Free Everything I Don't Remember by Jonas Hassen Khemiri

know. A small, specialized niche bank.”
    “But there aren’t any guarantees with love,” I said.
    “No, you might be right about that,” the taxi driver said with a sigh. “So I guess it’s probably a pretty crappy bank account.”
    Another time we were at an after-party and some girl claimed that love is when someone else is the main character in the movie of your life and you yourself become a supporting role and everyone
else is an extra. After a trip to the movies Samuel and I were sitting at a cafe and when I came back from the bathroom I heard the lady next to us say to Samuel and her husband:
    “No, no, no. You two just don’t get it. Love isn’t about ‘being happy and content.’ Love is suffering and pain and feeling sick and still being prepared to give up
everything for the other person—everything!”
    Her husband shook his head. Samuel nodded and looked like he understood. But even then I thought that he didn’t get it and never would.
    *
    The only piece of clothing I missed was an orange scarf I wore on my second date with my ex-husband. I thought that would ruin the scarf forever, but in fact I sometimes yearned
for it. And every time, that yearning made me happy. It felt, like, nice that a scarf could win out over that long-as-intestines, painful mess of a relationship.
    *
    When Samuel brought up the definition of love for the hundredth time, I was a little irritated.
    “Love is love,” I said. “What more do you want to know?”
    “But there has to be a better definition than that.”
    “Okay, here’s the definition of love. The definitive one. Love is when things that are chill get extra chill because the person you’re with is so chill.”
    Samuel laughed and told me I sounded poetic.
    “That’s right, I’m a poet. Now let’s call a taxi.”
    *
    Sometimes I actually toyed with the thought of calling my ex-husband, just calling him and asking him to send the scarf. As if we were distant colleagues who had never lived
together, been married, gone at each other so hard that I sometimes doubted we would come out of it alive. But we did, and of course I will never call him. It’s over, it’s finished, I
hardly think about him anymore. But that scarf, on the other hand.
    *
    The spring grew warmer, Stockholm’s outdoor cafes opened, and . . . Yes! Take it easy! Chill out . . . It seriously stresses me out when you do that . . . They meet soon,
I promise. Laide moved home to Sweden and we were sitting at that cheap beer place by Fridhemsplan. People were talking soccer, horse-racing, or which rappers have the finest honeys in their videos
(someone said the southern ones, someone said West Coast, no one said East Coast). Samuel and I were talking about who we were back in upper secondary school. I said I was about the same as I was
now, a regular old invisible person who people knew they shouldn’t start something with. Samuel said he hadn’t been bullied, but there were people at his school who thought he was a
little weird. He hadn’t had any problems in compulsory school because he went to one near his neighborhood and people knew who he was, but in upper secondary he ended up in a school that was
farther away and the atmosphere was different there. The guys were supposed to be a certain way and the girls were supposed to be another way and at first he got respect because people could tell
that at the least he wasn’t totally Swedish. But then a rumor went around that he was gay and Valentin who did Thai boxing and was the terror of the school grabbed Samuel’s headphones
in the common room and even though Samuel mostly listened to hip-hop, Biggie and Tupac and Snoop, this particular time he happened to be listening to a classical piano piece, and Valentin laughed
and started calling him Chopin, which turned into chicken, which turned into chickadee because of course Samuel was brown but white at the same time. They took his cap and spit gobs of snot into
it, they