Spotify plays the collected soundtrack of my young adolescence, reminiscing my past self I experience those now subdued feelings that defined me ten-fifteen years ago (taste). The sounds of the 90’s and early 00’s are familiar, etched into my neural pathways, connected to experience long since over. 

 

A few days ago, after one of the hottest days I can recall, I was chilling in the rumbling thunder that follows from heated passion. Spending the evening at three successive bars with The Philosopher we recollected the experience life had brought upon us since we saw each other last. Talking about life, Istanbul, work and all that silly nonsense you talk lightly about with friends. When at last the evening turned into night, I initiated a topic appropriately darker in nature. Doing my best to express a feeling of mild self-alienation that has been sneaking up on me. This vague feeling, occasionally imposing, that something is off. Like I am not all I should be, like something is missing, like I took a wrong turn, like something that should have happened – did not.  

 

I did my best to explain this elusive feeling: It feels like the colors are in the wrong shade, like distortion on a “cord-glitched” TV. Or, if life is a continuous train ride perhaps I simply missed a station in which I was suppose to leave.  I might not believe in second chances, but who can argue with a second first chance? Rejuvenating a hope that the train makes a loop or two.

 

Now I am the first to deny that things happens for a reason. I never believed in fate, or that God should have a “written-in-the-stars”-plan that dictates our lives. However, lately this idea has presented itself to me as a feeling rather than a thought – making it far more difficult to battle. Maybe it is the consequences of growing up that illuminate the balance between “desire and possibility”, now matured from the “confusion and uncertainty” in younger days. Finally allowing for the more honest pursuit of happiness, acknowledging that I am not quite there yet.

 

Several years ago, a friend asked me just this question: do you believe things happens for a reason? She was asking in order to confirm the perfection she was experiencing meeting her (now) wife. While I have no future “wife” in mind, I my thoughts flutter along these lines. Maybe the hope for second first chances is what brought this about. 

 

The Philosopher suggested my latest career choice to be the source of “the off”-ness. That I feel uncertain about where the “train is going”. Denying that I do not know where this part of the train is going would be silly, yet it does not bother me much. Instead contemplation leads me to think my feelings are due to a much more subtle personal plane. 

 

The last ten years I have changed very much, increasingly so just in the last few. All my life I have felt detained, contained into a box too small, stressed by my nonconformity. Feeling like a fox in an enclosure, desperate to expand the borders of my turf. Now-a-days my borders are immensely increased. I am freer, more relaxed. 

 

Soon my border is expanding once more. This upcoming fall the moving train heads down south, to Italy. Once again pushing the border further from the core, the heart, from that imagined future book-filled-living-room-with-a-rooftop-view on Söder.

 

Someone asked me recently if I intend to move back to Sweden and, “Yes”, I recall answering, “I miss home”. Ambiguous as always the response still ring in my ears as just uttered: “Home is where the heart is“. And it is true, I would go to the ends of the earth with the right person – as long as I could keep moving.

 

Peeking into Pandora’s box, still cautious, I hold my breath for a loop and return to a station I should have exited years ago.