The light is tepid, it comes in strange angles-
not light but a memory of what used to be light
sworn to the secrecy of the midnight sun
the forest in unrelenting, a thousand lifetimes pushed
into the mosquitos and moss and endless soft fallow 
nothingness of the present
thoughts swim under my skin like when a mosquito
is just about to bite, you feel it but not really
just the shadow of the blood, the viscous afterthought
to be comfortable is murder, but when I saw you smile
every weary kilometer melted like the rivers would push back
if the dams were torn, if Store Lulevatten rushed to the sad
pooling waters of the northern Baltic like every old Viking soul
that rest on lichen-covered boulders under heavy unused light, 
unseen and uncared for, understood implicitly because
life should be trying and painful and casual all at the same time,
the way a crystal catches the light in July when the sun is just pushing
the edges of winter somewhere over the pole, and everything aches in wet
green selfishness in the silent polar forests, the way your 
eyes met mine in such northern singularity, the way 9 turns to 10,
one beer to five, one work day to another; children into men.
we all want the same things, but sometimes the north seems
to want something else, something fierce and shadowy and 
always just a little further on the horizon, of choices and 
ICA checkout lines, grey apartment blocks, foreign caricatures,
thinning trees and stoic tundra, aimless reindeer, camper vans in
mindless precession before the gods of rain and highway stops and 
15- Kronor/liter gasoline, generic 'Thaimat', little dogs straining against
big static round-faced owners, dirtbikes/snowmobiles/all terrain vehicles/
retrofitted cars for terminally bored 15 year olds/motorized nature spewing diesel
fumes, half-grilled korv remnants, cigarette butts, snus cans like leaves on the mossy
resting place of all aspirations old and new, jagged chasms into the earth's cold stony
heart, glowing with steam and light and huge metal wheels ratcheting into place and the
hoisting of ancient glittery disco balls of iron and copper and metals we didn't even know
we needed until that girl across the room checked her facebook page vis-a-vis a
 metal-shrouded Iphone in a coldly sexy polycarbonate case for the third time in
five minutes, her kaffe is cold, nestled in Ikea-chic spaces, eyes meet for the time it takes
to make a thought move from your stomach to your brain and then back into the part
that will the mouth to say it but then remembers that we are Swedish and we don't always
need to say what the dark polar night and the little pointy edges of the tops of pine trees
and ditches filled with endless snow drifts and empty snus cans scream out into the darkness
because 'Lagom är bäst' after all.