I am here, sitting in our bed, alone and with an alarm clock that is about to ring in 6 hours. Tomorrow is a Stockholm day, but it is also the day when M comes back home. When he is away, I always find it hard to shut the light off and sleep. I don’t know why. Or if I would say the truth, I exactly know: I miss him. My days are filled with thousand thoughts, activities and things to do but when the night comes, and I’m alone at home, I feel like trapped.

Tonight, I won’t watch the TV program the Farm, I won’t use blocket for 2 hours, and I won’t snook in peoples life on facebook. Tonight, I write this post and admire the pictures on the wall in front of me.

On the left, up, this is a painting that M received from his parents. We can see a violin and it reminds me how unmusical I am. On its right, there is a postcard that I bought in Dublin and sent to M: a little goat is with a man in the woods and it reminds me the story of the little white goat of M. Seguin (well known in France but not at all in Sweden, I need to research that later). The last picture on the row up is a picture in black&white that we bought in a gallery. This is a local photograph, who had 2 different pictures to sell and we think that it is good to encourage the local artists.

On the row down, on the left, there is a picture I took by myself 1998 or so of a sunflower that was growing closed to the house my horse was sleeping in. I remember it so well: this plant was a giant flower, I think above 2 meters high and this summer was very hot. I actually remember the day I took this very picture: it was hot as hell, this sunflower was proudly standing in the middle of nowhere, no other sunflowerfriends around. She seemed fragile but had a so big head, and could carry it. At the end of the summer, the birds landed on it and ate directly the seed. The leaves became dry, but it stood up a very long time.

The picture in the middle of the row down is actually several pictures that I manually put together (taken at this time where panorama pictures were very expansive, when digital cameras did not exist and so on). This is the Blue Line of the Vosges, from the country side where I grew up. Somehow, this is the landscape I miss the most. Eventually, I wish I will once again live in this kind of landscapes.

The last picture is der Wanderer über dem Nebelmeer from David Casper Friedrich. One year, in my german class, we studied this picture with the help pf our teacher. There is speculations telling that the painted guy is Beethoven, but no one knows. The thing that is sure, is that this man is standing on the top of a rock, wondering how he will reach the other side with all this fog to go through. Mentally, I am often in this situation: I see the big picture, far away from today and need something to make me walk down in the foggy valley, in order to hike up on the top of another rock. Another bigger rock. The more the time goes, the more I need to think before to walk down. I don’t know if it’s because I’m becoming a coward or if it’s because I’m growing better at evaluate the risks. I used not to see the risks, like when I moved to Sweden ten years ago, with just a bag, a laptop and a french-swedish dictionnary. To make this kind of travel again now would take me so much more energy: not that it would be more diffcult, just that I am so proud and gridy about the things or situation I made myself.

M is my opposite from this point of view. One of his favorite sentence is “the problem is…”.(well, I’m not really sure that it’s his favorite, but this sentence pop up quite a lot when a strange situation appears). He is very god at analysing things and sees risks that I totally ignore. Together, we are a strong couple. We complete each others very well and support each other as well. Some close people told me they were surprised to see us together. Actually, I’m not: he is all the depth I need. And an evening like tonight, I miss him. He would help me to sort my thoughts.

If you look well on the floor in the right of the picture, you can see our fantastic (and it’s aweak word) hoover robot! This is the best investment we made in ages. Tomorrow, the robot will go around in the flat, sucks everything that is on the floor, and when I will come back home, I will be really happy to find a clean floor. If I had to make it the traditional way, it would’t be done before saturday. But until then, the robot will have worked twice!! Can you imagine how much more clean it is in our place?!

picture borrowed on wikipedia.