Mrs. Dalloway's Coffee Break

During these strange times of seclusion and roadblocks and restaurants closed and everybody doing their best to hold their respective own while this planetary house arrest is in progress, I guess I have nonetheless managed to find a handful of reasons to live. I felt I wanted to write you this letter, describing exactly what those reasons are, how I feel about all this, and what I find noteworthy about my life now that most of the things I have held so dear are going or gone. I hope you will please forgive me, should you find these musings utterly in poor taste, if I was mistaken, and there never should have been even an inkling of intention on my part to ever share with you what I am about to share. While my husband is writing his urgent pieces about the virus for the paper downstairs, I have taken into carrying a heavy brass candlestick with me around the house, thinking if we are going to do it, let’s go all the way with this upsetting, mauve-tinted paranoia, this hyster...

Honestly, I slept better and felt safer at night. That was when the Mansion felt less ominous and threatening, and more like a delightful riddle. I felt welcome and wanted, and the atmosphere never felt dangerous. The loud parties, the piano recitals, the cocktail hours, it was all very Old World, and seemed grand to me, and dazzling. Old World was, of course, exactly what it was. All that, the glitter, the tiny magicks and the occasional bigger ones, was not for my benefit alone, but I was part of it, the mark, the human, the stupid innocent high and oblivious. The temptation must have been almost overwhelming, and that I survived at all feels still almost like a mistake, sometimes. The hamlet was small and very rural, and the Mansion hid at the back entrance of it, right on the verge of the billowing wheat fields and the great cherry orchards and strawberry fields and blackcurrant bushes and the fragrant, mysterious woods that stretched into the horizon behind them. The main ...

Yritin muistella kiiltokuvia ja voikukkia ja pieniä lempeitä suukkosia. Makasin selälläni vuoteella Adèle kyljellään vierelläni. Silmäni olivat ummessa, hänen kätensä lepäsi kevyesti vatsallani. Tunsin hänen otteensa tiukkenevan ja arvelin hänen heräävän. But pretty pictures and dandelions were all there was, and the intoxicating lilac aroma by her window as we walked by it on our way to the woods to play and share secrets, and the kisses could have been something I had at first presented as a possibility and then as a memory. They were in the palm of my hand now as fickle as a bunch of fireflies, or perhaps as sure as one of those precious scented erasers shaped like a daisy or an ice cream cone, and I had her long hairs in the breast pockets of my denim jacket and knowing they were there made me unspeakably happy. Avasin silmäni. Käänsin kasvoni päin hänen kasvojaan kuvitellen näkeväni hänet heräämässä, poskien hento nukka pystyssä, pieni unihiekan jyvänen vielä sil...

I had this desire to drive and drive and drive all night long, but the maps were all crumbled and sour, and Adèle said she wouldn’t come with me. She stopped braiding my hair about that same time, and I knew then. Satunnaisesti ajatellen käsitin unohtaneeni ottaa pillerit. Tarkemmin tarkastellen tiesin, etten ollut unohtanut mitään, olin vain kauhuissani. Lumi satoi maahan järkälemäisinä motteina, mutta minä tiesin kuka siellä piilotteli.

I recently posted on my Instagram page a series of pictures of making a huge batch of cabbage rolls, a traditional Finnish delicacy, and was happy to realize the rather time-consuming, handicraft dish has lost the bad rep it had when I was a kid hating the horrible cabbage smell and reluctantly picking at the one sad, solitary roll on my plate before tiring out my parents and being excused from the table. Now, people were thrilled to see me make them, and if Instagram was a delivery service, I wouldn’t have had any left by the time we were done making them. And I don’t blame ‘em: in the mouth of a grownup, they do taste delicious, like home, like our childhoods; like it took three to four hours to make them, including the trip to the store in the middle of the preparation process, because I was being lavish with the stuffing and ran out of it during the first oven sheet, and father was like “I’ll go, I’ll go right away!” and me and my mother were like “Great, we’ll just hang ...