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Six hours in Stockholm: A girl sitting outside a cafè, wearing white lace tights and black strappy shoes, looking around, noticing my friends’ red shoes and writing down everything she saw in her notebook (style scout? writer?). Breakfast at a tapas bar decorated all white, good espresso. Male jewellry (diamond earrings and GIANT crosses) at H&M. Me trying to manage with my swedish when I only half make out what people say (mumble) to me. Too bright pink knit cardigan I wouldn’t have afforded anyway. A posh interior design shop named appropriately Posh Living. A feminist classic I bought. The A0-sized comic and illustration books at the design bookshop in the cellar of Kulturhuset. Italian restaurant with a grumpy old man waiter who then took extra care of me and came up with vegan things for me to eat, and a young waiter who forgot our dessert order but was so cool we got lost for words whenever he approached us. (photos)

“So let’s go and check out those swedish boys in advance,” said my friend M, to which I had no objection and so Tunisia was traded for Stockholm. This of course had nothing to do with only having a week of holiday, being broke and having tons of schoolwork to catch up with before the school actually starts. (the endless joys of being an architecture student…)

So today it’s three girls on a boat and tomorrow it’s Stockholm, shoe shops, cool cafés, hopefully good weather and no hangover. Only my traveling companions are such that inspire things like tequila shots! to happen…

When people go through mourning, and through their crisis of faith, what they come back to as bedrock is their own capacity to love. Sometimes that connection is frail and tenuous, but whether it is with animals, nature, music, or other humans, that’s the bedrock to which they must return, to that one caring relationship the perpetrator was never able to destroy. And then they build from there.
- a language older than words

donate shop participate help!

I put things in piles and topped them with four different colours of post it’s. I transfered computerfiles and took two thousand elastic bands to filing cabinet. I typed out two last emails (this is where I can be reached [don’t], these are the people to contact in case of…), (hey you and bye, see you around, have a nice life). Then I stole office supplies (four marker pens), gave away my keys and closed the door behind me.

And then, just walking down the street, I started smiling.