One morning Gösta got up early. His friends dragged him along to a café at the other side of town. He ate donuts for breakfast. Black coffee. This cafe is one of the very few independent ones, not part of some franchise brand. That is sad. Gösta wants to have his donuts at a place where people care about making donuts, rather than about the maximizing of quarterly profits. He does not want his donut to be part of value creation. Burly men work at the café, and every time Gösta has been there, laborers from the area has come there for a cup of coffee. It's a friendly, secluded place. One time, they saw a slip of paper with a picture of a hamster. The hamster was missing and the owner wanted to know whether anybody had seen it. They went for a walk. There's still so many places Gösta hasn't seen. Gösta hadn't seen the ancient boxing club before. He hadn't seen the shelter home and he hadn't seen the house covered with grafitti. It was a beautiful day. Crisp air, colors everywhere and no rush (except the hovering thought of the Office).
For a few weeks, it rained and rained. Gösta felt bad. Maybe it was the weather. Maybe it was something else. Gösta felt bad. He didn't do anything about it. He went for beers & lectures & stayed inside & went out & ate lunch at the cafe & talked to his colleagues about research projects & read books & fell asleep & watched TV. It didn't feel right. Gösta doesn't ask for reasons. Gösta makes up reasons. Gösta gets muddled in petty explaning. Gösta is sick of writing and done with talking. Gösta wants to shut up. Instead, Gösta engages in long, moralistic speeches. Gösta is tired of being serious and tired of not being serious enough. The paraphrases Gösta churns out, the clichés and the rest of the mindless, sentimental shit. Gösta wants piece of mind. Gösta is tired of saying: "this might not be completely thought out but...." Gösta should stop saying it. Small things bother Gösta while big things don't.
The light on Gösta's street is different every time. Gösta goes past the sleazy shops for ladies' underwear, past the closed down restaurant, past the karaoke bar, past the grocery shops that provides him with the necessities of life. Every stone of the sidewalk is familiar. There's the smell of the construction work to the left, the kebab place, the hamburger place. There's the people he sees every now and then; the lady who works in some of the shops (maybe at the optician's), the professor, the goth kid with headphones, the person who might or might not be Gösta's neighbor, some type from uni that he should recognize. Gösta hesitates to say hello. He half-waves, half-smiles. Other people consider Tavastgatan a monster of a street, an expression of ruthless city planning and cold negligence. There was a time when Gösta agreed with that. But when Gösta returns from some trip, even a small one, walking on Tavastgatan feels like an embrace made of concrete.
Tavastgatan changes its shape with the seasons. During the summer it is dusty and you can almost see the concrete breathe. Cars give rise to a small cloud of smog. In winter, a small trail of stern-looking beer-carriers and workholders keep up the life of the street. And be it winter or summer, there's always a crowd outside BAILA BAILA every Saturday night at 3 a.m. They smoke and curse and cuddle and fight and sometimes they ask if Gösta has a cigarette to spare.
Gösta visits the Island just to watch the sea. To watch the seasons change. It rains all the time. For some of his relatives, the sea is much more alive than it is to him. Dangerous, too. They tell him stories about people who drowned, people who never came back, accidents, adventures, bravuras. For them, the sea is a familiar territory, ladden with names and shapes and changes. "Did you put those fishing-nets south of Bergholmin? You know who will get mad about that...Dontcha." Gösta's father tells him about the fish that are about to disappear and the species of fish that have arrived instead. "Did you go fishing today?" they ask his father. Embedded in that question, curiosity, worry, languid conversation. They go look at today's catch. His father can't hide his pride or his disappointment. Among the villagers, Gösta's father is known to be a "real" fisherman. He is respected for that. Gösta is not sure what is implied by the "real", however. For his father, fishing is life itself, but when he talks about it he always belittles it as "a hobby", "you have to occupy yourself with something alright", "you get a few pennies out of it, right?" When guests arrive for coffee, the first thing they ask my father concerns today's fishing adventures. My father knows the good places. He knows the tricks. And the guests keep asking him how many fish he got and my father is eager to tell them the amount of lavaret or the amount of perch. Gösta doesn't know about these things. He couldn't separate lavaret from perch, anyway.
Gösta goes out in the blizzard. It's quiet-quiet. He hears the clank of some metal piece by the hospital, which looks like a glaring blob in the white, muted landscape. The creaks of steps. Subdued sounds of traffic. From a distance, he hears somebody wobble with a plastic bag of bottles. A dog barks and the wind moans in the corner of a house. The sky is yellow and bright. The wind makes the light flicker between the trees. Gösta admires the wonders of nature, but his musings are interrupted as he slides on the ice, falling elegantly on his ass. Before he rises up, he quickly looks around him to check whether anybody saw his little misadventure.
He sits at the Gardener's fireplace. There's a good smell in the room. He listens to his friends' quiet conversation about flowers, trees and cats. He sips a glass of fine liquor. He likes how they talk about people he has never met. Mostly he is quiet. The gardener chuckles. The gardener is friends with everybody, he doesn't hold grudges.
It's been a shitty autumn Gösta. You breathe the cold air and when you walk past your office in the middle of the night you dive into a heap of snow. You make an angel. You haven't done it since you were a kid. There's snow all over your clothes and inside them too. You freeze like hell. You wipe snot from your nose on your mittens just like you did as a kid. The snot immediately crystallizes. It will get better now, won't it Gösta?
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