He was sixteen when he died, and before that he was the first boy I kissed.
This is how I remember it: summer, Bokenäs. The particular smell of Swedish summer — pine and sea and something indefinably clean, as if the air had been washed. Imperiet was playing somewhere, not live but on a stereo, the windows open because it was hot. *Sommartider.* The song about summer days.
He was gentle. This is the thing I want to say first, before anything else: he was gentle. He didn't rush anything. He had that quality some young men have — rare, I know now, rarer than it should be — of not needing to claim anything. He was just there, present, unhurried. He laughed easily.
The kiss happened the way the important things happen: gradually, and then all at once. Afterwards there was the same air, the same song, the same smell of pine. But I had become slightly different. I had crossed some threshold I hadn't known was there.
He died that winter. Sixteen years old. The killer was never found.
I think about the violence of that sentence. *The killer was never found.* What that means: that someone ended this gentle boy and then walked away and continued their life. That the world contains this. That beauty and catastrophe share a climate.
I don't know what Lasse would have become. I know only what he was: kind, present, unhurried. The kind of person the world needs more of.
I think about him sometimes when I hear Imperiet. I think: *here is a moment of life that actually happened. Here is a moment of tenderness that was real, whatever came after.*
This is why I make things. This is why I photograph flowers, why I write down the hours and seasons. Because the present moment is the only thing that cannot be taken away retroactively. It happened. It was real. Nothing that came after can un-happen it.
He kissed me once, in summer, to Imperiet. He was gentle.
That is true forever.
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*From* Bloom Anyway: A Memoir