Aneboda, Expedit & Co.
The thing about a new city is that your head stops keeping up at some point. Too many inputs hitting at once, no internal map yet for any of it. I noticed it most clearly in IKEA.
I’d gone for the basics—something to sleep on, something to put things in, nothing ambitious. IKEA is cheap and it despises you. I couldn’t find the floor arrows pointing me forward. I wrote down the wrong shelf number. I stood in front of empty shelving in the wrong finish and had to loop back to the beginning. By the time I reached the checkout I’d lost the exit. But the room is done. White walls with red accents, a proper sleeping corner, Swedish names on everything—Beddinge, Aneboda, Expedit—and somehow it adds up to a place that looks like someone actually lives there.
I feel good here, genuinely. Something on every corner, the subway is starting to make sense, there are strange people and interesting ones and good-looking ones and you notice all of them. But there’s a part of settling into somewhere new that furniture doesn’t solve. I don’t like being alone, and I notice the absence more clearly now—not quite loneliness, more like a frequency that’s missing. I keep wondering when that changes.
One-night-stands keep coming up as a topic whenever people talk about new cities. Everyone I know who’s had one tells roughly the same story afterward: it wasn’t what they expected, they’d probably skip it next time, it felt hollow. And yet it keeps happening—novelty, being untethered, the animal logic of somewhere new. I understand the mechanics. I’m just not drawn to it. Maybe that makes me old-fashioned. There’s probably a more cinematically appropriate version of this move that involves more opportunistic behavior, but I keep thinking I’d rather wait for something that means something. I’m not embarrassed about that.
Something is starting. The city hasn’t run out of things yet. I built a room out of flat-pack furniture with names I can’t pronounce, and somehow it looks like somewhere I actually want to be. That’s probably enough to go on.