Jonas Khemiri - Everything I Don’t Remember

*

Mostly, of course, we hung out together. But sometimes Samuel got the idea that he should go on a date. He met girls with names like Malin-slash-Esmeralda-slash-Zakia. They exchanged numbers, they went for coffee, they went out to eat. They were heading in a certain direction. Then a few weeks later I would ask how it was going with Malin-slash-Esmeralda-slash-Zakia.

“Oh, nothing came of that,” Samuel would say.

“What happened?”

“Malin and I went to the movies and the way she breathed was totally disgusting, it was like the air whistled when it went through her nose. At first I didn’t notice, but once I heard it, it was impossible to stop thinking about it.”

Or:

“Esmeralda was nice but her parents are conservatives, I mean like they’re on the city council, and that’s not going to work. Plus she lives in Gärdet.”

“So?”

“It’s kind of far to go all the time.”

Or:

“I don’t know, Zakia and I never clicked. Yeah, we hung out a little but I was never quite there. Something wasn’t quite right, I don’t know what. Maybe it was the age difference.”

“Wasn’t she just two years younger than you?”

“Mmhmm. But it felt like more. Plus she had an ugly purse.”

*

By now traveling was a boring routine, a tiresome waiting game. I hardly remember my trip home. But I remember that it felt weird to bring less luggage home with me than I had had when I moved down. I had left most of my books behind, and a lot of clothes too. My belongings felt sullied somehow, they were part of a relationship that was over, they were a shell I had worn for five years and now I was free.

*

At the same time, Samuel started sliding up to strangers at bars to ask about their definitions of love. People would be sitting there talking about the kinds of things people talk about in Stockholm (how hard it is to find good skilled labor, good realtors, bad realtors, who earned what on a rental turned co-op-slash-sale-slash-bid) and without any sort of lead-in Samuel would approach them and force whatever he wanted to talk about into the conversation. Like this:

“A good tradesman can make you fall in love a little, and by the way, how would you define love?”

Or:

“I assume you end up with an intimate relationship with your realtor, almost as intimate as with a romantic partner. And how would you define. .”

I saw him do the same thing time and again. And the strange thing was that people answered him, everyone had their own definition. One taxi driver said that for him, love was a relationship that always yields increased returns.

“Like a bank account?” said Samuel.

“Yes, but a damn good bank account. With amazing interest. And guarantee of deposits. Not one of these fucking huge banks, you know. A small, specialized niche bank.”

“But there aren’t any guarantees with love,” I said.

“No, you might be right about that,” the taxi driver said with a sigh. “So I guess it’s probably a pretty crappy bank account.”

Another time we were at an after-party and some girl claimed that love is when someone else is the main character in the movie of your life and you yourself become a supporting role and everyone else is an extra. After a trip to the movies Samuel and I were sitting at a cafe and when I came back from the bathroom I heard the lady next to us say to Samuel and her husband:

“No, no, no. You two just don’t get it. Love isn’t about ‘being happy and content.’ Love is suffering and pain and feeling sick and still being prepared to give up everything for the other person — everything!”

Her husband shook his head. Samuel nodded and looked like he understood. But even then I thought that he didn’t get it and never would.

*

The only piece of clothing I missed was an orange scarf I wore on my second date with my ex-husband. I thought that would ruin the scarf forever, but in fact I sometimes yearned for it. And every time, that yearning made me happy. It felt, like, nice that a scarf could win out over that long-as-intestines, painful mess of a relationship.

*

When Samuel brought up the definition of love for the hundredth time, I was a little irritated.

“Love is love,” I said. “What more do you want to know?”

“But there has to be a better definition than that.”

“Okay, here’s the definition of love. The definitive one. Love is when things that are chill get extra chill because the person you’re with is so chill.”

Samuel laughed and told me I sounded poetic.

“That’s right, I’m a poet. Now let’s call a taxi.”

*

Sometimes I actually toyed with the thought of calling my ex-husband, just calling him and asking him to send the scarf. As if we were distant colleagues who had never lived together, been married, gone at each other so hard that I sometimes doubted we would come out of it alive. But we did, and of course I will never call him. It’s over, it’s finished, I hardly think about him anymore. But that scarf, on the other hand.

*

The spring grew warmer, Stockholm’s outdoor cafes opened, and. . Yes! Take it easy! Chill out. . It seriously stresses me out when you do that. . They meet soon, I promise. Laide moved home to Sweden and we were sitting at that cheap beer place by Fridhemsplan. People were talking soccer, horse-racing, or which rappers have the finest honeys in their videos (someone said the southern ones, someone said West Coast, no one said East Coast). Samuel and I were talking about who we were back in upper secondary school. I said I was about the same as I was now, a regular old invisible person who people knew they shouldn’t start something with. Samuel said he hadn’t been bullied, but there were people at his school who thought he was a little weird. He hadn’t had any problems in compulsory school because he went to one near his neighborhood and people knew who he was, but in upper secondary he ended up in a school that was farther away and the atmosphere was different there. The guys were supposed to be a certain way and the girls were supposed to be another way and at first he got respect because people could tell that at the least he wasn’t totally Swedish. But then a rumor went around that he was gay and Valentin who did Thai boxing and was the terror of the school grabbed Samuel’s headphones in the common room and even though Samuel mostly listened to hip-hop, Biggie and Tupac and Snoop, this particular time he happened to be listening to a classical piano piece, and Valentin laughed and started calling him Chopin, which turned into chicken, which turned into chickadee because of course Samuel was brown but white at the same time. They took his cap and spit gobs of snot into it, they graffitied his locker, in the shower after gym everyone left when he came in, and in the lunchroom Valentin liked to trip with his glass of milk and drop it in his food or onto his neck and if it got in his face he said sorry without holding back his laughter because the milk looked like cum. Samuel told me all of this in a voice that said it was nothing to worry about. But when I heard it I wanted to look up Valentin’s address and pay him a visit at home, ring his bell, stick my foot in the crack, and explain a thing or two. Samuel smiled and said that was nice of me, but it wasn’t as bad as it sounded.

“It’s not like I was bullied.”

When the bill came, one of us picked it up, it didn’t matter who, because we shared everything equally.

*

I landed at Arlanda. In the midst of feeling sort of free because I was alive. Freed from my ex-husband’s sticky web. The colors seemed bolder, my body lighter, and everything seemed possible as I stood there by the baggage carousel waiting for my bags. “Welcome to my hometown,” said all the famous faces, blown up huge on the walls. Then I jumped on the train into town. It was classic Swedish spring sun, cold and clear light that gave the illusion that it was warm out if you were sitting behind a pane of glass. I looked out at the ancient-forest landscape that still surrounds Stockholm and felt all my enthusiasm vanish. What the hell am I doing? I thought. How can I voluntarily be on my way back to this fucking backwater town? Am I really going to waste my life in this nowhereland when there is a whole world out there? And at that point I wasn’t thinking about Brussels, I was thinking bigger than that, I was thinking São Paulo, I was thinking New York, I was thinking Beirut. I was thinking about anything that wasn’t an adorable little city center with a few buildings from the Middle Ages and a castle that looks like a barracks and three measly little Metro lines and an inner city surrounded by industrial areas while everyone talks about how the city can’t grow any bigger and then and there, before I had even arrived, I felt like I had to get away, that this was a trial period. I promised myself I would stay for only six months, a year at the max.