All in Life
I needed It to stay away. I was so scared of It coming back. I’d kept It away by thinking of happy times and happy moments. Each one gave me only so much time. It ate away at my joyous memories and eventually burned through them like fuel. But I knew. There was one place, with memories too good, a place where every room rang with laughter and held the warmth of sun rays in the floor, a place where I had always been happy.
I truly have always hated early mornings. I don’t feel grumpy per se, although I have been told I look like I’m ready to murder, I’m just slow to start—like an old PC. I don’t think I’ve ever woken up naturally with the sunrise. And I’ve always had a strong distaste for those inspirational morning quotes: “the morning is full of possibilities” and all that crap. The whole day is full of possibilities if you ask me. Silly morning-person propaganda, I thought.
As time goes by, boys become men. However, their habits do not always change. My brothers never grew unaccustomed to their gleeful neglect towards maintaining order. As teenagers, we used to joke about the second law of thermodynamics applying to housekeeping; in view of this, cleaning became redundant. Still, after moving out, I feel as though housekeeping suddenly became a way for me to express myself.
An album creates a whole; a collection of songs that together tell a story much wider and complex than they would alone. It feels like nowadays I just tend to listen to individual songs and kind of miss the big picture that an artist or a band is creating with the whole of an album. But every now and then I’m lucky enough to stop, take a moment, and listen to the whole story instead of just hearing the beginning.
For Barán, the biggest cultural difference has been how much people care about others. She feels that the people in Benin are so much more interested in each other, and so much kinder than what she is used to in Finland, where, she admits, it often feels like people simply don’t care about others’ daily concerns such as flus, stressful life situations of funny everyday occurrences.
My hands are sweaty, My heart beats too fast (not fluttering like the wings of a bird but
thumping like stones being thrown into water).
I’ve said the words “no, Finland doesn’t have polar bears” about a dozen hundred times and friends’ birthday parties were actually massive barbeques. We took a car to a school located 300 metres away and our burglar alarm went off almost weekly. I’m a third culture kid, nice to meet you.
The sneeze-like sensation warms up your long-time memory and drowns your consciousness in expired feelings. The voyage of déjà-vu can take you from overwhelming happiness to sinking sadness in a couple of seconds. It acquaints you with your memories afresh, releasing what I am addicted to: nostalgia.
You might look at the year that we have had as having been a year of loss, a year of death of different sorts be it more tangible as in the case of Carrie Fisher or the hundreds in Aleppo, or more abstract as in the things that some people think that were lost in the US elections. As humans we tend to reflect things through our own experiences and this leaves me in a strange place. You see it could be argued that I wouldn’t be in the university right now had there not been death and loss in my life.
