Ex-Exile, Expat

Back in Sweden, out of exile. Or so I thought for the first few moments on the train over from Copenhagen. Smiled to myself at the prejudiced ease with which I judged the northern Swedish woman who corrected the local's pronunciation of the place she was asking for directions to, her shriekingly white jeans and blue striped shirt so typical of the upwardly mobile middle class's desire to seem fresh and chic, her chattering little girl identikit cute. Felt relaxed by looking out over the sound, remembering debates about whether the bridge should be built or not, and the horrors of missing the boat on the way to the airport when I was flying off to school. Saw the barns on the Swedish side - an odd feeling to know roughly what they look like inside.

Read C.S Godschalk's Kalimantaan on the plan over - exceptional. Took her ten years to write. So terse but so brimming with life. I understand why she uses her initials - in some ways, it's the least "feminine" book i've read in ages. I can only imagine the horrors of some marketing department trying to flog it as a "love across the boundaries" read set in the tropics... which for some reason i associate with female authors writing about the East (great, I'm prejudiced AND sexist...). Probably the truest description of expat life I've read - how it throws together people that would otherwise have nothing in common, it's cruelty and fleetingness, the impossiblity both of staying and of leaving. The need to have a "home" somewhere else, despite the fact that almost no-one can fully return emotionally - and if they do, they have to exorcise their life "abroad". Living on the cusp of cultures you don't understand, or are constantly trying to understand. And just the occasional smiting insight from Godschalk - that complex personalities struggle in that environment, that your life only seems real in the re-telling to people at home who don't know you anymore because you left them so long ago and have been too busy to keep updated.
In Godschalk's Borneo, it took 5 months for letters to arrive from England - they might as well do today, actually. I'm just about the only writery person i know who doesn't miss letters - i am just as good or bad at writing emails as i was with letters. there are only certain relationships i can maintain in writing - which i guess is odd, because it's where i feel the most like myself. i miss drawing in letters, and i miss the manic letters i used to write to people i was losing, in airports, when i knew i'd never manage to keep up the relationship in the way i wanted to, and somehow, through a quickly scribbled note on the back of tickets and (unused) vomit bags to tell the person that i still loved him or her, in transit. but otherwise i love email. still, the speed of communication does nothing to broach the emotional distance between expats and those 'back home', for me, anyway - it might as well take five months.

So being in Sweden is, as always, strange. Out of exileness, though Sweden has never been permanent for my family, into a false role of returning expat, to a from cultures I've never fully embraced. Both more home and less home than anywhere else. All sounds seems a disruption. Even in towns. Even nature is less intense than in the States, or in Asia - less growth, fewer bugs, not as many animals around. The trees grow further apart - distance measured more in silence than space, somehow. There's a lovely line by Rilke, about learning to love the distance between two people - small wonder he loved it here. Am annoyed I left his letters to Lou Andreas Salome at my flat in Brooklyn - perhaps they would have made sense to me here.