On the distance

Stockholm, October 2016

The leaves on the trees slowly shifted from green to yellow-brown gradients… gathering quietly in the corners of the city. It wasn’t cold, but it wasn’t really warm either; strong winds began to sweep through the streets, and the clothes people wore changed with them. Everyone seemed to slip into a grayscale palette… and in a way, so did their faces; fewer smiles, slower steps, and one by one, the outdoor areas of bars and restaurants began to close.

I wasn’t used to such a collective change in mood caused by the weather. Back home, people didn’t really change depending on how hot or cold it was outside… but this wasn’t home, and from the moment I applied to come here, I somehow knew that the closer you are to the poles, the colder people become too.

By then, I had already formed a small group of friends from school; a mix of locals and foreigners who didn’t want to spend all their time studying. We wanted to live a little… to experience something outside the usual student routines. One evening we planned to go to a trendy rooftop bar in the old slaughterhouse district, south of the city; it would close soon due to the weather, so it felt like the right time. A friend and I decided to have a few drinks beforehand in a nearby park… the closer to the metro, the better.

We walked up Götgatan and stopped at a small park called Björnsträdgården. It had concrete stairs where people sat facing a patch of green with a playground and a skatepark in the background; it seemed like a perfectly normal place to gather.

We texted our local friends, who sounded slightly confused as to why we had chosen to drink there… yet they still agreed to come. We didn’t really understand their hesitation; what could be wrong with it? Soon after, though, we were approached by junkies asking for beer, Roma women asking for money, the girls were catcalled by young North African migrants… and a few other strange people wandered around. We left as soon as our friends arrived.

That brief episode stayed with me. I couldn’t stop thinking about how that part of town, which had always seemed decent to me, changed so abruptly once the sun went down. It wasn’t that I didn’t know my neighborhood… but rather that I hadn’t truly seen it. Somehow, the invisible had become visible; the city’s hidden face revealed itself in the half-light of evening. It gave the streets a quiet melancholy… but most people seemed to ignore it.

It was oddly fascinating to see how the beautiful and the broken coexisted in the same space; like two parallel realities brushing past each other without meeting. Every time they crossed paths, it felt as if they existed in different dimensions… the elegant blondes in Chanel coats blocking out the Roma girl asking for coins. They were there and not there at the same time; and as days passed, they became invisible to me too… as if their existence were a glitch in the fabric of the city. Their pain drifted somewhere beyond our world, too distant to matter.

Everyone kept walking with headphones on and their thoughts far away; everyone passed without looking, and in a metaphysical sense they were only shadows of something we know exists… but prefer not to recognize.

Later that year, the city invested in a new lighting system to cover the same area where we had first sat. Slowly, those people disappeared; replaced by community service officers patrolling more often. Their corners were gone… their presence erased. Their suffering was moved elsewhere, somewhere unseen; a place less unpleasant to the eye, where people could again focus on their Instagram notifications, their Tinder dates… and not on the sound of coins rattling inside a Pressbyrån coffee cup