THE WAYS WE
USED TO TRAVEL

Min far sa: Den som reser är överflödig för platsen hon kom ifrån

Min mor sa: Den som reser tror att hon är oumbärlig för platsen hon kommer till

Min far sa: Den som reser är överflödig för platsen hon kommer till

Min mor sa: Den som reser tror att hon är oumbärlig för platsen hon kom ifrån

Min morbror sa: Den som reser vet ingenting om plats

My father said: The one who travels is redundant to the place they came from

My mother said: The one who travels thinks they are essential to the place they come to

My father said: The one who travels is redundant to the place they come to

My mother said: The one who travels thinks they were essential to the place they came from

My uncle said: The one who travels knows nothing about place.

Athena Farrokhzad, translation by Jennifer Hayashida

Hyphens

Somewhere along the way, I became neglectful of distances. Because it was never my own knees giving in, my own back paying for passage; the weight of miles became an afterthought. You stumble upon strawberries in your local supermarket in January and you say, ‘maybe I fancy some.’ It shouldn’t be this easy, but you plonk down a punnet and they look like strawberries. Strawberries in January. Artificial speed, compressed distance, is also what it takes to get home, once you’ve decided to leave. This strawberry got here before going mouldy. I’m like a yoyo and, until recently, I didn’t ever get very dizzy.

On the map, a straight line between the south of England and the south of Sweden looks like nothing more than a hyphen between longer journeys, as in more noteworthy routes, in the grand scale of things. Both countries are in the northern hemisphere, with a relatively narrow sea between them (one which the Norse crossed over a thousand years ago, without combustion engines). Denmark is in between too, but by the time you get to Denmark, you’re practically there. I used to fly back to Sweden from the UK two or three times a year. The speed of commercial flight in the early twenty-first century makes it possible to cross that distance in roughly two and a half hours, about the length of many feature films. As the crow flies, with the speed available to people like me, you hardly have time to even notice Denmark.

In the summer of 2019, Adam and I decide to go overland to visit my family in Sweden. We’ve decided to ‘stay grounded’, as the hashtag has it, but we won’t call it that, because it is a hashtag. Instead of two and a half hours of flight, it will take fifty-six hours from Bath to our final destination, a small red house with blue window frames by lake Verveln, 174 miles south of Stockholm, where my dad drowns mice in the basement and builds birdhouses above ground, where my mother and I tried to grow sugar snaps, and she taught Adam how to make cinnamon buns. This includes a twenty-four-hour stop in Amsterdam. We worry that if we don’t stop along the way, if we don’t notice if a Dutch field is different from a Belgian one, if we don’t annotate the weather, we might still miss something essential about the distance — the whole thing might not be grounded enough. It might stay a hyphen.

I do notice the weather. It’s like someone else’s baby crying; we all hear it, but it’s no one’s business to bring it up, to see to it, to fix what is obviously in trouble.

Exceptions

Starting with a coach ride from Bath to London, at three am on a Monday morning, the weather is still asleep. Adam was supposed to have time to shave. On the tube between Paddington and St Pancras, I spot him looking for something between all the heads, the bags, and the pre-emptively bare shoulders (it will be hot, it will get hotter), but it’s not a space to sit. He’s after the one person who’s not on their phone. At home, sometimes I’ll be swiping at my screen for too long and when I look up, he’s just there, staring at me with his mouth in a petrified ‘o’, like he’s been stopped in the middle of a sentence and left there, a line gone mute. It’s not a particularly nice thing to have done to someone. We call this look his ‘phone face’, and I really am trying to do better. We’re too old for our backpacks, I think. Then, just as I’m about to get my phone out, he looks up, triumphantly. Someone, squeezed in on the right side of the aisle, is reading a book.

By Wednesday afternoon, we’ll find ourselves in the house by the lake. Perhaps because we’re following railway-tendrils, instead of hopping into that compressor of time and space, the commercial aeroplane, we might not even need to lose ourselves at all. There will be no abrupt changes, only gradual adaptation.

The cottage itself is called Kruthult, ‘Gunpowder Cottage’. We don’t know why, but it was built by the father of someone who now spends their summers nearby. There’s no history of an explosion, only railway tracks, toe-biting crayfish, and a misanthrope farmer who chooses to forget about the Swedish right to roam in order to guard his mushroom patches, the same patches my dad has mentally mapped with military precision. In the house up on the cliff, around the bend from ours and looking over the lake, someone took their own life. My mother tried to establish the nickname La Ponderosa for the cottage, from the TV series Bonanza, when my parents bought it in 2002, I think because she felt that Spanish needed help to hold its own in our family. It didn’t stick. We did speak some Spanish there, as we did everywhere else. It’s been two years since I was last at Kruthult. It’s never taken me this long to get there, and to get all the way there.

We exit London just in time before the heat reaches, like a leak from neighbour to neighbour, all the way underground. It’s, as they call it, exceptionally hot.

Hyphenated

I learned how to travel from my parents. When my sister and I were kids, my mum showed us how to roll socks into the gaping mouths of shoes, a space which was also good for storing shampoo bottles, with any excess air squeezed out of them, so as to avoid miniature explosions in the hold of the plane. A few days before departure, we were instructed to put aside the clothes we planned to take with us. We learned that you shouldn’t cover the bottom of a suitcase in books, as this gives the impression of a secret compartment when scanned through customs, in particular when leaving Colombia during the mid to late 1990s. Avocados were fine to smuggle as long as they’d been checked in. I once took one home to an ex-partner, then left it with my parents by mistake. My mother posted it from Stockholm to the village in the south of Sweden where I was studying. It was perfectly ripe by the time it arrived, handed over by a bemused receptionist at my college. The boyfriend attempted to grow an avocado plant with it, but it never took root. He’d never seen one that huge, so unlike any avocado he’d ever known.

So much of who my sister and I are, and with whom, depends on the ability to move easily between countries, between identities. My Swedish dad went to work in Bogotá in 1980, where he met my mother, who was then at university, studying economics. They moved to Stockholm in 1983. We were all living in Ecuador when my sister was born, but flew to Bogotá for the birth. The hospitals were better there, I’m told, and my grandfather was a surgeon in one of them. Some places are safe enough to live in, for some people, but not to give birth in, if you have the privilege to make that distinction. After we moved back to Sweden, we used to visit my grandmother, uncles, and cousin in Bogotá once a year, spending about a month there each time. In the mid-nineties, we lived there for three years, and my sister and I went to a bilingual — Spanish and English — school. I lined my throat with a Colombian accent which hasn’t been chafed off yet, even though I haven’t lived there for twenty-five years. Sometimes, tourists from Spain are funny about it. It gives me a taste of new racisms. We moved back to Sweden on New Year’s Eve 1996. My sister eventually left to study at a London university and remained in the UK for nine years. I moved to Edinburgh almost a decade ago, and met Adam, who’s from Yorkshire. About five years ago, my sister moved back to Stockholm, carrying a small Welsh dog, drugged on tranquilisers, as hand luggage. This was before Brexit, when such a move was still possible.

That dog is Swedish-Welsh now, as we are Swedish-Colombians. Swedish-Colombian-Scottish, in my case. The hyphens, those identity bridges, expand to so much: nationalities, ethnicities, as well as the queerness it took me so long to even begin to hyphenate. In the UK, a double-barrelled name is often equated with poshness, whereas in Colombia it is customary to use the name of your father followed by your mother’s name, both constituting your surname, no hyphen needed. I got used to this when living in Colombia as a child and called myself Jessica Johannesson Gaitán for over twenty years, but my passport didn’t agree, as Sweden didn’t use double surnames, and they’d included Gaitán as a middle name. Eventually, I relented and changed. How many hyphens are enough to feel whole? I’m not posh, I want to say, just half-Colombian, but it would be unwise; I’d be making excuses for much more than double barrels. The term, incidentally, originally referred to the barrels of guns.

Non-Places

The check-in for the Eurostar looks like a thousand of its airport cousins. Although this time we’re diving into the earth, instead of leaving its surface, even the chairs you wait in are familiar: the tired slipperiness of them, and the way I expect them to smell like smoke, even though no one has smoked at an airport gate for a long time. This is familiar, as in: it is to do with family. My cousin and I used to run toward each other, a pair of small, unhinged wrestlers, across the arrival terminal at El Dorado airport, year after year until we were teenagers and too far gone for that kind of unrepentant tenderness. Luggage-reclaim halls still make me giddy, even when there is no one waiting on the other side of the doors.

At one point during university, I came across Marc Augé’s writing on the ‘non-place’ and immediately started salivating. I was trying to hone down a dissertation topic, and finding it impossible to choose between places, or even national literatures. This, like the whole scope of my MSc programme (Literature and Transatlanticism — a programme at Edinburgh which no longer exists), seemed like a way to explore belonging without choosing a side of the Atlantic. A whole range of non-place-related stories followed Augé’s book, some lifelong buddies, such as Jamaica Kincaid’s A Small Place, and some that didn’t stick around for long, including Alain de Botton’s reflections on his time as a writer-in-residence at Heathrow airport. I watched the videos of him sitting at a desk at terminal five, and started collecting scenes set in airports in different novels, thinking I could stay where I was, in the middle.

‘What’s this nonsense about airports?’ my tutor said during our next meeting. It was a bit like when I began to burn incense every day, during my teens, only to find out it was giving my mother asthma attacks. So much makes perfect sense, seems thrilling even, before you find out that it is taking away someone’s ability to take a proper breath.

April 2005 was the last time I went to Colombia with my mother. It was the only time we went just the two of us, and I had a fever on the way back. As I lay stretched out on a bench during the lay-over at Charles de Gaulle, counting passing varicose veins, we spoke about sex and exercise, although some time must have passed between the two topics. I find swollen feet, the kind that transatlantic flights give you, almost nostalgic, which, in turn, really bothers me, because by the time my mother died, she also had swollen feet.

As for the sex, I didn’t tell her that at the time I was in love with two people, a boy and a girl, although I think she suspected. I never came out to her, in so many words. My internal maps didn’t firm up enough, in the years we had left, to be able to tell her that my wanting for others, between sexual and platonic, regardless of gender, is another way in which I have always been in-between.

I recently re-read sections of Augé’s book on the ‘non-place’. Even though it’s short, I had real trouble finding whatever bits seemed so hot back then. In fact, it turns out that I’d misunderstood most of the book’s central premise. To Augé, the ‘non-place’ is the opposite of an ‘anthropological place’, by which he means ‘relational, historical and concerned with identity’. Lacking all those things, he argues, the traveller’s space (including trains, aeroplanes, and all kinds of stations) is the archetype of the non-place.

So, what about the tumbling cousins, what about the sex-talk with my mother? Relational, concerned with identity.

When I was five, my dad leaned closer to the window on a flight between Quito and Bogotá, to show me the Andes during an unusually clear night. The snow looked like mould growing in stains on the dark rock. We were the ones leaving, then, not the snow.

Stranded

In Amsterdam everyone’s faces seem accelerated by the heat, every single person five minutes late, from wherever, to something else. The heat seems always to be treated as accidental, an awkward scene taking place next door which has nothing to do with the task at hand. Adam and I watch Dutch ducks circling each other, one trying to catch a glimpse, or find shelter, under the other’s skirt. I make him stand next to a building saying ‘I am A’DAM’ so that I can take a picture, because there are things we do know.

Surveys have showed the people of Osnabrück to be among the most satisfied in Germany, according to Wikitravel. Åsna is donkey in Swedish and brücke is bridge in German; Osnabrück sounds like donkeys crossing a bridge, for ever and ever. The wait in this German town is supposed to be an hour, but the next train is delayed by seventy minutes. This means that we’ll miss our night train from Hamburg to Copenhagen. The next one isn’t till late in the morning the following day.

Even though the places we call home have stayed still on the map, the journey between them no longer feels like a straight line. The crow that flies here and there hasn’t been a bird for as long as I’ve been alive, but a fleet of machines, spewing thousands of tons of CO2 into the atmosphere every year — creating this heat that keeps rising, after sundown — available only to a fraction of the earth’s population, 11 per cent in 2018. The privilege of fast travel hasn’t only helped create the climate crisis; it has changed, distorted, the very reality of distances, by widening the chasm between the one who has access across them and the one who does not.

The house by the lake was chocolate brown when my parents bought it, but the first summer we painted it red. My mother never liked the atmosphere of old houses, but old houses in Colombia were far worse than old houses in Sweden. In a former life, she said, she was either a slave in the house of some Spanish aristocrat, or a pig sent to slaughter, because she also never liked lechona, a Colombian stuffed-pig dish. The house rests on a grassy elevation, which gives it a view over a small pond, and the lake beyond it, where everyone swims, except for this one neighbour, who died a few years back. He always chose the pond. We used to see his pale backside between the leaves, taking careful, perfected, steps.

The guy at the information desk tells us to head for Hamburg anyway when we can, and to ask for a hotel voucher, but he doesn’t say in what order these things should happen. In the half-deserted entrance lobby, we cool down with ice lollies and regret engaging in conversation with a man who tells us, trying to kiss my hand, that ‘we’re all Germans’. Back on the platform, it’s just gone eleven; pockets of air are released between our movements. The tarmac gives in to the strain of the day, finally allowed to exhale.

How is this actually felt? What is getting in the way of us feeling it?

‘What do you think you can do,’ I remember my dad saying a few months ago, ‘just you, with Trump in the White House?’ Not much, is the answer, but everyone, everything, responds, and I have to live with my responses. There’s the distance between Adam’s feet and mine. There’s no reason for me to cross it just now, but I do it because I can, to close the smallest gap when confronted with enormous ones. What distance is reasonable, responsible, and what speed?

Synapses

On another German train, the one between Osnabrück and Hamburg, Adam reads and reads, whilst I try to but, instead, think about how I don’t know what kind of metal this thing is made of. There are two Swedish boys in their early twenties in the seats behind us. It used to be the same when I was young and got on planes to Stockholm: the first conversation heard, in the language I was heading toward, was an announcement of what was to come, the point where one part of you became another, a translation took place.

At Hamburg Hauptbahnhof, about a dozen passengers gather at Deutsche Bahn’s information desk. It’s one o’clock in the morning and half of the queue consists of Swedish women in their fifties and sixties. Swedish is quickly taking over; one step through a ticketed door and then it’s the norm. The seventies was the golden age of interrailing. ‘Maybe they never stopped,’ I whisper to Adam. Unexpectedly, we are shepherded into groups, led out to the car park outside the station, and tucked into seven-seat taxis. We end up sharing one with three Dutch teenagers, all of them stone quiet as soon as we get into the car. That carbon footprint, I think, it’s fucked, and then I fall asleep. A while later, a vicious sideways jerk wakes me up. ‘Is he dozing?’ I hiss. I can only see the back of the driver’s head, stern and upright. ‘It was a deer,’ Adam whispers.

This kind of thing is happening now, apparently. I was never afraid of flying either, but when something is so fundamentally wrong, very little can be considered safe, balancing on top of it.

Something else I hadn’t paid attention to, back when I was reading about the ‘non-place’, was how little Augé mentions its impact on the patch of earth, the ecosystems, the real oozing or desiccated place on which non-places were erected, and from which they suck their profit. The book doesn’t give space to the people who, day in and day out, clean the loos, guard the doors, serve the coffee, keep the non-place going — those whose everyday lives and toil facilitate what others call breaks. Is calling something a ‘non-place’ saying there’s no one there, or that it’s not, really, on earth?

This, a connecting water between shores, is a place as well as any other: two or three o’clock in the morning on the upper deck of a ferry, crossing the sea between Germany and Denmark, with the wind prying clothes open, sneaking into the envelope between lid and eye. There are fish who live, procreate, and are familiar with each other, down there. Proper night also brings solace from the heat. Once in every twenty-four hours, it takes a deep breath and you can feel your periphery once more. The temperature of my blood is remarkably warmer than the air outside, and the weather has my back again, won’t give in as easily to the expansion of my blood, until morning. In Chennai, India, temperatures have reached 50 °C this week. They don’t have nearly enough water.

Since I was twenty years old, I’ve been taking medicine for anxiety on and off. It’s a ‘selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor’, a very common antidepressant, which makes it so that serotonin — the neurotransmitter that regulates things as varied as mood, cognition, and vomiting — stays between nerve cells for longer, doing its thing to make me fit for purpose. If chemical synapses, the space between nerves, weren’t that significant, if the connections weren’t as much a part of the body as the elements on either side, then how come they have such power over me?

Carbon emissions through transport don’t occur inside national borders. Governments wash their hands of it by labelling the places between countries as no places at all, yet through those interludes a capitalist system emerged; by way of those synapses, the same governments live, and make their living.

Severed

My dad has cut down a tree, and my sister has taught the dog not to run for the neighbour’s front door as soon as he’s let off his lead. He likes to sit there, on their porch, cocking his head and expecting a splendid welcome.

A few times a day during the summer months, a train called Kustpilen, ‘The Coastal Arrow’, sweeps past on a raised track which divides the pond from the lake. There’s an old train station which was closed down at some point in the nineties. The nearest working train station is Kisa, about half an hour’s drive away. When my mother was trying to teach me how to drive, we used the first stretch of that journey, through the woods, for practice. It went remarkably well dozens of times, and then, during one short trip, we met four tractors, one after the other. The local train station is now used, along with so many other houses around here, as a summer residence. A cardiologist stays there, who sometimes invites my dad over for dinner. Today, my dad picks us up in Linköping, the nearest city, as I never did learn how to drive.

‘The water is cold,’ I note. ‘No,’ my dad says, which might be objectively true, but he’s always slept with the window open, all through winter, forcing my mother to wear layers. On the first night, we go down to the lake after dinner. I walk out on the pier and land face down at the very edge, closing one eye to the tufty hairdos of the pines on the opposite shore, and listen for loons. Loons are probably the only bird whose call I’d be able to identify, without the trace of a doubt. To me, the water, the cliffs, and wild strawberries here all sound like loons, because there’s no splitting one presence from the other. The area close to the pier, now metallic and inscrutable as the sun recedes, is where my sister and I used to wave at the train passengers rushing past. We always hoped we looked older than we were, jumping up and down in our bikinis; then we’d plunge underwater and shout ‘banana’ at each other through the verdant dark.

Last time I was here, this place still held my mother in it. The water remained a substance in touch with her body, a body itself that she breathed over, belly-laughed in, and was upset when she couldn’t get into, due to her disability. It’s a lake around which she was considered a foreigner and — for much of the last thirteen years — felt a foreigner in her own body, but which she left particles, language, and choices all around. It still is that place. Death doesn’t remove a person from a place; if anything, it blurs the boundaries between place and person. The problem, perhaps, is the rest of us.

About a year after this trip, I will read Natalie Diaz’s poem ‘The First Water Is the Body’. Diaz, a Mojave poet and enrolled member of the Gila River Indian Tribe of Arizona, writes: ‘If I was created to hold the Colorado River, to carry its rushing inside me, if the very shape of my throat, of my thighs is for wetness, how can I say who I am if the river is gone?’ How is my mother in this water, and who are we, who have moved so much between waters? Elsewhere in the same poem, Diaz writes about how this image of body and water being the same lends itself in ‘American imaginations’ to ‘surrealism or magical realism’. This makes me laugh, because when thinking of Colombia, my mother’s land — my motherland — many, not just Americans, also think about magical realism. It may be easier that way.

I know, of course, that a thousand worldly fears are exacerbated by personal grief. This is not, by any means, an explanation of what I’m terrified of. It is as simple and as entangled as this: my mother taught me how to live between places. The year she died, I also happened to realise that I knew so very little about them.

Plunge

There’s an abundance of snakes this year. They’re small but still news. After crossing the railway tracks, we follow a short footpath between bushes to get to the lake itself, stomping through with a menace for the sake of the dog’s small nose, and what might bite it to shreds. ‘Have you heard of the parakeets in London?’ I say to Adam, and then I can’t remember the rest of that story, only that it’s about another adaptation. I speak to my uncle in Bogotá, who tells me that he hasn’t seen a butterfly in months.

The term ‘solastalgia’ was coined by philosopher Glenn Albrecht in 2005. It’s a hand-holding between the Latin ‘solacium’, comfort, and the Greek ‘algia’, pain. A pain brought on by comfort, or a pain where comfort should have been? Albrecht himself defined it as ‘when your endemic sense of place is being violated’. He often came into contact with people in distress because of the effects of mining upon their communities in Australia. It could be a condition of more than one, mutually enforcing, strand: the discovery that someone’s home has changed forever, and the pain of the diagnosis before the full-scale blow.

We each have individual ways of getting into the lake. My dad and my sister never divert from their tried and tested methods. She’s a dancer and has gone back to university to become a physiotherapist, which gives her three years of summers as a student. She’s spending them mostly here, with my dad, where they’ve developed routines of their own — half a family of four. When it’s time to swim, my dad steps down from the smaller pier and walks steadily out, gauging temperature, checking clouds, saying ‘umpf’ a few times as his shape cuts through the surface. Then, he turns 180 degrees to face the shore and, expanding lungs and midriff with sealed jaws, collapses backward into the water with something life an ‘ujujjuuuj’ trailing at his sides, along with shoals of minute fish. The loons are used to it and don’t fret. My sister has a different approach. She walks, with purpose, from the grass-lined bank, slowly into the water. It’s a tactic for true masochists. Once the water reaches her stomach, she launches nose down without a moment’s hesitation and swims a few strokes, before resurfacing somewhere else. My own routine used to involve a jump or a dive from the pier. It would be a good day, when it started head first. Adam is developing his own strategy. ‘I’m going to Norway!’ he says, side-stroking. ‘You’re going in the wrong direction,’ I say.

During this five-day visit, I don’t jump in a single time. The water is warmer than it’s ever been, as far as I can remember and according to my dad’s observations, but I linger on the steps, stalling and staring at the way light clusters, imagining what the liquid cut will feel like, the immediacy of the surface when it’s broken and no part of my skin is safe. It will be expecting the cold, the nerves reaching out to attention, but they will never be ready. I never know how they’ll respond, only that they will. It will never be the same. At least one person, perhaps two, around this lake must be frying eggs, I think, and step back and forth on the pier, like a cold-footed mallard, stuck between now and after. I have become suspicious of every sudden change, a state overturned by another before you know it, which is something I should be used to. It was so much like travelling.

In Touch

‘If we lived here,’ I say to Adam, sitting on the porch with my sister’s dog (his name is Arnold but we refer to him as Grisen, the Pig, or Lilleman, Little Man, because there are no grandchildren) belly-up on my lap, ‘we could come here all the time.’ ‘We don’t drive,’ Adam says. ‘If we lived here,’ I say to Arnold, ‘these naps together would be on the cards much more regularly. I could look after you,’ referring to when my sister and her boyfriend need dog-sitting. What I really mean is that I could look after all of them better. I mean that moving back permanently should be my response to all of this — that staying in one place is the only way I can, really, take responsibility.

It’s one of the wicked aspects of the climate crisis: addressing it demands thinking globally and living locally at the same time, connecting realities across vast distances whilst, crucially, becoming more of what we always were: part of a physical place. Within this network into which I was born, how do I best look after them: by being close to them, or fighting the arseholes who think they can get away with repeated genocides? Tying myself to a Scottish oil rig? With a crisis this big, where am I most of use, and not just to these specific people, whom I happen to love?

It’s an odd thing to feel homesick for a place where you’ve never actually lived, only lived in the breaks between lives. So few people really live here anymore; they’ve all moved to the cities. The train station and the post office are gone, and big chunks of the woods have been sold off by the aforementioned farmer, who lives in a house we call Sockerbiten, the sugar cube. It looks like it could harbour a meth lab. ‘It’s hard,’ George Monbiot wrote back in 2006, ‘to contemplate a world in which our own freedoms are curtailed, especially the freedoms which helped shape us.’ He was talking about the very essence of privilege — the blindness it makes possible. How hard is it, really, to contemplate a world in which billions aren’t murdered for profit? The reason that it feels hard is because identity is where we operate from, how we exist, the ‘us’ that was shaped over time and through love. When my sister and I left to study in other countries, my mother said that they — by which she meant her and my dad — only had themselves to blame. They’d raised us to think that was a thing people did, if they could. She didn’t say it like that; she usually switched languages in the middle of a sentence, and she certainly wasn’t speaking English when she said it. La culpa es nuestra, she said. Our hybridity never stopped with place: it has come to inform so much, every kind of being and wanting I do. Including my fear at this moment, my responses to a global crisis.

Every day for many years, my mother called her mother in Colombia to play some music and read some prayers. My mother wasn’t religious, but my grandmother is, and she’d had a stroke, so God was of some help as an interpreter. When my mother left Colombia in the 1980s, they were only able to speak on the phone once a month; the rest was handwritten letters, which took about a month to arrive. Hers was a very different migration compared to mine — ours is light years away from that of most people who are forced to leave, and who are kept from arriving. In the 1990s, environmental philosopher Henry Shue famously made the distinction between subsistence emissions and luxury emissions. The ability to visit loved ones, with relative ease across long distances, may be necessary for you to stay you, but this is different from staying alive. If we’re able to stay in touch, no matter what, this makes us forget that it all depends on what we can actually touch — the dirt, the water, and the bodies, her sugar snaps and her finger nails. In this crisis of disconnection, how do we repair those most essential links that nourish empathy and multiple perspectives, that make us hybrids, while understanding that many of them were always a luxury, always an exception?

Contrails

We’re on our way back, to work, to meetings and a big protest in October, to looking after the neighbour’s giant cat, who climbs our bookshelves and the back of my dressing gown. Taking the train both ways is more than we can afford, in annual leave as well as wages. Flying one way rather than both feels better, but like slapping someone’s face instead of kneeing them in the crotch might feel better. On the plane back to Bristol, a young person is humming to the music in their earphones. They’re soon told off by a gentle but strong-jawed air steward, and this is followed by the signal for strapping on seat belts. The sound is known, no longer familiar.

We were only away for five days. Next time, we say, we’ll plan it better, we’ll book way in advance and make sure we stay for longer, to make the long journey there and back worth it. We’ll adapt to true distance. We’re amazed at the quiet toddler in the seat in front. Children so far above the ground are somehow an even stranger thing compared to adults. Other aircraft sew zips of vapour across the sky. They leave temporary zigzag scars across our aeroplane window, one dissolving into the other. Contrails, they’re called, trails of clouds. Very soon, we won’t see them and there they will be, reflecting more heat back to earth than the rest of the sky.

Postscript

That was the summer of 2019. Finishing this piece, in the summer of 2021, I still haven’t been back to Sweden. I speak to them every day.