I never meant to stay in Reykjavik as long as I have been staying now. I was always on my way out of here since the end of summer last year, yet it never worked out. When I got here, I was only travelling with my backpack, bringing only my favourite, but rather less, clothes with me. It was only for 2 months. I packed it and thought it out really well- what fits with what and how could I use one piece of clothing more than one way. I tried to be clever. One book, one pair of boots, one jumper. In three months, it’s been a year since I arrived. At first, I was fighting with the idea- I was supposed to live my life in Scotland as that was always meant to be this 4-year chapter in my life. Not less, not more- I wasn’t interested. I like to think my life through, as much as one possibly can, of course. There is a lot on uncertainty in it and maybe that’s what makes it all so interesting. There is this mutual calmness in both- knowing the plan and knowing that there is no plan. Either experience can bring a different joy, when you learn to let go, knowing that only than you can enjoy the next moment when leading it.
I remember wondering myself what is this all about. I believe to my core that life happens (mostly; from where to where it isn’t, is another argue) because of a reason and the bigger is the situation, the more important is the reasoning. I tend not to worry too much, if things don’t go as planned- I always have the trust that I will sort it all out, as time goes by. I don’t know have I figured it out now- me being back in Reykjavik unplanned- but I surely do have a better sense of why this all was important. One could say that about everything, of course, but maybe this is what it is all about. We have religions and human psychology to balance it out, yet there is still this amount of unknown what nobody can describe, explain or say it with certainty. So, for me, that unknown is this belief that everything happens for a reason between all those things what actually is explainable with logic. Maybe it is just a way to feel safer and calmer in this rather alone world.

I am sitting on my living room sofa; the cold late winter air is coming in from the open window as I am reading Frank O’Hara and smoking a cigarette. I don’t smoke, but for years now, I have always had a tobacco in my house, just as I always have a bottle of wine or whisky. I never know when I may feel like a cigarette, nor I don’t know when I might have someone over, to who I could offer one. And every now and then I offer myself one. I smell the fresh, sweet vanilla but floral scent of the tobacco and from somewhere, the smell of dark chocolate surrounds me. I smoke the cigarette slowly; I like to take my time just as I like to kiss or sip my glass of wine slowly. Smelling it, tasting it. Acknowledging that if that cigarette brings me any closer to any of my deaths, as titled on top of the tobacco package, I better be aware of the act itself.

Put out your hand,
isn't there
an ashtray, suddenly, there? beside
the bed? And someone you love enters the room
and says wouldn't
you like the eggs a little

different today?
And when they arrive they are
just plain scrambled eggs and the warm weather
is holding.

O’Hara writes simply (one could argue with that statement), yet just complex enough. (This is not an argue between which is better: simple or complex. Light or dark. Small or big.) I find his compositions easy to follow, not to belittle his creativity anyhow, once again. His ideas are big, but his words are not heavy. There is some lightness in them. It almost feels like he is aware of how intelligent he is and that’s why he doesn’t need to prove himself with big words. After all, it seems that it is not without a reason why the history tells stories that ‘his personality became famous before he did’. I have always admired people whose charm moves quicker than themselves. He was in love to a young ballet dancer who inspired most of his best poems. He also uses a word “orange” a lot in his poetry and yet I cannot help myself thinking was he inspired, either positively or negatively, nor neither, of the colour or the fruit. If colour, it is rather unusual, I find, especially considering the fact that he wasn’t writing from some Mediterranean country where oranges and other citruses just lay around, but instead from New York. Orange is an unusual colour (but less unusual fruit). People just don’t walk around wearing an orange shirt or orange shoes or orange bag. One barely ever thinks about the colour orange as a preferred choice. But it seems that Vincent loved orange and maybe that’s why he did too. And suddenly all his poems what weren’t, at least not obviously, about Vincent, are still about him.

I suddenly feel like I have grown up. That it has been too long when I have been circling around the same loop where I have nothing new to learn. I always like to believe that I still have, one always have, yet it seems that all I can learn from it by now on, is proving myself what I already know. Suddenly this millennial way of caring doesn’t seem attempting anymore; where people become too busy to care and hide their vulnerability behind something what is self-centred. And since when did I became too scared of letting somebody to care about me. Just because you can do something, doesn’t mean you have to. Even if you cook the best scrambled eggs you have ever eaten, it is nice to let somebody else to cook them for you once in a while.

Few days ago, I had a Zoom call with my psychologist. We meet and talk every now and then for the past three years already. She is fantastic and I don’t know anything about her. She says that I am smart, young woman with an ability to analyse and that’s why she believes that I may know more about her than someone who knows the facts what one considers as the ‘information to know somebody’. I think she might be right.
On that early Thursday morning as I sip my third cup of coffee already, I told her that after all those 60-minutes turning the last three years I have spent with her, I am still struggling of getting over of myself and of the idea that I need to do everything by myself. That the same sense of independency with what I have created everything I am proud of, is the same what is keeps me away from the things I now desire.
And it seems that before I can plant myself into others, I, for once again, need to go back to myself. And this is not another self-discovery journey or some sort of spiritual evoking. This is now all about trusting people enough to let them close, not just keeping them armlengths away. Therefore, I have always enjoyed a journey to self and I find some comfort from the idea that whatever needs to be improved is in me, because trying to make someone else to understand or feel something, seems always more work than teaching something new to yourself.

I suddenly realise that the scent of dark chocolate hasn’t gone away. My cigarette is long gone, and it is not the scent of musk and vanilla on my skin or some fresh florals in the air. I open the news and I realise that meanwhile when I have been sitting on my sofa, reading about O’Hara writing about things what are orange, the land where I am on, have finally erupted. Everything feels so fragile yet so powerful at the same time. And maybe that’s the point. The strength that one should look up to, should come from a vulnerable place.