A Narrative Bio: Part II

[Jack_Pow]

This is a work of fiction inspired by the art and stories of Simon Stalenhag


(©Simon Stalenhag)

[Part II: The Distance Between Dreams]

For a while, time seemed to stop. Like the fabric of reality had become disorganised. Life carried on, school resumed, and training, seasons came and went. And all I remember feeling at the time was that I just had to keep moving.

Many evenings, from my bedroom window, I would watch the commuter trains cut through the dark at almost the exact same time every night. And for hours I would just sit awake and listen for them.

Me and Mum didn’t talk much about my dad after the funeral. It wasn’t because we didn’t care. I think it was the opposite. Certain subjects become too large to comfortably fit into conversations.

She worked quieter jobs after that, mainly office work. But eventually the quiet got too much for me, and football became the easy excuse. I spent less and less time at home. When I wasn’t at school, I was training. If I wasn’t training, I’d be sat in a field with friends, where there was always a pitch nearby. I’d often stay behind at training long after everyone else had gone home, just me and a ball, until the floodlights eventually switched off automatically, leaving me in the darkness. There was something I found calming about empty football grounds at night. It was a different kind of quiet to what I had at home. I could still hear the distant traffic, or the sound of a passing train heading into the city. It made the world feel lived in.

It was this particular time of my life where I stopped feeling like the boy who moved here from England. There were gradual shifts. My accent began to change, Swedish words started coming to me faster than the English ones. People stopped calling me “the English kid,” and new students assumed I’d lived here all my life.

This scared me. A part of me felt guilty for settling into a life my dad never got to stay in.

My football started to change over the course of the next year or so. When I was younger, it was mostly an escape. Something familiar to hold on to when everything felt unstable. But as I got older, coaches started paying more attention to me.

I was never the fastest or strongest on the field, but I understood space better than anyone. They told me I was able to keep calm, when other players my age would rush things. When I stepped on to a pitch, time would slow down in a way, even to this day, I still can’t explain. They told me I played like someone older. Looking back, I think that grief had done that to me. Trying to escape it had led me to shedding the skin of my childhood in a way.

During winter, darkness arrived before dinner. But during the summer, the sunsets would last a lifetime, the light never seemed to fully leave the sky, and time stretched because of it. My friends and I would stay outside long after we were meant to go home, hanging out on basketball courts, fenced off and covered in graffiti. We’d talk about football, music, our futures. Girls. The most important conversations you can have when you’re 15.

I still think back to those summers, now. The grief seemed to get easier. Sweden was my home now, and I stopped feeling like I was waiting for life to begin.

(©Simon Stalenhag)

Being apart of the IK Brommapojkarna youth setup, meant training sessions became more frequent, and football went from being something I did after school to becoming the centre of my life. Matches became more competitive. Suddenly I was having to travel further across the country for them. At this point I was old enough to understand that some of the boys around me believed football would become their entire future.

The standard was higher than anything I’d experienced before. Everything moved faster. Some of the boys I played with had already been inside academy systems since they were little kids. They talked about football differently too; diets, formations, things I’d put little thought into up to now. And for the first few months, I felt behind.

Everyone else seemed so certain of where they were going, but I still carried this feeling that I’d arrived here accidentally and someone would eventually realise I wasn’t supposed to be here.

When I wasn’t playing myself, I spent hours watching others. I started to notice little details. The body language of coaches, tempo changes. I saw spaces being ignored because a player was too focused on the ball. That became my education more than anything else.

One night after training, a coach stopped me as I was leaving. I remember it was a hazy, violet summer evening, the floodlights buzzed above us. He asked me if I understood why he was playing me in different positions and roles every few weeks. I asked him if it was because he didn’t know where I fit in yet, which was the truth in my mind, I didn’t know where I fit in myself.

He laughed and shook his head. He told me he played me in different positions and roles because he could fit me in anywhere. And that’s when I finally got it, and that feeling of being behind or out of place - a feeling I was all to familiar with growing up - disappeared, probably for the first time in my life.

My mum was worried about how much time I spent away from home. I understood why. Some nights I wouldn’t get back until late. I’d return home exhausted from school and training, and travelling across the country for matches. But I think part of her also understood that it was this that was holding me together. My reason to keep moving forward.

There’s a certain loneliness to serious youth football that people don’t really talk about. Most of your life starts revolving around routines, that other people your age don’t understand. The early mornings, late nights, the long commutes. Weekends swallowed up, and parties missed. Sometimes I questioned whether it was the right choice. Something was still missing and I couldn’t put my finger on what it was.

I met her towards the end of the following winter, when the snows had melted and colour was coming back into the world.

There was no dramatic scenario, where we fell in love the moment we locked eyes, like it happens in the movies. We were introduced after training one afternoon, by one of my teammates, who told me she was the girl that was helping out at the club canteen. We didn’t speak much, just a polite “hello” and “nice to meet you.” She had a care-freeness about her. Her name was Liv.

After that, I would notice her more and more. She’d come and sit in the stands some sessions, and watch us train. One night, I started heading to my bus stop when she came out at the same time. She had an old film camera strapped around her neck. She loved taking photos. She would notice things that most people would choose to ignore - train-lines, pylons lined up in a field, reflections in puddles after it had rained.

I once asked her why she took so many pictures of such ordinary things.
“Because they might not be there tomorrow” was her response.

She then asked me if playing football, professionally, was my dream. I remember not knowing how to answer that. The future, all of a sudden, felt so much larger than the past, and I realised I hadn’t ever truly thought about what my dreams were.

We slowly started spending more time together, it wasn’t planned, it just seemed to happen naturally. In the summer we’d choose to to take the long walk home after training, instead of catching the bus. We’d often just sit beside the pitch talking. We’d take late trains into the city, our feet resting against opposite seats, while the city whizzed by outside in blurred reflections and lights. When I was on the pitch I felt like I needed to think three steps ahead, but with her I was completely focused on now.

I don’t think she ever really cared about the football. She cared that I cared about it, and looking back I see that now. She’d ask questions about it that no one else did. About how matches felt. Why I preferred playing in winter more than summer. She’d poke fun about how I was always so calm on the pitch, but when I was around her I’d stutter and fumble my words. Time passed by so quick when we were together.

One weekend, there was no training or game scheduled, so we went and sat near the edge of Lake Mälaren to watch the boats. I remember thinking it was strange how quickly someone could become part of your life. I guess it’s no different to how quickly someone could depart from your life, and deep down that’s what I feared again.

She said it’s funny that a year earlier, we’d been complete strangers, and now she knew things about me nobody else did. I asked her like what? She told me that she knew when I was anxious because I’d pinch the skin on my elbow. That when I was upset I’d sometimes switch back to English without even realising it. And that I enjoyed walking late at night because the quiet would quieten my own thoughts.

We spoke often about my dad. It was good to finally be able to speak about that. She’d just let me talk without saying anything sometimes. There would be gaps of silence but then I’d start talking again, and she’d just listen.

She arrived in my life at exactly the right moment.

Football was beginning to get more serious now. Scouts were appearing more regularly. Coaches expected more from me. But she always tried to remind me there were parts of life that didn’t need to feel like a constant progression.

Then the offer came. I remember the day vividly. It was a late-Autumn Monday, and it had rained all day. I got home from school and saw the envelope sitting on the kitchen table. Plain white, apart from two logos in the top corner, for Stockholm IK and the SSL. I genuinely thought it might have just been some information from one of the many trial sessions I’d attended there over the years. But the way my mum watched me as I opened it, I realised it was more than that. Of course, she already knew. I stood there just looking at it for a while, unable to bring myself to open it. At the time, I didn’t know why. Now, I realise it was because I knew my life was about to change, and I wasn’t certain I wanted it to.

I eventually opened it. The letter itself was simple. Just a formal offer inviting me to join the Stockholm IK Academy programme ahead of the upcoming SSL season, after a successful evaluation period. The first time I read it, I barely took in the words, skimming through them as quick as I could to get to the end. Then I read it a second time, more slowly, hoping for it to sink in. Then again a third time just to make sure I hadn’t imagined certain parts.

My mum looked so proud, sat across the table from me. Suddenly, everything we’d been through since the move felt connected somehow. The emptiness we both felt after my dad died. The endless training sessions and late nights. For years, football had been just the thing helping me survive. Now it was my whole future too.

Growing up means learning that people can be everything to each other and still drift in different directions, floating along different currents. And just as my world was changing again, so was Liv’s.

She’d been accepted in to the UAL in London to do Photojournalism and Documentary Photography.

And like when we met for the first time, there was no grand finale, nothing collapsed between us. There was just a quiet understanding over time that we were beginning to imagine different futures, and had different dreams. And that, somehow, made it sadder.

On our last day together we stood outside the station for a while, talking about completely unimportant things because neither of us really knew how to end it. Then as her train pulled up to take her to the airport, she handed me a photograph she’d taken months earlier.

It was a picture she’d taken of me from the side of the pitch, one evening, while I was training. Surrounded by darkness, apart from patches of light from the floodlights.

On the back she’d written:

“You always did look like you were heading somewhere.”

I still have it.