Veera Laitinen

Breathy Song

How she lured me in, I still don’t know. But she did, and on Friday mornings I would find strings of her golden hair all over my sheets. A part of me wanted to collect them until I had a lock of her to weave into a plait but that was the sick part of me my therapist had told me to ignore.

We had an agreement: she would only stay at mine on Thursday nights. One of seven a week. I would count to 14.3 per cent of her life, and it was a deal I gladly signed. A sort of Faustian bargain.

We met at a bar. I was with a few of my friends. We drank local craft beer and marvelled at the fact the 90s had come back that summer.

‘Shame they’re wrecking this place,’ one said with a cigarette in her hand. ‘Just when it was about to get really good.’

She wasn’t wrong. Year by year, the little outdoor club by the seaside with a wooden structure resembling a bar had gained more attention among us who had fallen somewhere in between Generation Z and Millennials, got high after work, and enjoyed aggressive techno music a bit too much for it to be an innocent interest.

My head sizzled from the nightless night and lukewarm beer when my eyes turned to the terrace and its carnival lights where she stood.

She wasn’t striking, exactly. Pretty, for sure, blonde and tall as most Finnish people were, but not astonishing. Drunk and bored, I decided to follow when she made her way to the bar.

She ordered a glass of white wine and sipped it carefully. The lights freckled her face.

‘I like your dress.’

I didn’t, really, but it slipped out of my mouth.

She smiled. ‘You look great, too.’

She was a business student just about to graduate and she liked art. I told her I wanted to become a writer. She told me she read Louise Glück and that’s when she had my heart, and when I later asked her out behind the big willow where we had just kissed, she said yes.

We went on a picnic. She brought a sketchbook. I brought brie and fig marmalade and gingerbread biscuits, but she was vegan, so she only had the jam and the biscuits.

She lived in the eastern part of town. What was she doing there? People our age didn’t usually live there. She said she owned an apartment there; it had always been her dream to buy one before turning 25.

‘You have your own apartment?’ I asked, impressed. ‘How did you manage that?’

‘Oh, you know,’ she said. ‘My boyfriend and I bought it together a year ago.’

I guess all good things have a catch.

We squeezed a whole summer in six days. One day a week for six weeks.

Day one: the picnic. The sketchbook. She drew with colour and showed me her drawings; a lighthouse in a paradise; a kaleidoscope; a tree arising from water with its branches curving around itself.

Day two: a jazz club, the only one I knew. I wore my heaviest boots, and she a pair of heeled sandals. Her legs were long and warm under my hand.

Day three: it rained, so we went to a café. I brought her a poem I had written about her; the paper was soggy, the letters smudged. It was a short one but felt heavy in my pocket. My fingers shook when I gave it to her. Could she carry its weight?

Six dates in she agreed to stay the night. I panicked because I hadn’t expected it. I had thought shooting my shot would always return like a boomerang. I hadn’t changed into my nice sheets, there were at least two dead plants lying around, and there was a bowl dirty and smelly from curry in the sink.

When she stepped in, I asked her about her boyfriend, mostly to distract her from the mess. She told me what I already knew: they had made an agreement. It wasn’t an open relationship because he couldn’t date others, but she was allowed to explore. Only women, though.

‘How long have you had this… agreement in place?’ I asked. Six months, she said.

She was surprised, I think, by the art on my walls. We chatted and drank tea and swam in the anticipation that built up in the air until she couldn’t take it anymore. She was sweet as an angel, but angels don’t kiss the way she did. It was me, though, who told her to strip down, climb onto the bed, spread her legs, and keep her eyes open.

In early October the maple outside turned red. I changed my major. And minor. My academic advisor hated me for it. No more physics for you, huh? No, I’ll do future research, instead. And I’d like to switch my minor from nuclear safety to art.

I stuck with art for the first period. Then I changed it to the history of film.

She drew pictures of herself, always naked, and slowly started tracing my body down on paper, too. She was curvy and tall and magnificent; I was small and square and strong. I hung the pictures on my walls, and I think that’s how she knew.

We all have a type. I had always been drawn to the artistic kind. Later, I realised that was why she had caught my eye in the beginning; her fingers had been covered in paint.

I grew addicted to her skin. Sometimes, when she was asleep, I wondered about the boyfriend. Did he know where I lived? What did he look like? What did he do?

In November, she pointed out that I had no sofa. I had built a reading nook in the corner out of a mattress and a blanket. It was the first time she told me she didn’t like my home.

She showed me pictures of her home. Their home. I saw no colour.

That autumn Grandma smiled more than before.

Grandfather had died a few years earlier. Towards the end he had always leaned on Grandma when walking, one tree keeping the other one upright, and after he passed Grandma cried for a month. Then she decided it was time to leave cold and ancient Lapland and move to Helsinki. She drove the car herself, all 12 hours, only stopping once. It was the last ride she would make on her own.

In a way she came alive as if Grandfather’s spirit had melted into her, a beautiful spiral of two very different souls. Grandma learned to laugh again; she sounded like a windchime. She still wore her wedding ring and talked to Grandfather when she was alone. I heard her through her front door.

She believed in angels. Later in life I would, too – but when she died, I found it easier to just say goodbye.

She came with me to visit my grandparents’ grave. They slept next to one another, and I lit candles for them. I knew they were breathing the same soil below my feet.

‘Funny, isn’t it,’ I said, ‘how you can be bound to someone even after death.’

She kissed me, hard, right in front of my grandparents. They must have turned in their graves.

I inherited Grandma’s wedding ring and an envelope full of Grandfather’s pictures. Why, I wasn’t sure, but I placed them in my box of treasures right next to a bag of weed.

One Tuesday night someone knocked on my door. I smelled her perfume before I saw her, and she jumped at me, all arms and hair, and clung onto me like a sailor clings to a ship’s mast in a storm.

She had fought with her boyfriend. The boy, the male, the thief, the stupid reptile, the mosquito I couldn’t shake off my skin, always hearing his unfamiliar voice in my ear, a small shrill, a shrill, a shrimp, a mouldy shrimp, I bet he smelled like one, too –

She shook me and I dropped back to then and there. She stayed for the night and the next one, too, and then Thursday came and she stayed over again because that was my night, and I wasn’t going to let that go.

In the morning she was gone and next to me was an envelope.

I didn’t see her for weeks after that. I changed my minor to psychology. ‘How does love work?’ I asked the lecturer, and she told me not to worry my young mind with questions too big. My academic advisor shook his head, took off his glasses, and told me to stick with this one. ‘Sometimes commitment is key.’

I’d started wearing my grandma’s ring. She had worn it for 65 years. Sixty-five years of marriage. Sixty-five years of commitment. Until death do us apart, I would whisper to myself.

In January my mother said I had my grandma’s eyes.

By then I knew where my girl had gone – back to her hometown for Christmas. She had stayed there for a month. I’m sorry for not saying anything, she told me over the phone the day before she returned, I needed space.

‘From me?’

‘From everyone.’

In the envelope I found the drawing she’d shown me on our first date – the lonely tree. The lake was serene, but I wasn’t fooled by it. She told me there was a tree like that in New Zealand, that she would like to go one day, would I go with her?

‘Anytime,’ I said thinking to myself anytime, my lovely, anywhere with you, my love.

Next month she went to Paris with her boyfriend and came back with a new dress and sunglasses too big for her face. I made fun of her, but she got annoyed and left. That’s when I first felt like I had just lost something precious.

I spent the night going through my grandfather’s pictures. He’d been handsome, I realised. He had been engaged before meeting my grandma and I tried to find the first fiancée’s face in the photos but all I found was Grandfather’s face over and over again stretching over time. But some of the photos were sharp from the corners. Someone had cut them out of the picture. There he stood fresh out of medical school all alone like the tree in the lake.

She moved away. I had never known heartache before, and I enjoyed it. My therapist said it was okay but after a few months she got worried – I told her no writer would ever reject the pain that transforms into great art.

My girl moved to Stockholm. The man – the boy, the reptile, a thing – had been offered a job there. There were no goodbyes but two weeks later I received a letter.

The paper was expensive; I could tell even though it was creased. She told me about her job in a big bank and teased me by describing the pencil skirts she wore, knowing I could never forget the million-dollar curve of her hips. My walls were filled with her by then.

You’re a writer, she wrote.
So, write to me.
I will stay here for some time but once I’m settled, I’ll come over every other week. I’ll bring you the best fig jam I can find.
Give me a sprinkle of magic in my life. Secrets are always more beautiful when put on paper.

She had written her new address below. I wrote back the same day.

I told her I had cried that day. For what, I couldn’t remember, but I had felt the urge to look into a mirror whilst crying and there it had been: my grandma. She lived in my eyes, and it scared me, but I felt honoured, too.

She wrote back a week later. She had drawn a bunch of postcards of Stockholm. The places she’d picked were all narrow streets and snapshots of parks, all vague and anonymous, you could find them in any city.

A few letters later I cut my hair off. Eight inches of dark strings swam in my sink like veins. I ran my hands through my head. Sometimes you can feel your pulse through your skull. The power of human heart is something sacred.

You cut your hair?
Your hair always felt so soft in my fingers.

In my next letter I didn’t mention my new tattoo. It was a gingerbread cookie with her initials on my neck, like a lock. It was tiny and cheesy, but it lifted me up.

She wrote:

Monogamy is a weird concept, isn’t it? We are suddenly tied to one person. We only kiss them, only have sex with them, only hold hands with them. But humans are given two hands. I don’t like mine empty.

I wrote a poem called ‘A Pair of Hands’. It stretched across a whole page as tall as her. Nights became difficult. My therapist told me to go see a doctor and he wrote me a prescription for sleeping pills – and antidepressants.

‘But I’m not depressed,’ I told the doctor.

‘I wouldn’t be so sure of that,’ he said.

At home I took off all my rings apart from Grandma’s. It fit me and left no trace of green. I took a pink pill and slept through the night.

There are some things I haven’t told you.

There was this one night in November. Another night of gingerbread and jam and fruit. I fed her a fresh fig. She bit down to it and licked her lips the way she did after going down on me.

‘Figs actually aren’t vegetarian,’ I said.

She tensed, asked what I meant.

‘They’re pollinated by fig wasps,’ I told her. ‘And they are often trapped inside. They die and rot in there. With each fig we eat dead insects.’

She dumped the bowl of figs into the bin. ‘I’m vegan, you idiot,’ she yelled at me. ‘How could you only tell me now?’ She stormed out but came back half an hour later to make me apologise.

Another time I caught her at a club, and I knew I wasn’t meant to see her there. I don’t remember much but what I do remember is her standing by the bar wearing a red dress and talking to a woman with hair like hers. Moments later they kissed, softly, and I thought to myself good, at least she doesn’t kiss her the way she kisses me.

She didn’t see me. I went to the opposite side, ordered a shot of tequila with no salt or lime, and left. I never told her.

And there was this one night just before she moved to Stockholm. She was asleep by my side breathing lightly. It was a sort of song that would follow me for years, and I was dreaming of that tree of hers, a willow, New Zealand. I walked into the lake – the water only came up to my knees – and made my way towards the tree. A goldfish circled around it. It didn’t seem lost. It kept creeping closer to the tree before withdrawing again, finding a distance, and I sighed of relief.

Nine years later I was in a restaurant, one of those fancy ones with one wall completely made of glass. I wore my heaviest boots, since my publisher had told me to wear whatever I wanted. Helsinki looked different through the eyes of a writer. I’m an author now, I thought to myself. It had a weird but enchanting ring to it.

We had booked a section of the restaurant and I drank champagne with my guests until I needed to use the restroom. ‘Excuse me,’ I told everyone. One of the toilets on the women’s side was taken, so I picked another one.

Washing my hands, I heard the sounds from the taken loo. The zipper of a handbag, the click of lipstick, a spray of perfume. She was touching up her makeup in the booth. As one does, I thought, and left.

I curved around the corner and bumped into a man. Tall, blonde, handsome. He wore a suit like mine and as I apologised, he glanced at my shaved head and Grandma’s ring and the tattoos on my neck, and his eyes fixed on one.

Do you know how one recognises a person they’ve never met? Either you have seen pictures of them online, maybe on Facebook through common friends, or they have distinct features you’ve heard of, or they give you the eyes – a signal that they have recognised you first, and you instantly know. Call it a gut feeling, call it magic, call it faith. I call it bad luck.

He let out an animal-like sound as he stared at the little gingerbread tattoo on my neck with the letter inside of it, knowingly. He had grey eyes like my grandfather’s and I was almost pulled apart by his weight.

He was still staring at me when he called his wife’s name – ‘Honey, hurry, the kids are waiting back home, the taxi is outside.’ As he called for her, he nudged me towards my little book launch party. I went through every bad name I had called him in my mind during the one year of my time with his girl and realised he must have done the same. A lender and a borrower.

The door behind me opened. I didn’t turn around to see what she looked like. Did she still use the coral blush? Was she wearing the green dress? Was he able to see the subtle changes she made; the little secrets hidden in her drawings?

I wanted her to know I kept each of her letters.

Veera Laitinen’s journey in writing kicked off in her homeland, Finland. Both her poetry and prose drew inspiration from the abundance of southern forests and the rough scenery of Lapland, and to this day she finds her creativity from the outdoors. Today, Veera’s focus is on exploring the characters of her stories and finding complex and humane dynamics between anonymous people.

Apart from being a writer, Veera is a mathematics student and philosophy enthusiast. She enjoys running, especially when the weather gets colder.