Today while Christmas shopping downtown I got the strongest flashback outside of one of the malls. I thought about a day more than ten years ago when I walked the same way with a friend who I was very close to back then. Since I moved back to Västerås I get these kind of flashbacks often. It’s not things I have forgotten and suddenly remembers, it’s that when I am in a particular place and come to think of memories I have of that place the memories I have of it becomes extremely strong. It’s as though I remember a feeling, how it felt to be the person I was back then, how I felt for the people I knew back then. I almost expect to look down on my clothes and find myself dressed in the skirt I always wore in high school. To look over my shoulder and find my old best friends standing there.

I didn’t miss things in that way when I lived in Hultsfred because it was a completely different place where my teenage years in Västerås felt very distans. Now I’m all of a sudden back at the crime scene, so to speak, and being here I remember all the good times so much more vividly. It’s one thing to think of what you did in high school when you’re sitting in a town 400 Kilometres away and another thing completely when you walk by your old school.

Perhaps I wouldn’t be as melancholic as I am about the past if I had never left Västerås. Now the end of everything that was my life back then came abruptly. I didn’t lose my friends one by one, I lost them all at the same time when I moved. Life as I knew it didn’t slowly change into something else, suddenly I just lived in a small town in Småland where I had never even set foot before.

Now I make it sound like my life is 2011 is shit and my teenage life was the shit. That’s not the case. My life in 2011 is good and I certainly don’t want to be a teenager again. Except for maybe that feeling of having my whole life ahead of me that I had back then, I do miss that. Still, what I do wish is that I could merge my old life with this life. Take the best from both. At least I have reconnected with a few people from before and that’s wonderful. A small piece of my old life in Västerås is part of my new life here too.

November 2001.
It doesn’t feel like ten years ago.

Still open for Christmas card exchange btw.