* * *
And then a whole lot of years went by, as they normally do if you turn your back. I got older a year at a time, and though I never travelled to the island with Granny again, I did go with my parents. The first summers after the summer with Eulalia I would head straight for the Clearing to look for her, but since she was never there I gave it up after a while.
She had said that last night that I most certainly would forget her when I got older, or else I would get the idea she was something I had made up myself only because I was alone on the island with my grandmother. And I suppose she was right. My memory of her faded, and I got such a lot of other things to worry about. I don’t think I thought of Eulalia for almost ten years.
Then I was grown up and had moved to live alone in an old abandoned house down by the canal in my hometown. In a way you could say I didn’t have any parents either, only a mouse in a shoebox and a strange cat that used to pee in my bed just to spite me. I didn’t work and didn’t sleep much, and at night I would sit on a bench by the water outside of the house and look at the stars that mirrored themselves in the smooth surface. That was when for the first time since I was little I came to think of Eulalia, and the fairytale she had told me that warm summer night by the viking grave on the ridge, when she had decided to go away. What was it she had said about that girl?
“It was the sea splashing and surging inside her and she had to listen. When she lay on the floor in the old house at night she could hear the waves breaking in her head, and when she walked in the woods in the mornings she could feel the salt sea splash in her face”...
And suddenly I had to laugh and I lifted my eyes towards the sky that glittered above the hill on the other side of the water, and it was almost as if I could see Eulalia come sailing there through the night beneath the stars of Jörgen and Granny and all the others, with her arms spread out like wings and the cool nocturnal air whirling around her pale ankles. It was of course only in my imagination, but it still made me so incredibly happy and at once I knew what I wanted to do with my life.
I too would learn to fly, and I would go find Eulalia!
Today I’m very old and I’ve been to so many places and have known so many people that there’s hardly room in my head for all the memories, but I still haven’t found Eulalia. It’s true I’ve met some girls who reminded of her, and once or twice I even thought it was, but they all had other names and didn’t understand what I meant when I started talking about Imelda the dreaming frog, about snapdragons and pear trees in the sky.
A few times I sensed how she sat down next to me when I was watching the stars at night, and I could almost feel her put her little hand in mine while she pointed at one or other strangeness up there, but every time I turned my head to look at her she was already gone. It was like that one time at a rusty old ship that rolled over the Mediterranean Sea between Greece and Israel. It was like that another time on top of Table Mountain in the south of Africa, when I’d sat myself down in the night to listen to the crickets. It was also like that one time when I’d climbed a hill on an island outside of China far away in Asia to see all the lights of the village and the glow-worms in the grass try to out-twinkle the stars.
But mind you, I don’t think it’s all that bad because I know that Eulalia exists, and Eulalia knows that I exist, and we think about each other, and in this way we make each other happy. And if I still have to get inside of an aeroplane in order to fly, at least nowadays I dare to get lost most all the time.
And that’s why the story will have to end here, although nothing else does. I simply don’t know where she went, or if she ever found her parents. Maybe they’re wooshing around together between the palm trees of some nice isle of the South Sea, or maybe not. Maybe she’s hiding around here somewhere, cautious not to scare me – I’m grown up now and most grown-ups are so easily scared. Maybe she met some other little boy or girl to talk to about the sea and the winds and the gardens of the stars.
Maybe she’s even there with you, is she?
In that case, make sure you greet her from me!
Malmö Sorgenfri, the fall of 1998
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A note from the author:
The swedish original of ”Eulalia Starwind” wrote itself in a couple of strange and happy weeks towards the end of 1998. I then had it published on my own accord in 2001, sold a (very) few copies and forgot about it for ten years until I got the idea to translate it and test it on a free-writing website in the UK. Since the reviews were astoundingly positive (in some cases quite raving) I wrote it through once more and here it is. If you got this far and liked it, please let me know! There’s nothing like personal feedback for a writer who’s been spending thirty odd years writing in solitude without even publishing nothing (more than a few print-on-demand titles).
(For photos of the actual site of the story you may very well search on ”Fårö, Sweden”. Or why not watch some of the many Ingmar Bergman movies that were filmed there.)
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