Andromeda

by Therese Bohman

“It’s tragic, really,” he said, “how lonely we are with so many of our memories. All those things that meant such a lot to us, the little details that combine to make up almost everything that is precious in life. A scent, an atmosphere, a particular kind of light in the sky. All those fleeting elements that can’t be re-created. Books hold so many memories, details that live on because someone has tried to put them into words, written them down and woven them into a narrative. Just imagine how many perceptions of the world are passed on from one person to another.”

I think I felt closest to him when he talked about literature, because everything he said I had also experienced but had been unable to express. How life-changing a reading experience can be, how it can fill you with a completely new perception of what life could be, fresh insights into what is worth striving for, worth believing in and defending, what it means to live life to the fullest. I realized that for both of us, something had been missing before those key reading experiences, and that the same would always be true from then on.

I also grew tired of rosé wine very quickly, I felt as if it stuck to the inside of my mouth in an unpleasant way. Waking up in the morning after too much rosé was a particular torment, and it happened with increasing frequency because the wine provided me with armor against the socializing in the evenings.

That is probably why new people are so tempting, not necessarily for their own sake but for yours. The new and the fleeting offer a chance for you yourself to become new. A chance to be seen as you want to be seen, maybe as the person you really are: a fragment that contains more truth than the whole.

It also felt as if we saw each other for the individuals we really were—paradoxically, because we both saw a reflection of ourselves in the other. And for the first time in forever I felt alive. That made me both happy and sad: happy to have found

someone who wanted to listen to what I had to say, and sad to realize that this had been missing throughout my life. Someone who actually wanted what I had to give. There was so much that was important to me, and it struck me that I had never shared it with anyone. You liked hearing about what I had read and what it meant to me, you wanted to hear about the things that had shaped me throughout my life.

It’s funny, because it’s a common theme in literature, one of those archaic structures we used to discuss: fearing something so much that you unconsciously bring it about. Like King Oedipus. And yet I let it happen in my own life. I became someone else in your eyes, and I had only myself to blame.

Do you remember you once told me that you felt as if you had spent your whole life running? I understood exactly what you meant, I had done the same. I had run alone, just as you had. But during those years it felt as if we were running together. It felt as if we were running toward home.