Page 3 of The Happiness Blueprint
“I suggest keep them for now. One step at a time. I don’t see any harm in those two tokens if they give you comfort.”
We finish up with small talk about her daughter who is backpacking in Asia and how it gets dark already at 5:00 p.m. in Malmö this month, and then I enter the same way I came.
There are twenty-seven flowers on her headscarf.
KLARA
Where is home?
Google Search I’m Feeling Lucky
Exactly five days after the phone call with my crazy family, I’m strolling through Gatwick Airport, waiting for my one-way flight to Copenhagen. I don’t likeone-ways.A return would be a circle, which is a shape where the distance to the given point is constant. A one-way can only be a line, and lines are one-dimensional and extend infinitely.
I would have liked to know my return flight so that my trip would have form and not be infinite.
My phone pings with a message from Alice.
You will nail it (pun intended!). I’ll keep following your blood sugar and tell you to shove some sugar in your face if I see a low alert x.
I buy a tuna baguette at the airport Pret. It always has tuna mayonnaise and four slices of cucumber on a white baguette. I know that it contains 45 grams of carbohydrates and this is the number I enter into my pump. Nutritional information is very important for diabetics, but you must look at the back—the front information excludes the carbohydrates and is therefore incomplete. The pack has everything displayed in neat rows. I would like to bring a scale with me to weigh out the exact weight so that I can know exactly what I’m eating and can dose my insulin with extreme precision. But Mum put a stop to it in childhood as she wanted toprepare me for life. She argued that it is the personwithouta kitchen scale in their handbag that is considered more prepared.
I squeeze the baguette as I stand in the queue. One time it was sold out, and I instead bought a baguette with egg and sun-dried tomatoes, but the filling smelled a bit like the air in the Underground. It must have been a different sort of bread as the insulin didn’t work as expected—my blood sugar was high for an hour afterward. Also, the egg spilled out onto the tray, and I had to pick the small pieces up with my thumb and index fingers as if they were chopsticks. I shudder at the mere thought.
I used to be a vegetarian, but I started eating fish recently. Sometimes food items will be sold out, and a more flexible diet means I can prepare for this. It also means I can eat some of Alice’s dishes, which inevitably saves me time and effort. I don’t particularly like eating living things but found a compromise I can live with morally. I eat species that have a life span of less than five years. I did briefly consider not eating anything with a backbone. But the more I thought about it, it seemed like discrimination toward creatures with a different neurological disposition to us. Life span, on the other hand, is more fair, really; that’s how medical doctors decide who to save in the emergency room. You save the one with the biggest chance of survival or, in other words, thelongest predicted life span. Following my new principles, I can enjoy a varied diet without feeling guilty. I can eat prawns (two years), salmon (five years) and certain other types of fish.
However, sea bass is out of the question (twenty-five years), as is cod (twenty years).
I have time to kill so I sit down on a seat opposite the gate and type into Googlehow to tile a bathroom. Obviously, I won’t actually be putting any tiles down—you need training and qualifications for that—but if I am soon to become Tile Boss Lady, then a grasp, even a DIY one off YouTube, seems necessary. I could tell you the differences between British and Scandinavian architecture in a heartbeat, but my knowledge of nitty-gritty building work is limited to watchingBob the Builderat age three. I now wish growing up I had taken better notice and shown a bigger interest in my dad’s activities, instead of choosing to wait in the car with a book or a Nintendo DS when I had to accompany him on his appointments.People don’t bite, Klara. I’ll leave the car open, so you can come inside the house if you change your mind.Working in Dalby, Skåne, Sweden, would involve some form of large vehicle and multiple locations and attending daily and social interaction with a high number of unknown individuals. Customers. Real, live people with questions, ideas and elaborate yet ineffective designs scribbled on pieces of paper that they hand me across a kitchen table. I’m used to interacting with people via my keyboard. You can only demand so much in a chat box; however loud you shout there, the letters go no bigger than capitals, font size 14.
Next, I log on to the company website, which I discover is a simple, standard design. Dad was never one to splurge on luxuries, and it’s obvious he has asked for the most affordable package. I read.
Let us create your perfect space! Established in 1992, Bygg-Nilsson is a well-known firm covering a large part of Skåne, specializing in tiling work but ready to manage every aspect of your construction project. We pride ourselves on being a small, select team who take each project seriously and aim to offer a personalized touch. 100% satisfaction guarantee.
I sigh. It’s not exactly going to stand out on my LinkedIn or look good to my sixty-one Instagram followers.
I click on the before-and-after images, most of them dark and shot either too close or too far away. Dad’s photography skills are appalling; he can’t be trusted to take even a family photo as he cuts heads off as ruthlessly as Louis XVI. I decide the first action should be to scrub up the website, and that this is the perfect remote job for Saga.
Around me crowds have gathered, and a general sense of stress has manifested. I will do what I always do: stay seated until every last person has gotten on board and the ground staff announceFinal boarding calland look directly at me. I pull up the family WhatsApp group, which I rather fittingly named Nonstop Notifications, the only thing holding us four together across countries and past indifferences. Technology: the glue of the modern family.
Me: Boarding.
Saga: Yay amazing you will be great K! Just think what it means for all of us xxxx
Mum: Typing...
Dad:
What is it with older men and their love of the thumbs-up emoji? Dad should really be using the whitest one but insists on choosing the second one from the left, as if he thinks he has a summer tan or a deeper pigment rather than the one his Swedish lineage has handed him. The thumbs-up is his go-to, to the point where I often feel as if I’m communicating with a body part rather than an actual person.Shall I order a birthday present for Nan?Thumbs-up.I just got a promotion.Thumbs-up.My house is on fire.Thumbs-up. There is no way of telling from this ever so slightly tanned thumb if Dad is happy I’m coming or not, so his reaction will be asurprise.People say I don’t like surprises, but this is in no way accurate. I like good surprises, just like everyone else. What I don’t like are the bad ones. Others can shrug them off with ashit happens,but I can’t: they throw me. Having to go to Sweden after seven years in London feels like a bad surprise, and I can’t help but think that if my plan had worked out all those years ago, I wouldn’t have been so easily movable now.
My glucose monitor beeps with a lost-connection alert, and I look down at it with sympathy, saying, “It’s okay. I, too, am rather lost.”
I spot Dad immediately. He looks uncomfortable, nervous even, as he gazes toward the stream of passengers I’m part of. As soon as he sees me, he breaks into a large smile and comes toward me. He’s lost weight but looks healthy. I recall the unassuming1,and he pulls me in for a big hug, pressing my whole head onto his chest. I let it go on for longer than I’m comfortable with. His jacket smells of Dad, which I guess means fresh air, olive soap and cheap aftershave.
“You’re here. How was your flight?”
“It did its job in getting me here. I’m happy to be here, Dad.” And in this moment, it’s true. Dadneedsme. A strange feeling hits me that our roles have reversed. I’m not quite ready for my dad to need me more than I need him. I had imagined this moment when I was a lot older. And wiser.
“Coffee?” He gestures to the airport Starbucks.
