bus driver is warm. We know the same early morning pain.
The only other passenger is a young girl who gives me such a bitchy look of disdain when I make way for her that I can’t help but return the feeling and sit in tired silence
Always this exhaustion. Sleep deprivation. RyanAir crowded and hot, too cramped to stretch out, and I’m too tall to sleep on the tray, either leaning into the passage or on the old italian man next to me, no sleep… and I want to know sleep. My legs feel like they will fall off. My legs feel like they could walk for days. My brain can’t tell the difference.
Wandering around Stockholm a few hours earlier, kicked out the T-central in the middle of the night, the underground, and McDonalds as the gates of civilization close in dark succession until I’m walking passed columns that smell of piss and homelessness, laughing at the cabbies who promise me a ride to Uppsala for less than a hundred dollars. I wasn’t born yesterday, you smiling thieves, telling me that my American accent means I have the money to spend. Go fuck yourselves, please, and leave me alone in the dark. Bumped and jostled by the drunk townies making out and falling down with equal abandon.
Sleep deprivation. That drugged out space that stretches outward towards oblivion. When tetris on a 10 dollar phone becomes too challenging, skitterish blocks whose colors and shapes can’t be understood…. and yet the secrets of life, love, and saving the world seem somehow closer, crystalline and graspable.
The river is booming. Brown coldness through the heart of Uppsala. Cigarettes litter the street outside the bars, a cobblestone field of corpses spent in Saturday’s revelry. The only company is a grinding of footsteps behind me on the pebbles. Which I soon realize is my own. I’m being followed by my own echoes. Winter is dead. Wearing clothes that reek of travel and socks that should just be burned.
Easter dawned. Christ arose. And I went to bed.
