Lapland Express

The boy in carriage 7

Did you know that there are two direct trains from Stockholm to Lapland every day?

The landscape is ever changing, as long as we are talking about shades of grey.

Looking out of the windows you will see Arlanda, Uppsala, Boden and Umea,

all the way to the northern coasts and read houses of the arctic circle in Luleå.

As he looked through the window, watching the lakes and cities pass by,

he felt that he was living his own life behind as well, and with this, a high.

All the spreadsheets and errors messages and system cataloging and endless testing,

the feedback rounds and brainstorming meetings and emails from marketing.

He is, or he was, a programming engineer or more pompously called data architect,

not the most poetic of professions but he had always found it sort of magic,

turning letters and numbers into images on a screen, building a world alive in your pocket,

where people saw a character, he saw only calming order. A dark page in static.

He should have known, deep down, that this game was different than the rest,

that the data they asked for, in emails coded in ways he didn't fully understand,

was a new type of request, one not as harmless as another beta test.

And by the time he realized, it was too late, the request was a command.

And so he reversed the magic, turned the people back into numbers and letters,

neat little rows of preferences, anything from wake-up times to dreams to genders.

Organised them in cohorts, deleted duplicates and highlighted key facts with color-coding,

sent the file to management, with translation into human speak for the guys in marketing.

And now here he was, looking through the windows at a midsummer sunset over dark lakes,

feeling a bit awkward in his brand new jacket and already too tight hiking shoes.

wondering how long he could actually really spend here looking at the nordic views,

wondering how long he could last, endlessly writing the list of his mistakes. 

And so he sat, on the same seat, at the same window, for eight minutes and fourteen hours,

Carriage 7, seat C of the SJ92 night train leaving Stockholm Centraal at shortly past nine.

Finding comfort once again in the certainty of numbers, the similarity of chairs

Watching people get up, get off, reading and working and talking and drinking wine.

And the train was finally pulling up in Luleå Centralstation, the last stop in Upper Norrlan,

his eyes fell on a abandoned newspaper leftover in Sundsvall from a businessman,

the red headline warning about the latest South European right wing surprise election,

valfusk, datafusk - such fun-sounding words for election fraud and data manipulation.

As he turn away, knowing too well what the paper would say, the gleeful theories,

his burner phone flashed, sending coordinates in quick succession, another number series.

A new location where the work would begin. 

He smiled, an ear-to ear splitting grin.

The woman in carriage 7

the Lapland express had always been her favourite mode of transportation,

Over eight hours (an express!) to go up the entire length of the country.

Through the lakes and the countryside and the small fishing stations,

with finally some time to herself, to dream and eat and even maybe study.

She hadn't been back for a while, having left as soon as she could for sunnier shores,

where summer lasted months, not weeks, where even the floor of the flat felt somehow sunny.

And if she was honest, a healthy distance from her family who was always keeping scores,

counting who was already married, had kids, who had graduated from the best university. 

She liked being different, being the exotic one. For once not only for her darker looks.

In Sweden she sometimes felt like a dark eel in a sea of shiny, healthy, blonde cods.

Her lunch different, her clothes a bit too colourful, her head always stuck in books, 

But eventually, she grew up and found her own adopted country, against all odds.

She even ended up falling in love, again and again. Feeling silly and breathless,

first with these new boys, so different from the ones she grew up with, playing in the wood,

but eventually, after some many adventures ending in various states of undress,

she walked down the aisle with a boy who came from the same (the right) neighborhood.

And so they stayed and made this warmer country a place that they could call theirs.

For ten years they raised their children and quietly climbed the company ranks,

ignoring the sly glances at diversity day, the assumptions filling the wrong blanks.

Focusing on building their life, their home, telling themselves that they didn't really care. 

But as the posts kept piling up on their screens, the murmurs seemed to get louder.

The sneers on the subways more frequent, the playdates rarer as their own invitations.

And suddenly it seemed it was everywhere, the insults and glances like gunpowder,

and finally, like an inevitable, surprising for many, but not them, the results of the election.

And then his position first, lost in the terms of synergies and restructuration,

barely a couple of weeks to explain everything to a replacement fresh from graduation.

While hers, more elegantly, quietly decimated in more corporate terms, in strategy

not a demotion, you see, a chance to focus on her interests, spending more time with the family.

And so she was, back to where she started, in her worn winter boots and warm coat.

Slipping them on like a younger version of herself, with a new lump in her throat.

The boy from the neighborhood no longer by her side. An accident they said,

kids being kids, although no one would know as they had since long fled.

So here she was, back on the train, in her best business- casual outfit,

interview after interview from Stockholm to Göteborg to Narvik.

The newspaper on her lap like a bad reminder of what her life had come to be,

she rushed out in Sundsvall, with barely a glance to her neighbor in seat D.