Free Everything I Don't Remember by Jonas Hassen Khemiri Page A

graffitied his locker, in the shower after gym everyone left when he came in, and in the lunchroom Valentin liked to trip with his glass of milk and drop it in his food or onto his neck
and if it got in his face he said sorry without holding back his laughter because the milk looked like cum. Samuel told me all of this in a voice that said it was nothing to worry about. But when I
heard it I wanted to look up Valentin’s address and pay him a visit at home, ring his bell, stick my foot in the crack, and explain a thing or two. Samuel smiled and said that was nice of me,
but it wasn’t as bad as it sounded.
    “It’s not like I was bullied.”
    When the bill came, one of us picked it up, it didn’t matter who, because we shared everything equally.
    *
    I landed at Arlanda. In the midst of feeling sort of free because I was alive. Freed from my ex-husband’s sticky web. The colors seemed bolder, my body lighter, and
everything seemed possible as I stood there by the baggage carousel waiting for my bags. “Welcome to my hometown,” said all the famous faces, blown up huge on the walls. Then I jumped
on the train into town. It was classic Swedish spring sun, cold and clear light that gave the illusion that it was warm out if you were sitting behind a pane of glass. I looked out at the
ancient-forest landscape that still surrounds Stockholm and felt all my enthusiasm vanish. What the hell am I doing? I thought. How can I voluntarily be on my way back to this fucking backwater
town? Am I really going to waste my life in this nowhereland when there is a whole world out there? And at that point I wasn’t thinking about Brussels, I was thinking bigger than that, I was
thinking São Paulo, I was thinking New York, I was thinking Beirut. I was thinking about anything that wasn’t an adorable little city center with a few buildings from the Middle Ages
and a castle that looks like a barracks and three measly little Metro lines and an inner city surrounded by industrial areas while everyone talks about how the city can’t grow any bigger and
then and there, before I had even arrived, I felt like I had to get away, that this was a trial period. I promised myself I would stay for only six months, a year at the max.
    *
    Spring became summer. Time passed. Samuel continued to ask people about definitions of love and when he encountered people who seemed content in their relationships he would
always ask how they met. I stood next to him, thinking that everyone had a tale and that tale grew taller and taller every year.
    “How did we meet? Oh, that’s actually an amazing story.”
    And even though no one but Samuel cared, they would start telling it. They were in the same class in elementary school and hadn’t seen each other for fifteen years when, by “huuuuge
coincidence,” they ran into each other at a market. In Italy. At sunset. They were at a conference and ended up next to each other in line for the breakfast buffet. They sat there until
lunch. Until dinner. They didn’t leave the dining room for several days. They stood next to each other at ICA in Bredäng in two cash register lines that were exactly the same length, and
after the line had stood still for thirty seconds, five minutes, fifteen minutes, they started talking to each other. The conversation never ended and “that’s how it happened”
they said, smiling their liar smiles. I suppose they wanted our eyes to light up, wanted us to share their joy. But in fact, both Samuel and I thought that they ought to keep their joy to
themselves, because they didn’t get that there were people out there who hadn’t experienced that, who were still waiting.
    *
    I refused to become one of those people who gets stuck in a place just because it’s comfortable, who meets someone and takes out loans and buys an apartment and imagines
that this shithole of a city with its nervous baristas and bartenders who drool over celebrities and racist bouncers and