Over the weather

Over the weather

In Sweden, we call it The Wall. To ”crash into The Wall” is to be burnt out, exhausted, needing to rest and take time off from work and friends, the plights of the world and sort of restart your circuits. Your wiring has burst, and the need arise for tools to cool off from being constantly hot until overheated.

(Something similar to that actually happens, a psychologist explained to me, causing a fear I’ve been carrying since then, ”your brain will never be the same again”).

I write to you not from a Great Wall (a couple of years ago, during the great civil Gender Dysphoria wars within me, it was), but this fall and winter from a sort of skirmish with a Japanese folding wall, Byōbu I believe they are called (at least from my most recent Ecosia-search, these days I do not leave any detail to chance while writing). Willpower will only get you a certain stretch of the way. And I’ve tried for a couple of moons now. The wall is there.

It is of bamboo, starched linen, coarse gauze and old memories. It will not budge. It won’t give a way and a passage, and if I want to make it until Christmas without standing in front of the same old folding wall, stuck in the same place mentally while the body launches with all of its flesh to conquer linen – I have to take the deepest couple of breaths I’ve taken since late Summer, observe it, write about it. Ask myself, with a voice soft as summer rain, as if speaking to a child: what’s the matter, baby girl (born a boy)?

The weather, is my first response. I marvel at the nuances of sickly green and gray of my neighboring building. Triangles of light and dark green between the windows. Three of them, melted into a quadrat. Upper left corner, lower left corner, right and dominating the shape. Upper left; the color of weak, washed-out olive oil on the verge of water, bottom left goes into the woods and comes right back from a clearing, bearing no news worthy of retelling, the dominant shape is tainted with Robin Hood’s cap, three days after a good wash. On white background, and with the backdrop of the sickly white winter skies, no nuances remains to rest in and it sort of makes me want to puke a bit, I have to veer my gaze into my own room to escape the Color of Reality for a while.

Under the weather.

My building (which I can’t see because it contains me) has a threesome of velvet, soft pink and red, which I can imagine fares much better in comparison to the relentless sky, is where is watch the world from. My newly conquered queendom, dubbed the Pink Palace by a friend, equals my newly painted student room (color: Cutie, nr #113 in the catalogue, the color of bubble gum, Barbenheimer and dreams), and it truly is a dream within a dream. The girly room I never had the chance to have, the rekindled flame of freedom, room for all the books I never could fit sharing the shelves with the esthetics of my exes.

You’ve won the ultimately freedom, a queendom of your own. The fuck you sick for?

I put it down to my work, ultimately. Seven days of paid sick leave to be able to catch up. Put it down to the changes of my life, relationship status, new sheets and bed to wake up (or suffer insomnia) in, new hormones i.e. new patterns in my brain forming like (can’t even think of a simile) say water poured on uneven ground.

I put it down to the weather.

You’d think it’s the cold that gets you. Many newcomers ask that: how do you cope with subzero degree cold? You put on clothes. You drink hot beverage, you keep moving, you try to think of when it will all be worth it: days of Swedish Summer when the limerence for life is unending. You celebrate some holidays (and we desperately need a Thanksgiving in Sweden, not Thanksgiving as in ”a celebration of an ongoing genocide” but as in a holiday that closes all of the shops and public life down for a week in November –we can’t cope with market capitalism in the cold, we’re lab rats, we’re zombies) and you stumble into Christmas if you survive.

The dark is what gets you. Not just the fact that there is no sun after 3 pm, like at all. It’s also the milky-gray, nauseous sky on sunless days. You know it’s technically sun, and you need to get out into it since it’s the only light you get all day, but it’s like a light-bulb, like a strip-light, like a fluorescent tube. It’s not fucking natural. Vampires designed that sky. As beautiful as the Nordic Lights are at the Midsummer fest or up above the Arctic Circle with its Northern luminescence, the other side of the coin (and the Dorian Gray’s portrait shadowy side) is the wintery skies at day. A flicker in the morning. A strip of light slowly filling the sky. You still get the dawn, and it’s visible. That’s almost the worst. The dawn is still a promise, and it could be a clear-blue winter sky if it’s cold enough, and you’re never quite sure when you wake up. Which one is it going to be?

Well, when you’re an hour or two into it, the answer grins at you in fleshy white and gray. It’s gonna be nausea and migraine today, kid.

I’ve heard other hemispheres has their boredom and saudade, their lionn dubh, their huzuni and their umubabaro, their sayu and pouri. Right now, I’d like to feel them instead, just to embrace them and see if they are different. Anything but Nordic boredom.

They are probably different. They probable are. But as the song goes,

Everywhere you go, you always take the weather with you

which I heard as if for the first time in a moment of youth in Nepal, I was a youth but it was also a moment of youth in which my inner and outer youth correlated in such a a beautiful way in that Pokhara café, I heard the clarion call of youth and probable jotted some poem down on the page (probably not one of the good ones, like Rachel down the stairs or Blinded by life), the importance not in the words but the mental photography: this is how it feels to be young, to elope, to veer your gaze from the sickly green and grey into the life-size pink. To color the world in rose.

To be over the weather.

Do the îles Sous-le-Vent envy the isles that are windward, or is the opposite true? Context remains everything, and for a grey sky to make sense you sometimes have to stare at it long enough. As I write, it’s slowly turning brighter, bit by bit, a tint of sun behind there – in my youth I might have missed this moment, sleeping late with a love, wallowing in my hungover like a bulimic addicted to the act of nausea, I might have misinterpreted it, calling me the master of this change, that I perhaps wrote the change by jotting down some words on paper (not one of the best poems, like Caribbean Wind and Polynesian storm), but I know now it’s me. I am the change, because I’ve changed.

A clearing of the throat. Two days left of my sick leave. They feel like vacation.

I’m not sick anymore, and the gray sky… I’m so over it. So way ahead of it, imagining summer clouds in it’s stead.

It’s not check-mate, but a stale-mate.

Gray sky, you are just as good or as bad as me.