Divorce, sky and train

Dear Helsinki,

I don’t know if it is because I am in train for the first time in a long time or that I am listening to a song that makes me a bit melancholic, but I am tempted to let you know that I am a bit sad at the moment. Sun visited you last week, but she left. Also blue filed for a divorce last Wednesday and the sky is miserable without him, desperately wanting to repair their relationship but I am not too confident about their future together. Perhaps that is what makes my collarbones shiver, lungs tremble and fingers shake. Their love story was one of the nature’s wonders, it was a script that was never supposed to end because God was the author and we all knew she had fallen in love with her own characters.

The train just stopped moving forward. It is not my station yet.

Besides the grey that has pierced the atmosphere and even my mind, I have nothing spectacular to share with you. I have decided that I will stay with you a year longer. I applied for an internship in Brussels for next autumn, but us two have still so much to figure out that I cannot leave you, not right now. Also Brussels is not a city that attracts my heart, that relationship was doomed before it even began. I have been wanting to go to Paris, New York, Buenos Aires or Beirut but I stopped searching because I am committed to us, my Helsinki. I have been with you the past two years now and I do not remember the last time I have stayed in one place for so long. Maybe when I was eighteen and lived in Swaziland. That was eight years ago.

I am moving next week and I am a bit excited, because this time it will be my apartment and I have the liberty to decorate it in a manner that depicts my love for cities, TV-shows and world. The two apartments I have had while living with you have been furnished and while both of them were nice, I never experienced that tingling feeling of calling the place where you sleep a home. Having no furniture is also bound to mean a road-trip to Ikea. Remind me to write a list of items I need or otherwise I will come back home with things that I do not need. She always gets me.

In a couple of weeks I am going to visit Brussels again and whereas before I have dreaded visiting her, I am surprisingly looking forward to the trip. I will meet the same wonderful people I met the last time in Brussels, but this time we will present our research on European Integration Fund to the eurocrats who are interested to encourage and promote multiculturalism. At the end of April a flight will take me to Malta where I will see friends that I met in Amsterdam last December. And yesterday my father bought me a ticket to go to India from end of May to the beginning of July and this is the visit I am excited about the most. It has been three years since I have been to India and although my identity is unable to grasp Indian characteristics, Shimla is one of those rare places in the world that I am able to call home without any hesitations. Maybe because the earliest memories of my life comes from that lovely hill station in the Himalayas. I so much would hope that you two could meet each other in the future because I am sure you will instantly hit it off.

I met a nurse on Friday to talk about my situation and she was understanding. I was honest with her and told her I was not keen to repeat the same procedure once again, I have gone through it multiple times and each time the system has let me down but she seemed to feel the numbness who has made himself quite comfortable in my mind. The past few weeks have been good despite the reminders from the past, but she said I should receive long-term treatment. She admitted it would not start until September due to the wonderful bureaucracy of a welfare state, but also acknowledged that I am a strong and determined man who will get through the world. It made me feel good.

It is still grey outside and I think my station is about to arrive.
What do you think, Helsinki? Is the love story finished?

Lots of love,
Nitin