Saffron Stockholm nights…
It was my last days in the cold windy Stockholm and I was invited for dinner at her place… the apartment was kaleidoscopic in its own humble way… as if the the colors of time and space were dancing all around her living room, sometimes beaming with oldness and the coziness that comes with old buildings , and then as you look on the other side the contemporary sofas and sitting tables and ipads and lcd screens brings you to present times… seeing on one side the African handicrafts hanging around, takes you back to the continent of raw hope, and then you see the other side where the wooden piano of western culture greets you with open arms, tempting you to dance … and on top of this the boxes here and there full of books and petty things and the bunker bed reaching the roof and the openly hanging clothes, all of them adding their own bohemian touch to the whole ambiance of her apartment.
With the smell of cinnamon and spices from slowly simmering glogg spreading all over the place , and the shadows coming to dance from candles burning all over , we ate our two course dinner of fish soup and fried mushrooms while starting to discuss one of her favorite topics of man woman equality ….. and we discussed alot that night… about everything there was to discuss … music, food, religion, consciousness, god , humans, children, life, hope, desire, emotions… I told her the mere feeling of self consciousness, of sitting right here feeling this self awareness pushes me to think of creating meanings in this seemingly organized chaotic world… She told me how she feel uneasy when it comes to emotions, as if it is some force totally uncontrollable and having its own life and breath taking you into unknown… i told her about my dreams of making and selling perfumes someday… she told me about the indigenous people of Sweden and there musical way of communicating long distances.
We finished our night sipping the hot glogg with ginger biscuits , and bit of playing of piano , a perfect dinner ending , much more satisfying then a happy ending…….
Long after that, 
walking on the pebbled streets of her Stockholm and moving between subway trains, i was thinking, how unlike us , the people of the west treat loneliness as one of their most prized possessions , loving and hating it at the same time…. I see loneliness everywhere here, in the eyes of people standing on sub way metro with their headphones plugged on , or with their little dogs, or even in the eyes of couples trying to hold each-other as if something unwanted is about to happen…. I was thinking the other day, is it really the objective reality I see here, or is it my own subjective loneliness that super-imposes on everything I see around me….
Saffron nights are over… am sitting on my plane heading towards my own land, having her own chaotic and beautiful colors, away from the cold windy Stockholm, away from the warm people I met and made friends with during multiple dinners and parties and concerts and bar hopping and after-parties in cold Stockholm…. I think someday many years into the future, somewhere in this ever shrinking world, when I would be old and will have nothing else to do but just to think of the past, the cold winds and drizzling rains will definitely be reminding me of these warm people of Sweden and the saffron filled nights cheering up my own cultivated loneliness….
