*Bloom Anyway — A Memoir*
*Catching everything before it fades.*
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## Memory 001 ### Cyprus. Age 6. Late Afternoon.
Just the two of us. She and I against the world — that was always the shape of it. Mama loved the sun so completely, so hungrily, the way only someone from Sweden can love warmth — like it was something that could be taken away at any moment, because it always was.
We were standing talking to a couple we had met at the hotel. Late afternoon light, that golden Mediterranean hour when everything looks like a painting. I don't remember what the adults were saying. I remember her beside me. And then I remember her not being beside me in the way she had been — something changing in her body, something wrong —
The man was a doctor. Thank God. He saw it before it happened and grabbed her, caught her before she fell.
*Solsting.* Sunstroke. She had taken too much of the thing she loved.
I thought she had died.
I was six years old and I thought my mother had died in Cyprus in the late afternoon light and the world went completely silent in the way it only does when the thing you cannot survive losing almost disappears.
She hadn't died. She was caught. She was okay.
But I was not okay — not for a long time after. I was glued to her until the next day, physically unable to create distance between her body and mine, because my body had learned something my mind was still processing:
*She can disappear.* *The world can change in one late afternoon.* *Hold on.*
This is my first memory. Not a happy one. Not a sad one. A true one.
The sun. The hotel. The doctor's hands. My mother falling. My terror. And then — her still here. Still warm. Still mine.
She and I against the world.
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## Memory 002 ### Kim Kärnfalk. Ages 3 to 16. Uddevalla.
Kim decided I was her friend before I had any say in the matter.
It was her first day at kindergarten. She saw me in the sandbox and something in her simply settled — *that one* — the way certain people move through the world with a certainty about what they want that the rest of us spend our whole lives trying to find. She walked over. And that was that. A decade of friendship decided in a sandbox on a Tuesday.
We were, from the beginning, completely wild together.
At seven years old, Kim had the idea to run away from kindergarten. Not away from anything in particular — toward something. Toward freedom, toward the main street, toward her maternal grandmother who worked in a store in the center of Uddevalla. That was the plan. That was the whole plan. Run to grandma.
And so we ran.
I don't remember being afraid. I remember the running itself — the particular joy of two small girls on a main street when they should have been somewhere else entirely, the feeling of the world being bigger than the walls of any kindergarten, the relief of a grandmother's face when she looked up from her work and saw us arrive breathless and triumphant and completely unrepentant.
We also sang.
This was Kim's idea too — most of the wild ideas were Kim's. We would visit the elder homes in Uddevalla and perform concerts. Two little girls singing Swedish folk songs to rows of old people who clapped and smiled and looked at us like we were the best thing that had happened all week.
Perhaps we were.
I didn't know then that I was performing. I didn't know that the need to stand before an audience and offer something — a song, a circus act, a gospel — was already woven into everything I was. I just knew that the elders smiled, and that their smiling felt important, and that Kim and I together were capable of making something happen in a room.
She had a way of lying, Kim. Small lies, strange lies — not malicious exactly, but unsettling. I never fully understood why. I think now, with the understanding of years, that it was survival. That behind the boldness and the running and the grandmother's store there was a story I only partially knew, a story that made lying feel necessary in ways I couldn't yet comprehend.
But at thirteen I only knew that I was afraid of it. Afraid of not knowing which Kim I was getting. And so I reached toward others — toward Sabina, who had been mine since eleven, toward Therese and Malin and that whole gang who became my world through the gymnasium years.
When we were sixteen, my mother — quietly, anonymously, with the precision of a woman who protects her daughter without making a performance of it — arranged for us to be placed in different classes. A clean parting. No confrontation. Just: a door, gently closing.
We went our separate ways.
Years later, when I was living in New York becoming myself, Kim won Melodifestivalen. The little girl from the sandbox, the one who ran to her grandmother, the one who organized elder home concerts before either of us knew what performing meant — she stood on Sweden's biggest stage and won.
I was on the other side of the world, becoming my own kind of singer.
Two girls from Uddevalla. Both with stages in their blood. Both going somewhere neither of us could have predicted that day in the sandbox.
She's not well now. And I hold that with tenderness — because whatever the lying was, whatever the fear was, she was also the girl who saw me and decided immediately, completely, without hesitation:
*That one. She's my friend.*
And for a decade, she was right.
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## Memory 003 ### Lasse. Summer after 8th grade. Bokens/Hogstorp.
Lasse was so cool.
Not performed cool — not the kind that needs an audience or announces itself when it enters a room. The real kind. The quiet, easy, *I know who I am* kind that is extraordinarily rare at fifteen and almost impossible to fake.
He had an ep-traktor — one of those small Swedish agricultural tractors that teenagers in the countryside drove everywhere because the law allowed it and freedom demanded it — and he drove it all over Bokens like he owned the whole landscape. Which, in the way that matters, he did.
That summer Helene's father's house in Hogstorp became the center of the world for a night. Friends came from all over the area — one of those long Scandinavian summer gatherings that begins in afternoon light and doesn't end until the next morning because the summer dark never fully arrives and nobody wants to be the first to leave.
We ate spaghetti with ketchup. It was the only food available and nobody minded at all.
There was homemade vodka. When the sodas ran out we drank it straight — it tasted absolutely awful, the kind of awful that makes you shudder from your stomach to your shoulders — but we drank it anyway because we were fifteen and the night was long and Ebba Grön and Imperiet were playing and nobody wanted the feeling to stop.
Imperiet. *Höghus Låghus Dårhus.* That song specifically — I can still hear it, the way music from a particular night embeds itself permanently into the body, the way certain songs become time machines rather than just songs.
Everybody slept over.
And somewhere in the middle of that long night — the spaghetti finished, the terrible vodka drunk, the music playing, friends sleeping in corners and on floors — Lasse held me gently.
Not urgently. Not impatiently. Gently.
And my first kiss happened.
I want to remember that gentleness specifically. Because Lasse was loyal to a fault — fiercely, completely loyal, the kind of loyalty that in another life, in safer circumstances, would have been his greatest gift. He was part of a gang. He was brave in the way that young boys in small towns sometimes are brave — too much, too soon, in directions that have no good ending.
But with girls he was a gentleman. A softee underneath all that cool. The boy who held you gently at a party and meant it.
A year after that night — after the ep-traktor and the ketchup spaghetti and the first kiss and Imperiet — Lasse was murdered with a knife outside the disco at Hunnebostrand. He was sixteen years old. They never found who did it.
He was dating a friend of mine when it happened. A girl I danced with — jazz dance and ballet, our bodies learning the same movements in the same studio. She lost him too. We were all so young that none of us fully understood how young we were.
I wasn't there that night. But the night found me anyway, the way these things always do in small towns where everyone knows everyone and the news travels faster than you can prepare for it.
And I started to think — with the magical thinking of a teenager trying to make sense of senseless things — that all my boyfriends die. Before Lasse there had been a boy who died of a brain tumour at fourteen. Two boys. Two deaths. A pattern that wasn't a pattern but felt like one because the alternative — that the world is simply random and brutal and takes the gentle cool boys with ep-traktors for no reason at all — was too large to hold.
Lasse was sixteen.
He and Joachim had been voted the most handsome in all the classes at school that year. The most handsome boys, both of them connected to me in different ways — Lasse who loved me first, Joachim who finally saw me because of it.
I did not understand then how young sixteen was.
I understand now.
*Rest gently, Lasse. You held me gently first.*
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## Memory 004 ### Morfar. Hedekas. Summer Mornings. The Sea.
The world was still quiet when we left.
That's what I remember first — the particular hush of early Swedish summer morning, the light already bright but the air still cool and unhurried, the feeling that the day belonged entirely to us because nobody else had claimed it yet.
Morfar would have the bicycles ready.
He was that kind of man — quiet and steady, the kind whose love you feel not in speeches or grand gestures but in simply being there. In having things ready. In showing up without being asked, without announcement, without needing to be thanked for it. He just did it. He always just did it.
Marie came too, usually — my friend from Hedekas, the one I would later stand beside at a fair while a *spågumma* read our palms and told me things I would spend my whole life discovering were true. But on these mornings she was just Marie, cycling beside me, the three of us moving through the quiet Swedish countryside toward the sea.
Mormor had prepared everything before we left.
I think about that now — how she must have risen early, moved quietly through the kitchen while we were still waking, assembling the picnic with the particular care of someone who loves through providing. Sandwiches. Swedish summer things. Everything wrapped and packed and waiting so that when we arrived at the water there would be nothing to worry about, nothing to fetch, nothing missing.
Just the sea. Just the food. Just the morning. Just us.
The beach was stark in the way of Swedish west coast beaches — not Los Angeles, not the Mediterranean, not the kind of sand that promises glamour. This was honest sand. Real sand. The kind with shells threaded through it, cold and pale and specific, the kind that stays with you in your shoes for days afterward as a reminder that you were there.
The water was cold. It was almost always cold.
We swam anyway.
Morfar loved swimming — this quiet steady man who showed his love through doing suddenly completely alive in the cold water, moving through it with the ease of someone who has been doing this his whole life in this same sea in this same place. Watching him swim I understood something about people: that everyone contains a version of themselves you only see in certain conditions. Morfar in the sea was morfar completely free.
Afterward — dripping, cold-skinned, wrapped in towels, the sandwiches unwrapped and eaten with the particular hunger that only cold seawater creates — he would take us to the little shop.
It sat in the grassy area near the beach. Small, probably unremarkable to anyone else. But morfar would buy us candy there, quietly, without fuss, the way he did everything — as if of course this was happening, as if there was never any question that the morning would end with sweetness.
My Willy Wonka morfar.
I spent all seasons in Hedekas — not just summers, not just holidays, but constantly, endlessly, because my mama was so young and single and needed the village that her parents provided. I did not understand then that I was being held by a whole ecosystem of love. I just knew that Hedekas felt like breathing.
That the mornings were fresh and quiet. That morfar had the bicycles ready. That mormor had made the picnic. That the water was cold and we swam anyway. That there was candy at the end.
Happiness. Freedom.
Both words together.
That is Hedekas. That is morfar. That is the sea.
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## Memory 005 ### Joachim. Ages 3 to 16. Next door, then everything.
He was the boy next door before he was anything else.
We had been neighbours since I was three and he was four — which is to say, we had been neighbours since before either of us had any say in the matter, since before the world had organised itself into people who matter and people who are simply there. He was simply there. For years he was simply there.
Birthday parties as small children — all the neighbourhood kids together, cake and games and that particular Swedish children's party sweetness that belongs entirely to those years. His little sister came on playdates, which we solved efficiently by sending her to my mother so that Joachim and I could have the afternoon to ourselves.
I don't remember exactly when it changed.
When he stopped being simply there and started being everything.
But it changed. The way these things always change — gradually and then completely, the way Hemingway described going bankrupt, which is also how you fall in love at thirteen or fourteen in a small Swedish town with the boy who has lived next door your whole life.
Everyone knew I loved him.
Everyone including him.
He was a teenager by then and he knew he was handsome — the most handsome in the school that year, voted officially, undeniably — and he carried that knowledge the way certain boys do, not cruelly but with a kind of easy awareness of his own effect on the world. He knew about my crush the way you know about the weather. It was simply there. A fact of the landscape.
I longed for years.
And then one night in Hunnebostrand — that outdoor party place on the west coast where Swedish summers gather and the young are briefly, completely alive — he told me he thought he loved me.
I was in heaven.
The next afternoon we were to meet at the neighbourhood football field. I was so nervous I could not eat. Not a single thing. My whole body had reorganised itself around the question of whether he had meant it, whether the night had been real, whether the word he had used — *thought* — contained enough certainty to build something on.
He had meant it.
He was there at the football field and he had meant every word and what followed was a year and a half of being completely, overwhelmingly, seventeen-year-old-in-Sweden loved.
And then one evening we were in his room.
Guns N' Roses played. *Don't Cry* first, then *November Rain*, then *Don't Cry* again — all evening, over and over, the same two songs on repeat while we sat together and I didn't understand yet that he was already saying goodbye through the music. That he was preparing himself while I sat beside him thinking it was just an evening, just music, just us.
Only days earlier he had held me and said he loved me.
Not *kär* — the lighter word, the ordinary word. *Älskar.* The heavy one. The real one. The word that weighs something in Swedish, that costs something to say, that cannot be taken back without consequence.
He had said *älskar* and meant it.
And then *Don't Cry* played all evening.
He walked me home. We had moved by then to Södergatan, in the middle of town. Almost to my door — close enough that I could see it, close enough that safety was within reach — and there, just before I was home, he told me.
*Fruktansvärt.*
It was terrible in the way that only first love ending can be terrible — total, complete, a before and after with no negotiation possible. My whole everything died. There are no better words than those because there are no better words than those. Some losses don't need dressing up.
For years afterward I could not hear *Don't Cry* or *November Rain* without breaking. The body remembers what the mind tries to forget. Music keeps the wound fresh whether you want it to or not — it lives in you like weather, arriving without warning, changing everything in three opening chords.
Joachim.
The boy next door since we were three and four. The one who didn't see me until Lasse loved me first. The one I longed for with the complete unreasonable certainty of someone who believes that true love, if it is true enough, must eventually be returned.
I was right.
He came.
He said *älskar.*
He played November Rain all evening.
And then he walked me almost home.
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## Memory 006 ### The Spågumma at Saltklåvlan. Age 8 or 9. Summer.
Every summer Saltklåvlan arrived like a promise kept.
That particular smell first — the fair candy they only sell at tivoli, the kind that exists nowhere else in the world except in the specific atmosphere of a Swedish summer fair, sweet and slightly burnt and completely irreplaceable. Then the stalls: paintings, belts, all the things you don't need and cannot resist. The lights strung between poles. The sounds of rides and music and people who have decided, collectively, that this evening belongs entirely to joy.
We went every summer. All of us together — mama, my aunt, Jan-Åke my godfather, morfar and mormor from Hedekas. The whole golden circle of people who loved me most in the world, moving through Saltklåvlan together the way families do at fairs — loosely, happily, drifting apart and finding each other again between stalls.
Marie was there too. My friend from Hedekas, morfar's cycling companion, the girl who stood beside me for so many summers that she had become part of the furniture of my childhood in the best possible way.
And there was a tent.
A *spågumma* — a fortune teller — in a proper tent, the kind that promises mystery and delivers it, the kind that an 8 or 9 year old cannot walk past without her whole body leaning toward it.
We went in. Marie and I. Two little girls with our summers still ahead of us and our whole lives completely unwritten.
I don't remember her face exactly. I don't remember her hands or her voice or the precise words she used. Memory keeps only what it needs, and what it kept from that tent was not the details but the landing — the moment something true arrived and settled in my chest like it had always lived there and had simply been waiting to be confirmed.
*She told me I would be recognised late in life.*
Not yet. Not soon. *Late.*
And I believed her immediately. Completely. Without question.
You have to understand what I wanted at 8 or 9 years old — I wanted to be Carola. Not *like* Carola, not *inspired by* Carola, but *Carola* — that voice, that faith, that particular Swedish gospel brightness that made Christianity feel like something you could live inside rather than just attend. Carola was the reason the Bible had become important to me. Carola was the reason I understood that a stage could also be an altar, that singing could also be prayer, that being recognised and being beloved of God could be the same thing.
And here was a woman in a tent at Saltklåvlan telling me: *yes. you. someone special. late in life, but yes.*
It was so perfectly aligned with everything I already secretly believed about myself that I didn't question it for a single moment.
*Den lilla lilla jag.*
That little little me. Standing in a tent smelling of fair candy, hand outstretched, eight or nine years old, already dreaming large enough to fill a whole future — and a stranger confirming that the future was worth dreaming.
I dreamt of it for a long time after.
Outside the tent, Saltklåvlan continued — the lights, the stalls, the candy, mama and my aunt and Jan-Åke and morfar and mormor somewhere among it all, the summer evening refusing to end because Swedish summer evenings do that, they refuse and refuse and finally give in to a darkness so brief it barely counts.
Marie and I compared notes afterward, the way girls do — excitedly, privately, turning the words over to see what they meant, what they promised, what we were now supposed to do with the knowledge that the future had already been glimpsed.
I don't remember what the *spågumma* told Marie.
I only remember what she told me.
*You will be recognised late in life.*
I am still waiting.
I still believe her.
The little little me who stood in that tent at Saltklåvlan knew something that all the years since have not managed to undo:
That the future is worth waiting for. That late is not never. That a *spågumma* in a tent at a Swedish summer fair can sometimes see exactly what God has already decided.
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*— from Bloom Anyway: A Memoir* *by Alice Amorina Saga*