Today is July the 2nd, 2002. On this Tuesday morning, I am on my way to the town swimming pool. I always find the walk there boring, even though it’s only a 12-minute walk. Today seems slightly different; I greet two cats and three dogs out loud. I wish them a pleasant Tuesday.

 

This reminds me of my teenage days, of the same weekly routine that led me to the farm for milk duty. I hated it because Mr and Mrs Anderson were so kind and friendly to me, but I could not express a word of gratitude to them. I carried this difficulty with expressing thanks when I was young. I expected so much that Mr and Mrs Anderson would know how much I wanted to take the words “thank you” out through my vocal folds. What I did instead was rub the edge of my plastic basket and wait patiently for them to fill the milk jar for me.

 

One day at the dinner table, Dad told us to be extra careful with fish. Old Mr Henrik had got a fishbone stuck in his throat and luckily managed to take it out. The first thing I thought was that I wished it had happened to me. I could take out the fishbone and carve some thank-yous onto it, then bring it to Mr and Mrs Anderson. At least they would know.

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To this day, I still haven’t had a chance to say thanks to them. We moved to a different town shortly after my final year of lower secondary school finished.

 

On a summer day like this, I followed Dad, Mum and Astrid into our new, half-furnished home. Astrid, my older sister, was back during her university break. I walked behind them, looking around the unfamiliar rooms, and felt unsettled. I didn’t feel like I belonged there. Soon they were busy moving things around while I sat on the newly delivered couch in the middle of the living room - not quite on the couch itself, more on the plastic it was still wrapped in. I watched them while imagining what the house would turn into after the summer holiday.

 

One of the workers noticed me sitting there and said that a teenage girl like me should be reading books instead of wasting a day doing nothing. I felt ashamed. I had always thought of myself as a good child. He sent me into another room to read.

 

The room had no function then. It became a reading room later on. I can still remember the smell of the paint, but not how long I stayed there. For all I knew, the whole house could have been put together while I was in that room. Whatever happened outside the room happened without me. Perhaps something happened that day, and that was why Astrid never moved back home after that summer.

 

Astrid and I used to hide secrets behind the washing machine. We had this logic that when the washing machine ran a cycle, the secrets we wrote on pieces of paper and threw behind it would be wiped out too. That’s what Astrid told me. We never got to do that again in our new house. The new washing machine stood so close to the wall that there was nowhere behind it to hide anything. I can’t remember whether that was the truth, or whether I simply stopped hiding secrets anywhere other than inside myself from then on.

 

Years before that, when I was in my second year of primary school, my classmates played a trick on me and got a rubber toy stuck in my ponytail during a class break. Everyone soon gathered around. I couldn’t see what had happened behind my head, so I could only judge it from their reactions. Some were talking over one another, wondering what to do. In the middle of them, I noticed Finn, old Mr Henrik’s oldest grandson. He did nothing. He just stood there, looking calm.

 

Perhaps the tears acted as a magnifying glass. But if Finn could stand there so calmly, perhaps it really wasn’t as bad as everyone else made it seem. It turned out that I still had to cut off that section of hair, which gave me my first experience with short hair. As I grew older, I learned that even for a girl, the length of her hair is a choice she can make calmly, for reasons of her own.

 

To this day, I still think of Finn when I go to a hair salon. The hairdresser had to ask me again how heavy I wanted my side-swept fringe this time. I had been completely drifting away, wondering if the boy who stood there so calmly that day was Finn, or perhaps a Flynn. I no longer had any contact with old Mr Henrik’s family to ask.

 

Memory does this thing. It makes me question the memories themselves. Until I don’t know which one is the fact anymore. Live with it. That’s the only rule now.

 

I never met the two cats and three dogs again. I don’t mind. I’ve said hi to them, on a Tuesday morning on my way to the swimming pool.