Life across places and between them: family, migration, landscape, memory, identity and the complicated work of making a home.
Why is alyssa.ax in English? Partly because it is my native language. Partly because writing has to remain sustainable. But also because English lets things travel — and because I think Åland is fascinating enough that more people should know what the hell goes on here.
Thirteen years abroad today, and my life elsewhere has reached its adolescence. It has some questions about the promises it was raised on. How can a place become so much of who you are while remaining unsure what to do with you?
Where I grew up, toughness included turning up when someone needed a hand. In the Nordics, I found beauty in making that care a public promise. I want a society that offers both without making obedience the price of belonging. Perhaps steel, smoke and social democracy have more to offer one another than either of my homes suspects.
There are distances on maps, and there are distances between lives—the quiet assumption that history happens to other people, in other places. On September 11, 2001 both gave way. A city I did not know became intimate through the mother of the classmate beside me; a landscape I knew by heart became part of the world’s memory. Manhattan entered my biography. Terror entered my childhood geography. Elsewhere became somewhere.
A missed bus gave us an unexpected morning together, a field of dahlias, and one magnificent flower already occupied by a bee. After twenty-one years of marriage, perhaps love is partly this: thousands of ordinary acts, and knowing what to do with the time life unexpectedly gives back.
