tristane

Being back in Sweden is awesome. The first couple of days have been intense, but for a first start back in the good ol' country it could hardly have been better. Not only do I have a HUGE room in the middle of the city, I am sharing it with a girl who seems to be great fun. I realized this almost immediately after having arrived in Lund and met my future room mate for the first time. She is short and blonde (1-0 for prejudices) and, when she was piciking me up at the station, described her car as a "Mercedes". As if I could recognize a Mercedes if it bit me in the ass and called me mama. Two seconds later I realized we had the same model of Nokia phone and then I knew we would get along.

The appartment is amazing. I'll post some pictures later, but as for now I could just mention the three and a half meters to the ceeling, a decent kitchen with a little kitchen island with the front windows that is the awe of the whole 1920s high class building. Once I entered I realized what Jessica had ment by those death threats. My room was big and bright and with a tiny balcony out to the inner yard. There would be no problems decorating or trying to fit everything in, it would hold everything I could throw in.
This night, however, it was redecorated as a living room since E, my new roomie, was having a dinner party later that night. Thus I was no more than half an hour old at my new place before I was invited to my first house party.

After having been up until all night and leaving with a cab at four in the morning I was beyond tired, and wasn't really in the best of party moods. I had planned to sleep at Jessie's place, but it turned out she was working late and leaving immediately with the bus up to Uppsala at eleven, and the prospect of hanging with Jonathan until morning was less than appealing. Heading down to Systemet I picked up three beers and figured that would do well.
We had not even sat down to the table before E started filling and refilling my wine glass. I had been nodding not even halfway through the dinner, so when time came to head out my body had given up and was going for the sky and - sooner or later - a head first crash.

The club was crowded, but Elina got me in for free and well inside I got a free drink and even though I was drooping a bit I was still entertaining myself watching the men, who weren't Irish. Especially one caught my interest. He had short stubby hari and a kind look in his eyes that among the rest of the drunken crowd seemed blissfully thoughful. We exchanged a few words in the beginning before we were both pulled apart by the rest of the crowd. I took a loop around the bar, half-heartedly looking for Elina who after almost an entire bottle of wine had rushed around like a headless hen - although quite a bit merrier - and kept appearing and disappearing around me. Suddenly a guy next to me stumbled into the glass she had handed me, and two seconds later I was drenched with red bull and vodka.

The blonde guy had been standing not far from me, and now he came up to me and helped me get some napkins form the stressed out barman. This time no crowd pulled us apart, and we started talking. It turned out he was studying ot become a fireman in Revinge, about 25 kilometers east of Lund and had that cute Gothenburg kind of accent that I love so much. The bar closed soon enough and we went out and, still talking, headed towards my new place.
He turned out to be quite pleasant, not to mention handsome, and as we reached my place he asked if we should go inside, pointing to the rain that was prickling the asphalt all around us. I did feel a bit weird about bringing somebody home in my very first night in my new place, so once we came up I made clear that there would be no "funny stuff" and explained why. He looked a bit dissapointed but asked me if it was still ok if he stayed the night, since he had missed his last bus. This seemed perfectly aproproate, and I even took the measure of calling Elina to make sure that this was ok. She seemed fine with it once she knew it was nobody she knew, and ten minutes later, when we had sat down in my room and started discussing career paths, she came crashing into the room with a kebab and started a long and loud monolouge about the quality of the kebab until she realized that all we did was nod politely and smile (which, I might add, Fireman K did with a peculiarly strained expression in his face). Then she suddenly stopped in the middle of a sentence and exclaimed, in her own subtle way;
"Oh, you people want to be alone??"
Not really knowing what else to say, I told her that she could calmly stay and have her kebab. It was, after all, her place. She just laughed and told us, "No, no, I'll just go and leave you guys alone. I'll go hang with Peter instead. Where is he by the way? Pee-eter??"
With that she left the room.

We stayed put in the couches for a while and talked until it started heading towards three in the morning. I was leaving at eleven thirty for Uppsala, and after the last couple of days I desperately needed to sleep. there were two couches in the room for us to sleep on, but it was soon decided upon to put them together, "for the extra space".
He didn't try anything though. There were no stray hands, no discrete pulling of the blanket, no blunt verbal invitations. It was as if there was nothing at all strange about laying in a couch in your underwear beside a woman you have never seen before until tonight and just talk. So that's what we did.
We just kept talking there in the dark until we were close enough to kiss.

I know I have been bitter about Ireland. The houses are cold, the food is disgusting, the fashion is as attractive as a week old roadkill and the men looks like they have been running into brick walls for generations. Maybe that's the reason why I brought somebody home on my first night in Sweden. Because after nine months of bum fuck nothing I could not resist the warm and strong arms of a Swedish fireman. To be honest I am glad I did either way.
He was tender and warm and knew what he wanted. I love a man who knows what he wants - and that shows that he likes it. I love the breathing, the panting, the curly chest hair moist with sweat, the five-in-the-morning stubble scraping against your neck, the sensation of weight pushed against you again, and again, the play of the muscles working forcefully underneath his skin. An arm twice the size of our own, that faint smell of cologne, shampoo and sweat.
Freud always said that men want to return to the womb. If that is true, then women probably want to return to the arms of our fathers; a place where it is safe, where nothing can hurt us. I can sing all I want about makingit on my own, but deep down I know that somewhere deep inside I want that strong, handsome knight that with his bare hands can protect me from the harms of the world. Somebody who could tie me up in the blink of an eye, but that is still man enough to kiss me and gently crawl up close to me afterwards.

I slept on his arm for the rest of the night.

The next morning I snoozed until I had fourty minutes left until my train left. He left his number on my cell phone, then gave me a hug and a kiss on the neck before he left. I don't know if I will ever hear from him again, but it hardly matters. He made a fine twenty-nine.