IT HAPPENED AT NIGHT, or rather the early morning. The clock said it was 4:30 am. Either way, it was still dark. The black cat was biting my fingers, which was uncomfortable enough, except that this black cat was also my child. Somehow my child had shapeshifted into a black cat. I wasn’t sure which child this cat was. One I didn’t know or didn’t remember. My black cat child bit down hard. I tried to shake it from my hand. There was something vindictive about it.
I was being paid back for something by the universe. The cat’s fangs pierced into my thumb.
Silvia was in the apartment while this was going on. She was doing renovation work. Specifically, she had removed the front door, which looked like a water-logged piece of driftwood that had once been painted Mediterranean blue. “All of the doors have to be replaced,” Silvia told me. Her boyfriend Enrico was in the kitchen while she sanded down one of the doors. He was standing by the stovetop boiling a hot espresso. “Cats!” was all he said as he watched me tangling with the cat. He didn’t know what to make of the thing. Neither did I.
WHERE WERE WE? I wondered. Then one of a pack of school boys turned my way and said, “Don’t you know, you’re in 1968!” Is that why everything was so weirdly sepia-toned, as if we had all stepped out of one of those ancient, musty smelling album covers, like Waiting for the Sun by The Doors, or Pisces, Aquarius, Capricorn & Jones Ltd. by The Monkees? A strange place was 1968, one foot in the past, one in the future. People’s hair was merely growing then, but had not yet achieved its 1970s freak-flag length. Wide collars, floppy hats. What was I even doing in this murky picture of the past? I was standing outside a school on a street. The boys from 1968 turned and went one way, and I went the other. A girl in a plaid dress passed me by.
It was autumn in 1968, a rainy autumn, or was it a rainy spring? It was cool, moist, there were wet leaves on the mottled asphalt of the street. I walked and walked and soon I was in my old neighborhood on Long Island, which wouldn’t be built for another 17 years or so, but here it was, and the houses were all finished. Jocko and his family were outside their home, which was across the street from my old house, and the sun had just come out. We used to play right over there, in the sand dunes between his house and the neighbors’, and wrestle in the mud. One time he even sprayed us with his sister’s tropical perfume, which made the hornets and the bees of the neighborhood go wild with lust. This time, he was kneeling before a stack of roofing tiles while his brothers did the hard work. I put my hand on his shoulder. “Are you doing okay, man?” I said. Jocko looked up at me, good-natured Sicilian that he was, and said, “Yeah, of course. Just this renovation job is taking forever.” It was. The façade was missing. I could see his room up on the second floor, the wind gusting through. “Where do you sleep at night?” I asked Jocko. “We have to sleep here,” he sighed. “But it sure does get cold at night.”
In the back of the house, I found stacks of utility uniforms, the kinds that construction workers wear. These piles formed elaborate patterns, so that it almost looked like they were a deck of playing cards. I was baffled by the uniforms and knew not what to make of the find.
From there, I walked on.
Eventually, I wound up back at the school where I started. It was a brick building, like all of the school buildings in the district, which had been, per chance, constructed in 1968. I stood there waiting outside of the school while other parents waited for their children. Just then, my friend El Scorcho, a Latin folk singer with a faint moustache I knew from Estonia, arrived. He came down the hill on his bicycle to the sounds of Simon and Garfunkel. He too was here in 1968, and his clothing was of the modern fashion. He wore a brown leather jacket, his black hair was becoming unruly, and he smelled of incense and marijuana. As soon as he saw me, he slowed his peddling and came to a stop. “Oh, you’re here too. You’re in 1968 too,” he said. “What are we doing in 1968?” I asked him. “Beats me,” he said. “I’ve been stuck in 1968 all week. But do you want to get some tacos? I found a place that’s good. Jim Morrison even goes there.”
FRIDA AND SASKIA came to visit Estonia. They booked for themselves an exclusive suite in an Old Town hotel, one with its own traditional sauna. We sat by the fireplace in the suite together, waiting for the sauna to warm up and drinking tea. Saskia was at the table, thumbing through a fresh copy of Eesti Ekspress. Frida’s older sister looked the same, with her red-hair parted down the center, and she was wearing a t-shirt with a vest over it. I’m not sure why Saskia was so engrossed by Ekspress, because she couldn’t understand a word of the Estonian language, but maybe she liked the cartoons? She seemed in high spirits, whatever the case.
Frida stretched out on the couch. She was wearing a dark dress, maybe black, maybe navy colored, and seemed quite tired from all the travel and very unimpressed. Her brown hair fell across the couch pillows like waves of grain tossed about by an autumn wind, and she reminded me of one of those slightly jaded Romanov princesses from before the Revolution. I surveyed this woman from end to end and from head to toe. Frida looked me over with a glum mix of pity and boredom. She yawned. I took a blanket and draped it over her legs. “Why did you do that?” Frida said. “I was afraid you might get cold,” I told her. “But I wasn’t cold,” she said. She took out her phone and showed it to me. There was a photo of her and her husband there. They were embracing each other and both topless. Frida put the phone quickly away. “I’m a married woman. Married.” She repeated the word as if it had great eternal meaning.
“But married women also need to stay warm,” I said.
Saskia looked up from the newspaper at that moment. “Cute!” was all she said. She smiled at me. “Frida, do you remember him being so cute? Because I had no memory of him being so cute. He sure is cute!” “That’s always nice to hear,” I said. Frida lounged on in tranquil lethargy, eyeing me with a mix of frustration and half-amused interest. The nerve of this man to barge into her life again like this. Why couldn’t he just let her go? Why did it keep on happening?
I presented her next with a gift, a box wrapped in old-fashioned wrapping paper with small evergreen trees painted on it. Frida carefully undid its ribbon, and opened the parcel in a way that the paper could be reused. Inside there was a small toy piano, like the type that Fisher Price might make, except made of metal. Frida gave me a funny look and pressed down on the keys. The piano made a playful, tinny, musical sound. “This is for your children,” I told Frida.
To be honest, I had no idea how many children she had. We hadn’t spoken in years and I knew nothing about her anymore, other than it was her fixed policy and heartfelt desire that I would continue to know nothing. Frida gave me a clear-blue-eyed glance and a sad half smile. I stroked her legs again. Then Saskia set the copy of Ekspress down abruptly and looked over. “Well, you two love birds” she said. “I think the sauna is ready now.” It was ready. It was hot.
AD-ROCK AND MIKE D were in the Raeapteek. Ad-Rock was wearing his red t-shirt and Mike D toted a stolen VW hood ornament around his neck. It was a summer’s day and there was light through the windows. It fell upon the jars of burnt bees, bleached dog feces, dried deer penises, and other potent medieval remedies. They were impressed, to say the least, especially by the thick, ancient volumes of the Burchard family, the original owners of the apothecary which, to their surprise, were full of dope rhymes about wack aldermen and fly maidens.
I be smokin’ roaches in the vestibule, in the next millennium I’ll still be old school.
“But where’s Yauch,” I asked? This was taking place in the past, you see, long before the sad, unnecessary, and tragic death of the vital MCA. “Yauch went to Helsinki,” Ad-Rock said. “He went to go to a Kaurismäki film screening with Lars von Trier.” I could see him then, with his nose to the sea, sniffing the Gulf of Finland. I could see him traveling on Tallink. I was worried about Yauch disappearing into a cinema in Helsinki though with this notoriously difficult Danish director. They would no doubt go out drinking. There would no doubt be pool hall fights. But then I remembered that Yauch had toured the world. Yauch had leapt into hotel pools from third-floor windows. Yauch had rapped alongside strippers in cages beneath giant inflatable phalluses. Yauch once made out with Madonna during the Like a Virgin Tour in ’85.
Yauch also had a beard like a billy goat.
“You don’t need to worry about Yauch,” Ad-Rock told me. “He always comes out unscathed.”
Yes, Yauch would turn up unscathed off the ship in Tallinn Harbor, munching on some fresh Karelian pies. Mike and Ad-Rock would have rhymes galore to share from the archives of the Raeapteek. And no matter what happened after that, the B-Boys would rhyme the rhyme well.
ESMERALDA came in wearing a green dress. She arrived with the others, pointing out her name at the registration with her pretty ringed fingers. Her name was there, as was mine just a few lines away. I was surprised that she even remembered me. I was certain I had been entirely forgotten, maybe on purpose. She had skipped town months before, but here she was again in the full flesh. I asked Esmeralda where she had been all this time. If she only knew how many black nights I had walked home thinking of her, or half expecting her to appear from some shadow or behind some corner, only to whistle on alone in solemn disappointment. She said that she had been busy. ‘I’ve been so busy,’ she said. She was a busy kind of woman.
In the summer, during the festival, I would watch her walking up and down the street. She was always talking to someone, and she was mostly in a good mood when she wasn’t having one of her sad-looking sulky days, when she sat in the corner staring out the café windows. I asked Esmeralda why she hadn’t responded to any of my love letters, but she told me that there was no need to. She did this fluidly, as if she was dancing between the registration desk and the coffee. There were many bureaucrats in white shirts buzzing around. Her potato brown hair was pulled back. There was something about those eyes. Esmeralda has clever, fox-like eyes.
I could see her soft comforting milky white chest poking out of the top of that dress she had on, the same way you might see a gold coin reflecting the sunlight at the bottom of a clearwater lake or pool. Or the same way you might see a distant light in the night sky and wonder if it was a planet. What struck me was how at ease we were with this whole thing by now. It had become the default for us. It ebbed, it flowed, it undulated, rolled along and vibrated but it was reliably there, as sure and as trustworthy as the sunshine. ‘But you do know that I love you,’ I told her at registration. Esmeralda only smiled, her smart eyes drawing up into half moons. She placed a finger on my lips and said, “Hush, hush, hush.” Then I felt her all over me and in every part of me like a March wind. In my bones, in my blood, in my hair.
BY THE SECOND WINTER, I already had a good stack of wood in my barn. It was birch wood and it kept us warm. Sometimes the kids in the neighboring yard would kick a ball over the rooftops. Without a word I would toss it back over and they would continue playing.
This was all part of Viljandi’s shanty life, footballs landing without notice, strange boys knocking at the door. One day a few boys even showed up in the snow. “Has anyone seen Benny?” one asked. “He owes us some money.”
“What do you mean, ‘owes you money’?” I said.
“We bought him ice cream and he promised to pay us back.”
“Well, he’s not here. You’ll have to find him somewhere else.”
Benny was the Swedish Chef’s son. Just eight or nine years old. He was already in ice cream debt.
That second winter, I moved into a larger apartment across the hall. The Chef came to live in the small apartment. It became his base, temporary residence for the next few months while he did side gigs in Norway — two weeks on, two weeks off. A spontaneous little commune bloomed up though, between me and my daughter, him and his three kids, and Musi, his girlfriend, and her son, who also stayed sometimes. All together there were five kids and three adults spread across two apartments. The children would race back and forth, doors slamming. There was howling, laughing, arguments, crying, things were thrown, there was anarchy, chaos and then the Chef made soup or porridge and they all ate.
Sometimes the Chef and Musi would come into my bedroom to check on me. I would be in bed trying to sleep. “Are you sleeping?” they would ask looking down at me in my bed. “It’s midnight,” I would say back. “Yes, but we just made some lentil soup.”
During the day, they built snowmen outside and my youngest came too. Now there were six children. On one hand, I enjoyed the company. On the other hand I never knew who might show up. Once I took a shower and forgot my towel. But Musi just happened to arrive at that moment. I asked her for one and she passed one between a crack in the door.
Having so many people around was really helpful. Clothing was mixed, socks exchanged. There was even a green dress in the laundry. No one knew where it came from. A hamster came to us too — Martinus — and he joined the commune. Then there were the two fish, Tsunami and Tornado. These we had bought off Epp’s old friend in Saaremaa. They were as adored and worshipped as any other creature. In the mornings, I would open the curtains so that they could watch the people in Posti Street. In my mind, it was entirely conceivable that they would live forever.
Tsunami and Tornado, swimming in circles, watching the street.
When we left for Italy, I left them in the care of the Chef and his children. They heated the apartment periodically with the wood from the barn, but one day before we were set to return the temperature slipped to -25.
That was the day the fish stopped swimming.
When we found them there, like that, suspended in cold water, upon arriving back from our trip, my daughter cried the cries of someone in deep emotional anguish. I took two matchboxes and made small coffins for them. Tornado, the blue fish, went into the red matchbox. Tsunami, the red fish, had a yellow matchbox coffin.
“Why don’t you just flush them down the toilet?” asked the Chef as I put their tiny fish corpses into these makeshift fish coffins.
“We have to wait to bury them in the spring,” I said.
“You could just cremate them,” he offered. He had apologized for their cold-water deaths, but wouldn’t be losing much sleep over them. This was a man who gutted salmon and carved up crabs for a living. Dead fish were a part of life.
“They deserve a proper funeral,” I told him. “They were family.”
I kept the fish coffins in the freezer. It became my tiny makeshift morgue for dead fish. Then one day, I opened the freezer to discover the coffins weren’t there anymore. When I saw the Chef, I was furious.
“What did you do to the fish? I know you did something!”
“What do you mean? I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“You flushed them down the toilet, didn’t you! Or burned them.”
“Never happened.”
“I saw your eyes. You think I’m crazy. You think I am crazy for wanting to bury the fish. You don’t think that they deserve a proper burial!”
“But you are crazy. You’ve completely lost your mind, man.”
“I am not crazy!” I said. Or was I? That winter, with all those people around, with that constant low temperature, I had started to doubt my sanity. Maybe the fish had simply combusted or dematerialized? Or maybe the fish god had taken their souls? Viljandi was a very weird place, and in such very weird places, very weird things like that just might happen.
It was months later that I discovered the two little coffins, packed neatly into the ice in the back of the freezer. They had fallen behind some frozen pelmeenid. They looked like the graves of British explorers left behind in the Arctic wastes, only to be discovered by some later expedition. I took them out to the yard, dug a small hole for them beneath that crooked old tree, and set them to rest there for all eternity.
I SWAM OUT to the end of the bay, to where it connects with the sound, just off the point. The water was darker and deeper here and the current was just too strong. Turning back was hopeless, so I let the water carry me all the way around the point to Sand Street Beach. Remember Sand Street Beach? Wasn’t there even a little shelter there, at least in the old days? Maybe it’s still there, with the names of aspiring lovers carved into its sturdy wooden walls.
Joanie loves Chachi.
It was there there that I emerged, dripping salt water and sand. It wasn’t such a long walk home, but a storm was setting in, and the air was thick with thunder and that ominous grayblue feeling. The wind picked up and danced with the cedar branches and I began the hike. Sand Street connected to Christian Avenue. Christian Avenue intersected with Quaker Path. I had this feeling all along that a hundred eyeballs were watching me through the windows of white clapboard houses that had once belonged to dead whaling ship captains.
IN MY TIME AWAY from Lennart Meri Tallinn Airport they had constructed a gleaming towering hotel on the eastern flank with views of Ülemiste Lake on one side and the runways and tree lines on the other. The architecture and interior was Nordic noir. The joint was decked out like an IKEA store at Christmas. Spare and white. Glass and metal. The words of a Romanian comic came to mind, “Estonia is like Norway, if Norway was made in China.” There was something to that, I thought as I rode the glass elevator down to the Departures area.
Descending, I noticed that the cat was sleeping in the hallway on the second floor. How did she even get there? She looked lost, with that inquisitive pink nose of hers up in the air, sniffing at the dry hotel air. Quickly I pressed at the buttons in the lift, trying to get out to rescue the cat, but the elevator arrived to the ground floor, some irritating tourists got in, and on the way back up to the top of the hotel, I saw that the cat was no longer on the second floor, but had gone up with the other elevator to the eighth floor. Again, I pressed the buttons in the elevator, but it was impossible to get out on the right floor. I was worried. What if she was to venture out onto the runway, only to be crushed, pancaked and splattered by the rubber wheels of a jet? My children would never forgive me for allowing the death of the cat.
Something had to be done.
When the elevator opened its doors again though, I was on the backside of the airport. I got onto a bus that took me all the way around to the other side of the airport, where the various rental car companies have their offices. Other irritating and slow tourists departed the bus here. Some were hugging each other on the escalators. As soon as I got off that bus, I began running through the airport. This part of it had changed too. It looked more like Arlanda, with Pippi Longstocking-inspired play areas for children, as well as counters loaded with cinnamon buns and open-faced sandwiches. Bookstores with Pride flags. There I was, rushing through the airport, trying to save the beloved black-and-white family cat. About halfway through, my wife came walking my way with the children. She was not amused by this funny airport scene.
“Why are you running through the airport like a lunatic?” she asked. “What’s wrong with you? I can’t take you anywhere.” “But I was trying to save the cat! She could get runover by a Ryanair jet.” My wife gave me a strange look. “What are you talking about, save the cat? The cat’s right there. She’s enjoying herself.” She gestured at the cat, who was sitting beneath a fake palm tree in the play area, biting her paws. “Come along,” she said to my youngest as they walked away. “Your father is weird.”
ON INDEPENDENCE DAY, we went to visit a producer in Helsinki, an older man whom I suspected of carrying on an extramarital liaison with my wife. We all went to visit him, and I decided to keep my mouth shut and not say anything, even as the two of them disappeared into the back garden to “talk about things.” I was in the living room with the kids, both mine and his own grandkids, I believe. We were watching TV and then we all fell asleep. There was a large tabby cat beside me. I could hear the cat purr. In the middle of the night, the cat awoke and went outside and I followed it out into the city shadows. I wandered past the cathedral.
I found my way to the Helsinki train station, the Helsingin Päärautatieasema. I got on the first train I saw, seconds before it was about to leave the station, found a seat inside, and again shut my eyes and began to dream deep. When I opened them, it was daylight and we were surrounded by the heather of the Scottish countryside, some ways south of Glasgow. Riken the Japanese mountaineer was seated across from me with his knapsack, looking over a paper map. He was marking his route with a short pencil. “Where does this train go?” I asked him. “Mons,” came the response. “This is the train to Mons.” “But where is Mons?” “It’s a little city to the south of here.” “I’ve never heard of it. I need to go back to Finland.” The train pulled up to an elevated platform in the middle of nowhere and Riken disembarked. “Don’t be such a nervous nelly,” Riken said, with that handkerchief of his on his head. “Just stay on the train.”
I leaned back in my seat and watched the Scottish countryside roll by and again shut my eyes for a while. When I opened them again, I was in the back of a truck driving up the sandy roads of Cape Hatteras National Seashore. We passed through Rodanthe, Pea Bridge, Whalebone, and Kitty Hawk, until the road would go no further. I could see fishermen out in the inlets pulling in nets full of fish. We began to hike into the jungles that separated the Carolina line from the Virginia line. The seawater was warm here, and we encountered a group of indigenous people diving for lobsters and crabs and filling buckets with them. This was a local tribe that was doing work for some company, but the owner was not there on the job site. His lone, shake-sided house stood on the sandy bank that separated the bay side from the Atlantic Ocean. “Which way should we go to get home?” someone asked. One of the Natives showed us into the forest. There was a trail that began here, leading deeper into the swamps and jungles.
The Native gestured with his head. “This is the way home,” he said.
I LIVE IN A LITTLE WOODEN TOWN. Or so it’s been called by people who live in larger wooden towns. Each morning I rise and follow the same trajectories. I can see the milky light stirring behind the curtains, and I remember my third grade teacher telling us how there were places in the world where the sun never set in the summer and the winters were so dark.
Strange, I think, that I wound up living in one of these places. I wake up, shower and dress. I walk down one street toward one café, or I walk down another street to another. I cross by the courthouse, or that apartment building that used to be a dance school. There’s the park that used to host Joala, or the Konsum that used to be an A ja O. The preschool, the hairdresser’s, the Armenian restaurant. Estonian towns are full of bizarre surprises. In Viljandi, there’s an establishment called Suur Vend or “Big Brother” and another one called Sahara. There’s the Nuremberg Building, the façade of which is painted to look like it’s part of some German mountainside town. In three minutes you can travel from 1984 to Bavaria to North Africa. These small town trajectories are being engraved into my mental map. I call this my internal landscape. Your mind knows that the bank is here and the church and school are there.
Your mind knows, even when you aren’t paying attention.
DURING THE PANDEMIC, I started a writing project, one where I would write down my dreams in narrative form. I called this experiment “dream fiction.” What has resulted is a catalogue of stories, maybe a hundred already, that tell, in a way, my own story over the past five years. But it’s not only my story, it’s the story of the world. During the pandemic, I would have dreams about vaccines. When the war started, I had dreams about rockets. After Assad was overthrown, I had a dream about Russia surrendering to Estonia, and Koit Toome and Tanel Padar lounging in the Grand Kremlin Palace. There they sat stoking the flames in the fireplace beneath a torn portrait of Lavrov and complaining about how hard it is to be famous.
Another story was called, “Elon Musk’s Italian Restaurant.” I wonder how many of us are having dreams about Elon these days. I noticed in the dream that my mental landscape blended Viljandi with Stockholm, a city I have spent a lot of time in and that means a lot to me. In this combination of Stockholm and Viljandi — Stockholmdi? — Paalalinn and its lake were in Norrmalm. Elon Musk’s Il Colosseo was on one side of the lake, and his competitor’s was on the other. To get from one side of this lake, you had to take the metro, like you might in Stockholm. Viljandi had its own version of the T-Bana. Viljandi had its own Pressbyrån.
In another dream, Kihnu Island had merged with Viljandi, creating Kihlandi, so that all of the streets remained in their places, but the houses had been replaced by tall pines and red-painted wood barns, and the roads were gravel. There were fieldstone walls marking the boundaries of Joala Park. In another part of the town, San Diego was superimposed on Viljandi, creating Viljandiego. Viljandi was in the same layout, but all of the buildings were taken from the Gaslamp Quarter. There were even Kihnu women waiting for me on the other side of town, knitting in their red headscarves. I rode my bike past the mariachi bands and Mexican restaurants to get home. In this way, my town became half fantasy, half reality. I think that’s what happens when you live somewhere. Places get inside you. They fill your inner world.
***
People are arranged in such ways too. It’s not just streets and avenues, eateries and esoteric shops and lamp posts. Someone might be fixed in a certain place, such as the love of your life, for example. This woman is always there in that one spot, just like a mountain is always in one spot. You look up and see the mountain and it gives you a reassuring feeling, just like a certain person can reassure you through their presence. The mountain is always there and she is also always there in that place where she always has been. People become fixed in these places. Women become like mermaid statues spurting water. You go to visit them and to admire them.
It’s not easy to move mountains or mermaid statues and it’s not so easy to move people. This is how you can remain in love with the same person for years, even when it makes absolutely no sense, even when it causes you suffering. Buddhists call this attachment. They want to slip from place to place without ever paying these landscapes much notice. These people, these places, this yearning, it’s all like clouds drifting by. Do not get attached to women or to mermaid statues either, they say. Yet you do get attached. They are fixed in that place on your map, as much as Konstantin Päts’ enormous disembodied head is watching you from its perch beside the Estonian Theatre. You could try to move Päts’ head, but it’s too damn heavy. It’s been put there. So you just let it be. The woman you love is as fixed on your map as Päts’ head is fixed. It’s always just there, even if you don’t notice it every day. Sometimes you do notice it.
Some people do attempt to alter their inner landscapes through force. They get desperate and try to blow everything up with dynamite. I’m guilty as charged here and I have learned the hard way that it just doesn’t work. Movement creates countermovement, as the British-American philosopher and entertainer Alan Watts said in his lectures. Whatever you push against will push back against you doubly as hard. This creates balance and harmony, but people don’t want either. They want to be in control. They want this person here to be moved there. They want that person there to be erased. Out with the old and in with the new! From a cartographic perspective, this is like saying you would like Liivalaia to be relocated to Gonsiori. You want Rüütli Street in Tartu and Malmö Street in Pärnu to switch places. Let’s put Pirita in Kakumäe. Let’s move Rakvere to Karlova. But why? Because you think it will be better. You think that if you were able to redraw the map, everyone would be happier. You’re tired of loving that woman, or she doesn’t love you back. She has even said so. You want to exchange loyalties. You want to give your love to someone else, someone more deserving of your love.
But what happens in these ambitious inner world renewal projects? Things just fall back into place. Everything you did to rearrange your inner world was a total waste of time. There was no point in even trying. The world has its own natural order, just as towns do. In this way, whether you like it or not, she will remain the woman you love until one day, when there is a great earthquake or mudslide, or some other natural cataclysm that changes everything. This creates a before and after, just as burned cities only in part can be fully restored and rebuilt.
Estonian towns are full of such well-tended green parks that used to be grand structures. You walk through them all the time. Children play there, old women are out walking dogs there. Where there once were houses and hotels, there are now ice skating rinks. I wonder sometimes if we can still sense these places, even though they are no longer there, in the air about where the Golden Lion once stood before the March 1944 bombings, for example, in the same way we can still feel the presence of a woman in our lives through her long absence.
In this way, a lost person becomes both there and not there, just like the Golden Lion Hotel.
***
Recently I wrote down these words. I said that some things in life shattered us into pieces, leaving nothing in solid state. I said that in these situations, we become like free-floating mosaics, like the icy rings around Saturn or Neptune that, when viewed from a distance, almost look whole, but that upon closer inspection can be seen through. The light is visible between these leftover chunks of soul, feelings, and memory. They are suspended in time.
I wrote these words and then left to go to work on a rare sunny winter morning. On my left, I could see through some trees the spire of a small church, and on the right, I could see the sun on the windows of the courthouse. Often I am inspired to take photos of these little pieces of the town. I photograph sunlight against the wooden facades of old houses, I photograph frozen laundry strung across backyards, I capture the symmetry of the rail lines at Ülemiste.
Sometimes I see something interesting, like an old doll staring out a window at me. On that morning, my phone was dead and I could only watch the yellow light on the facades. A lot of people I know are nature enthusiasts. They ascribe to the Fred Jüssi School of Forest Asceticism. They try to fill the holes in themselves with birch juice, buckets of blueberries, and lake swims. For me, the sun on the facades of the buildings has become my own way of filling in those cracks, of gluing the pieces of myself together. Most people think we are all separate from each other and from our environments. I am me, you are you, this place is this place. I don’t think this is correct, because people are also places. This has become obvious. The universe is a continuum. I now know that this is true, but I am still trying to figure it all out.
north! 