I left home around 05.00 in the morning. It was January.

Actually it was my parents’ home, a big two-room apartment where I slept on the couch when we were there all together which happened rarely, as they work between Finland and Åland. My actual home I had left already almost a month prior.

Well, anyway.
In am writing this about a year after it happened.

I remember that my parents came with the ferry and arrived home some time around 01 in the morning. I remember joining them for a late supper but I don’t remember what we talked about. I think I was packing, sorting things to put in my backpack and what to leave behind.

I think I went to bed around 02, nervous over the three hours of sleep I was to have, that they wouldn’t be enough.

The alarm ringing some time just before 05, the room just as dark as I left it. I think I just got dressed and cleared my bed from the couch, quick and quiet. Waiting for my friend who was to pick me up and when he finally calls I make my way to the hallway. My parents get up, I didn’t intend to wake them but they come out to the hallway and hug me good-bye, looking almost like groggy children in their payamas and it’s so strange to see your parents like this. One day they are just smaller than you remember them to be.

Riding the elevator down, maybe crying, I don’t know but definetely a storm of emotions in whatever the hollow place inside where I feel them. Gripping something, I am sure, bracing for the cold outside.

It is still dark but the traffic is going. My friend is so energetic and happy and doesn’t see that I am breaking apart, just happily chucks my things into the back of the van and slams the doors efficiently. In the front seat, I ask for a minute.

We drive out of the city and I notice what a good driver he is. I calm down and settle into the mood of the road. I dawns around us. We play music: my playlist of everything, really everything, and my friend tells me to skip songs he’s not feeling, or to send him the ones he particularily likes.
I have never been in Riga before.

(And I do not yet know about the cold Air b’n’b-apartment that we are to rent, the bread and pickles we will eat, I have not yet felt the icy wind blow through all of my layers, I have not yet stopped to hear the church bells chime or seen the wild national library building, I have not yet said good-bye to my friend or went to the empty milonga or the secret dancehall class and I have yet no idea of how, in a few days, I will wake up puking my guts out on the same day I am leaving for Vilnius.)

…

(This story told in pictures.)