Well done, little paper-skin girl
Björköby residency — blog#2
It feels a little like arriving on location for a week-long school trip, or a summer camp.
The Ädelfors Folkhögskola covers a substantial terrain on which a central building houses a reception, kitchen, common cafeteria and several multipurpose conference rooms. All around it lie a number of unattached bungalow lodges, each offering ten bedrooms. The tired guests trickling onto the premises in the course of the evening (fetched from a nearby train station by one of the many SmåBUS volunteers, or arriving by their own means) are welcomed by Mrs. Joke Guns, who is in charge of the festival and has taken on the role of first-rate camp leader. We get to check in, receive a badge, and drag our luggage to where we’ll be staying. “Are you hungry?” Joke inquires, as she walks us to our rooms. “Good. Supper is being served in the cafeteria as we speak.” Get a move on, kids.
The hotel is in charge of distributing rooms to the participants; I have been appointed a room in lodge 3, looking out on the central building. As I wave my badge at the entrance eye, Joke continues on with Jurgen all the way to lodge 6. I let myself into my room, drop my bags on the floor and look around. Two neatly made beds, a night stand, a fully equipped bathroom behind a sliding door.
I dredge up my phone from my bag and fidget with it for a bit. No urgent messages or breaking news items. I leave my bags as they are and walk out of the room again without as much as sitting down on one of the beds. It’s been a long time since I felt so lost.
It turns out I am not the only one who is having a summer camp feeling. We all joke about it, but I honestly have some serious adjustment issues. Those have nothing to do with the location or the festival as such, and my mind knows this is going to be a wonderful experience. But right now, at this exhausted end-of-the-trip moment, the entire setting is summoning just a tad too many personal memories.
Cut off, like a plant taken from a pot without its roots. That’s what it felt like when I was ten years old. Class excursions were an ordeal, school trips including sleepovers were hell. All day long I would walk with a heavy weight, bordering on panic, in my chest. While my classmates were laughing, singing, running around and enjoying their lunches, I was a quiet bundle of misery counting down the hours until we would finally get back on the bus, homeward bound, to that place where I did not have to be on my guard all the time for unexpected and therefore threating stimuli or assignments that made me uneasy since I wasn’t sure I was capable of handling them, to that place where all was familiar and where I cut put things in their proper context.
Today, I understand that this was the defence mechanism of a hypersensitive child who was at that moment not yet rooted deeply enough into her personal center to interact with the world in a more relaxed way.
I had outgrown this panic decades ago. Or so I thought. That is why this feeling of displacement and uprootedness is catching me by surprise, quite unpleasantly so — right when I thought it would never happen to me again, it is smirking at me with its scary, hollow mouth.
And just like in the old days, I am incapable of hiding it. During the evening meal Jurgen gives me a worried look and asks why I am unsually quiet. I’ll be fine, I assure him, just leave me be, although I am less confident than I sound.
But the change is made more quickly and more easily than I feared, that very same evening even, when I roll into a pleasant conversation with both old and new acquaintances. When Jurgen and I sit with a few Flemish illustrator colleagues and receive a bucket of heartfelt praise and respect for STROOM, being handed down and read around the table, I can feel myself ‘landing’ and centering.
Still a paper-skin girl, that quiet bookish child, even after all those years, I catch myself thinking a few hours later, when I let myself into the bedroom that still feels bare and empty and lonely but in which I do feel less at a loss now.
But perhaps this short set-back wasn’t all that crazy, after a whole day of travel. I was at the train station at six in the morning, staring out of a completely dark train window. There were no unexpected complications during the journey, but all in all we were on the road for twelve hours, before we could finally put our bags down in the school camping grounds.
Journey in shorthand:
Meeting Jurgen at the airport; tunneling through the checkpoints; waiting in transit; finding out at the last moment that we have to run for it as the gate turns out to have been changed; turning out not to be seated next to each other because we only checked in that same morning and have to content ourselves with the leftover seats, an arrangement that does get Jurgen to have an interesting conversation with a documentary maker and me to take a series of photographs of the sun reflecting on water masses along the way; waiting for more that two hours at Copenhagen station (time enough for a quiet lunch, but there is hardly anything that qualifies as decent food — we make do with the fastfood chain for sheer need); perching for half an hour on the most uncomfortable platform chairs ever, trying to write and draw a bit while waiting for the train; more than two hours of train ride, during which the landscape turns ever more appealing and I manage to finish my first blog; being picked up at Nässjö station; spending a squeezed hour in the backseat of a car between writer Edward van de Vendel and a Swedish illustrator I do not know, trying to have a conversation while in the front Jurgen is stretching his legs and exchanging a few words with Han, our driver and Joke’s husband; at last arriving in Ädelfors. Piece of cake, right?
But it is going to be alright, I can feel it already. The warm conversation with our colleagues has lifted my spirits, and I feel more confident about the coming days. Tomorrow I’ll be on my feet, promise. And it’s going to be fun. I’m looking forward to it.
Well done, little paper-skin girl, I think to myself, switching off the light.
