the road preferably never traveled

Me on Hisingen on the sunny and snowless Monday.

Another study of winter without snow from Hisingen.

Somehow it pleases me that I get to be her.

People who don’t know what ‘Hisingen’ is are probably confused by now – but here is another photophraph of Hisingen.

When I left our cozy university world behind, Boy-C promised that he would comment once on my blog during the absence – but I had to write something ‘commentable’ for this promise to materialize. I’m now unsure I will be able to do so; I might not write much at all. As it looks right now, not only this winter break in Europe but also the coming spring semester in Berkeley will be a matter of making it through each day and be happy about the small things accomplished. A day without crying would constitute an immense achievement it feels like right now to me. As I have already blown the whistle here on the blog about my father’s illness – he was diagnosed with cancer in the spring – I might as well fill you in, dear comrades, with what I found out a few days ago: my father will not beat this cancer. One morning in 2012, I will wake up and my father will no longer be with us. In a way it feels like it was an act of kindness that I was only told recently, after I got back to Sweden, even though it is also strange to look back at the past months and how I called him every week and asked him how he was doing and he was never better but never worse and I guess I always focused on the latter quality of his answer… It feels so fucking unfair [excuse the f-word but I think it suits the context] that my father has to die – especially since he’s still young, and I’m so young, and my little sister is only a teenager. Why did this have to happen to my father? Why do I have to live the majority of my adult life without him? Since the second I thought the fateful ‘my future children will not know their paternal grandfather’ I have been crying whenever I’m left to my own devices… Why do I have to find out all of this a couple of days before Christmas?

In the light of this, nothing else in my life matters. I have cancelled the three ‘options’ because one needs to be able to care about things in order to write a good application to anywhere. I don’t care about my career or any other aspect of my personal future right now. Right now my main priority is to negotiate the worst emotional turmoil before I go with my sister to Stockholm to see him after Christmas – because he doesn’t want to talk about the cancer and he only wants to have fun and laugh and I have decided that I will respect his wishes – and then figure out a way in which I can live with this ticking bomb beside my heart for the next weeks/months.

I had a plan for how this blog was going to change in 2012 – I had decided upon a new name, and a new design [bye bye Playboy bunny]; all of this to more fit the current content [seeing as it is really not that much about ‘my Russia’ anymore]. Now I don’t know. I guess I realized that you have to care about your blog too if you’re going to write it and keep it up and even change it – improve it. I don’t really care about my blog now. I don’t even care if I’ll ever “find a man” or whatever the hip kids are saying these days because all that matters now is outside of me. And simultaneously inside of me.