Pavlovian Chirping

After I changed the alarm clock chime on my phone, birdsong took on a Pavlovian effect on me. Especially the first few times it felt as though I had discovered a portal between worlds, the moment a flock of house sparrows started making a racket in a bush.

Just as when Pavlov rattled his bell, I travelled between states: from a sleepwalking life to wakefulness, except that wakefulness went in two directions and could just as easily hurl me to the Sillekrog petrol station outside Nyköping, where we stopped in various Aprils, halfway to the Allsvenskan season opener.

After a frosty, football-poor winter, we thawed out in order to make up for the conversations that had only taken place internally within us, and then after an hour or so with his right foot on the accelerator Conny needed a bit of sugar more than the car needed petrol, pulled over to buy sweets and a Coca-Cola, maybe a hot dog, but probably not, and I didn’t really need anything since I had just eaten to keep me going for a while, instead waited by the magazine rack and skimmed headlines about the week’s TV programmes, without really being interested, but it was the feeling, being sixteen or thirty-six, stretching my legs and standing by the magazine rack at Sillekrog on a sunny day in April where the gravel still sticks under the sole of your shoe and we were on our way somewhere, towards a city, a season, a match, a new campaign, a second chance. In every version of the memory, sun.

So back to the passenger seat, a few Ahlgrens bilar candy shaken out of the bag and landing in my palm, accelerating back onto the E4 motorway and letting my body be pressed back into the seat, yet never really noticing any traffic, because all the openers had to be sorted through, from the times when everything collapsed on the first day, to those when we could hope a little longer. As yet we know nothing about our immediate future.

All Aprils the same, the same shoaling hope, and in the cabin’s few cubic metres of universe the feeling that this is in fact always going on, that we do this every week without interruption, and that it will always be like this, regardless of players, divisions or generations, if not us then someone else. This journey towards the future, with its attendant stop at Sillekrog, always exists and is always bright, I think as I realise that the house sparrows are house sparrows and not an alarm clock, and I continue on my walk.