Fictional Article and Photos
May 22, 2017 / featured on Kevin Kish Photography seaandcityblog
By mid-December, the Sun was coming up at 9 and going down at 3. Even when the Sun was “up,” its appearance was quintessentially northern European— reserved, quiet, and a little bleak. Direct sunlight was rare. Most mornings all I could see out my window was shades of gray and white. Finns drink the most coffee in the world and during my first winter living in its neighboring country Estonia, it was easy to see why—the lack of sun that characterizes winter in that part of the world gave my new city, Tallinn, an eerie apocalyptic feeling, and all I wanted to do was sleep.
But instead, I took a page out of the Finnish book and upped my already admirable coffee intake, and slowly my eyes began to adjust. Like all things in life, there was a bright side to all this darkness—a yang to its yin—and it was the way that the high latitude changed the entire color palette of the sky. Pink and purple light often danced across the evening sky, reappearing in certain places and in certain light throughout the night. When the Sun actually graced us with its presence, its backdrop was a modestly light blue sky. If the Sun briefly came up in the day, there would be a sunset—a muted, pastel colored miracle in a place of seemingly endless darkness.
Months earlier, during a blistering New York City summer with days lingering above 90 degrees for weeks, I sweated on the subway and wished for cold, snowy days and dark Estonian nights. On Sundays, I took the R train from Queens, where I was temporarily living in the basement of my childhood home, to Manhattan’s own miniature circus and playground for vagabonds, psychics, chess players, protesters, drug addicts, and the mentally ill, Union Square. From there I walked a few blocks to the edge of the East Village where I worked part-time for a photographer, scanning and color correcting his photographs.
I told the photographer I was a would-be writer, which lead to discussions about art. The photographer was a big fan of Morrissey and Leonard Cohen, so it was somewhat surprising when one day, during a conversation about music, he said: “I just don’t think death is that interesting.” He paused. “Creatively speaking.”
“I think about life and I think about death and neither one particularly appeals to me…” the Smiths sing in “Nowhere Fast”.
That summer in New York the entire city was alive. Sunlight poured over everything, as I bought leggings and thick socks and oversized boots to prepare for my re-location to Tallinn. I shuffled from home to work to bar and back again. I lamented about the heat, and idealized my escape. By the time I arrived in Tallinn, the mild Estonian summer was ending. The Sun still stayed up until 10 p.m., and I felt lifted by the city’s light sea breeze. A season resembling autumn lasted about two weeks, and by November, snow had begun to fall.
As the days got shorter and shorter, Christmas lights appeared everywhere as compensation. At the end of November, a Christmas tree, around the size of the one in Rockefeller Center, appeared with no lights and no ornaments in the middle of the Old Town center, surrounded by empty wooden stands and tables covered by canvases. One day, it burst into life—a Christmas market frequented by locals and tourists alike, with stands selling sausages, cookies, souvenirs (including a large selection of wooden trolls made by Nordic Gifts), jewelry made out of amber from the Baltic Sea, and hot wine called glögg, which you could enjoy while walking through town or at a table standing next to a heat lamp. The tree was adorned with lights, oversize ornaments and a star on top, despite the country’s rampant paganism.
So winter was here. As I found myself struggling to wake up at a reasonable time, taking two hours to get dressed, and walking past the Christmas market through a dark purple-y sky at 4 p.m., desperate to get to a coffee shop, fast, and my new city seemed trapped in a film noir scene, I reminded myself—it might feel a bit like death—but death is simply not that interesting.
