Fairytale/Fear/Fate

Ghosts. Apart from a scary incident in a school elevator when I was 16; a forced excursion with my ballet class to the eponymous Patrick Swayze movie; and my residency in a former monastery in Amsterdam which I fervently hoped was haunted (it wasn't), I have only vaguely wondered about the existence of ghosts.  But the last few weeks in Stockholm have taught me about an entirely different sort of ghost, the sort where you can't help feeling a dreaded, omnipresent sense of deja vu in everything you do. (I know I have been sounding increasingly esoteric in these last posts, but bear with me.  I am not denying I may be well on the way to Crazy Cat Lady.)

Yesterday I received an email from none other than The Norwegian.  Longtime readers of this blog will know him also as The Little Dutchman -- my long lost unrequited love from an ill-fated Lost In Translation Experience in Tokyo.  We are friends now, if you can call bi-annual emails being friends, but I couldn't help but think perhaps the universe was trying to warn me about history repeating.  He might as well have accused me of tearing a hole in the space time continuum. 

This has been going around in my head ever since: here I am again, trying to start a new life in Stockholm (again),  blighted by unrequited love (again), contemplating a future as a crazy cat lady with Irina (again), in temporary housing provided by the absolute kindness of friends (again) and wondering if I should have moved to New York or London (again).  Ironically, it all feels almost comfortingly unstable. Quite possibly I have actually discovered the secret of time travel, and if so, I think like any other form of travel it probably requires quite a lot of red wine and Xanax to survive.

Upon boarding the plane to Stockholm from a recent trip back to London (me and of course one of the people who I think the universe is warning me about, a nomadic kindred spirit which means trouble, at least in my head) we were confronted with a set of three HSBC ads featuring wedding cake couples with FATE, FEAR and FAIRYTALE printed on them.  'Which one are we?' he joked.  I immediately said FEAR,  I wanted to say FATE.  But there wasn't one that said OH FUCK, and I don't think FAIRYTALE is in my cards.  Although, I guess that's up to cruel FATE...