Omnes Elegiac

I went walking through Uppsala for the last time tonight.
The last straggling revelers were limping home from Stockholms Nation, the way they always are, and were waylaid by the cunning trap of Johanna's Grill Stand, where a line waits eternally for kebabs. I wandered the narrow streets of downtown, passed all the old places I kept meaning to go into and never did, and finally sat on a bench by the silent river, watching the sun go down and then come back up in the amount of time it took me to drink a cup of tea.
The wind was there too as I visited all the tired old places, but it was quiet; despondent. It used to make long speeches and shove me hatefully from behind during the long straight walk along the cemetary road, but tonight it just sighed through the trees, saying:
"This is the way the world ends,
This is the way the world ends,
This is the way the world ends,
Not with a whimper,
But with a sigh."
For the last time I looked up at just the right time to see the high, lonely pinprick of light where a woman was putting her life in boxes in a bedroom in which I'd spent more time than I intended, but less than I'd have liked. The world has the feeling of those first amazing days where everything is new, but it is as though I am seeing a favorite old childhood film in which the characters have all aged and grown ugly and apart, dying slowly and alone.

I am told many people have strong links between smells and memories. I have never had much of a sense of smell and tend to be a fairly visual person...I equate places with memories. Memory for me has almost a tactile, physical aspect: a given time in my life brings with it a certain feeling, something which is made from but still more than the individual aspects that shaped what I was doing and why and who with. It often has a taste of the most often eaten food, a smell of new surroundings, a feel of the weather and the time of day (early Sweden, for instance, feels like chicken breaded and seasoned with lemon pepper, fried in vegetable oil, eaten at 1:30 on a warm but breezy afternoon). Those memories were everywhere tonight, reminding me that I will never be in those places or with those people again.

It is strange how goodbyes never tend to work quite right. As a former aspiring writer, I can always envision a brief, characteristically hardboiled account of the particulars, followed by a prose sucker-punch: "And they never saw each other again." I pass people on the street whom I know quite well and say hello, the way I always do, expecting to see them again soon, but chance and circumstance intervene, and it seems quite likely I will never see them again. My two corridormates came home stoned and made pasta as I went out for yet another goodbye...I wished them well with their food, as it seems likely I will never see them again. The same with my librarian friend, who I saw weeks ago and had a trivial conversation with, but who wasn't working when I dropped in for the last time. The same with so many people in so many places, from old hotels to school lunchrooms, to student housing common areas to squares in ancient cities. There is a parting, and a sense the credits should roll, but they never do.
Goodbyes too often take the shape of lonely, windy 4 AM partings, when my shirt is soaked with someone else's tears and the eloquence I know I have seems ugly and perverse in the face of such naked suffering which I so often seem to be unable to experience it myself.

What I wanted to say this morning as I packed a sobbing woman on a bus: "We knew the job was dangerous when we took it."

But I didn't, and I never do, and I never will.

This will most likely be my final post from Sweden. It is possible I will post a written account of my experiences while travelling 9,500 kilometers through seventeen cities in seven countries over the next thirty-nine days. I may instead just tell you these stories in person. This may be the end, and after sixty-odd posts and untold thousands of words, it just doesn't seem like I've said enough. You know that quote from Flaubert: "For none of us can ever express the exact measure of his needs or his thoughts or his sorrows; and human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we tap crude rhythms for bears to dance to, while we long to make music that will melt the stars." Perhaps there will be more crude rhythms from me later. Perhaps the next time you hear from me will be in person.

Perhaps a lot of things.

You kids take care.