architecture in helsinki (provisory title)–part 1

I never thought a hug could mean so much to me. I was alone. As most of the time lately. As most of the time ever. I was just drinking some coffee and thinking. Like most of the times. As you should probably imagine already, it was in a Café I had never been before. Mostly because I have never been in a café in this town. I won’t go back there, their coffee is terrible. But still, I saw something rather hard to forget. At least for the near future. I saw you. Except it wasn’t you. And that I knew it. But it was just like seeing you. You were just the same size, with basically the same features. The only recognizable difference was in the hair. And, I should really say, you should probably let your hair like that. It was really short on one side, and in the other it grew just like yours, the same brown colour, the same wavy pattern.

And when I saw you, I felt the urge to go there, to you, and hug you, and say “thank you for your help” or “I already miss you”. In this city every building seems huge and meant to last, to survive the everchanging trees and the evil deeds of time. And in those endless streets of honey and mighty horizons, thousands of working bees converge, everytime in everyday. In these my wandering soul felt like never before the heavy weights of wanderlust; the price it takes, and the marvels it shows. A simple hug may be able to ease the pain and double the wonder, bring closer things torn apart by the depts. And I saw you; your shadow, your cool doppelganger through the windows of that book-filled café and wondered. If it was a sign, the ghost of Christmas future, prophet of the loneliness to come with winter, a shadow-friend to which confess the emptiness of the bed sheets.

I should have ran and hugged your shadow while it was still there. I should have watched it turn from you into some Finnish girl who would probably slap me in the face and think me a pervert or some other thing like that. Instead I kept sitting, drinking that awful coffee: tasteless with sugar lumps, s'il vous plait; and trying to read a newspaper in an unknown language, looking for an apartment. I was not that desperate then, and I’m not that desperate now, won’t be, at least for a while. And even then, other ones were yet to come, other hugs and other shadows, they ever come. Just a little while longer, they’ll come in time.

The next night, as I was walking home at night, I kew it. Baby it’s cold outside, and you know that it’s warm inside. Summer out there, and in here only the dark night of the soul.