it's not on you

-You learned silence from a young age. It’s for your own safety. If you must acknowledge someone you are not intimately acquianted with, do so quietly, in grunts and glances, preferably.

-Don’t make eyecontact. You never know who might enter that way.

-Winter doesn’t “come every year”. Winter is a natural state here, a white death, interrupted by a brief sunny period – every year Mother Nature blinks her dewy eyes, yawns and rolls over to her other side to fall asleep again.

-You miss the short summer every long winter but when it comes, you can’t stand it because the sun won’t set. Why won’t it set? You can’t sleep, it’s too hot and you are drawn to the window. The sun hasn’t set but here it is, rising. You miss winter. You miss the sun not rising at all.

-Drink to celebrate. Drink on Wednesdays (or “little Saturdays”), take a pint or two on Friday to unwind, get drunk on Saturday. Get very drunk on Midsummer’s Eve. Drink to forget.

-You are sure teetotalers remember something you don’t. There aren’t many of them left.

-A VR train is late again. You joke about this with your travel companions. VR is always late, hahah. Nobody knows why. Your conductor friend doesn’t talk about work.

-A VR train is late again. When it arrives in Helsinki, the front is covered in frozen blood. Papers say it ran over three elks. Obviously. Your conductor friend quits their job.

-Elks are enormous. Finns have been foolish enough to put roads where they still roam, so the least you can do is respect the elks and drive carefully.

-Sometimes the warning signs for elks are not there because of elks.

-We don’t talk about the civil war. We’re leaving that to the ghosts. They can’t get enough of talking about the civil war. We ignore them, mostly.

-Lakes and forests are everywhere. You are drawn to them, drawn to the silence and the surrender.

-Stories about lakes and forests are everywhere. Stories about what happens to clueless people who go to the lakes and forests are everywhere. We have forgotten the important names hundreds of years ago, so we can’t tell you who, but we can tell you how.