October 2013

This is the city that was always my home, even before I moved here as a naïve 19-year-old. This is the city that took my virginity (after a party at Konstfack) and taught me the grim rules of attraction. This is the city where I got Stockholm syndrome, the curse of being in love with your captor. This is the city that comforted me in the mornings with its pale yellow light shining gently on empty streets, and this is the city that still, at the end of the day, colours faces and buildings in burning orange and blinding sun. This is the city that made me realise that a city can be as small as a village, when everyone you know knows each other, and when you all share something together, the burden of being in love with the now, and the need to express it, night after night, in different bars, to the sound of music. This is the city where I learned to go out. This is the city where I learned to have fun. This is the city that woke up from a sleep and promised that the night would never end. This is the city that always had me stay, to the very last minute, until the morning would spit me out.

This is the city where I had my first book release party, back in 1997 in the tiny office of the publishing company Leander Malmsten, where I was introduced to Czech translators and got drunk on cocktails for the first time, and this is the city where I first heard my song being played on the radio through an old analogue Bajazzo De Luxe Telefunken, in my first apartment, a small studio on Gärdet. This is the city I moved away from, again and again, heartbroken or bored or just ready for something new, only to come back, with a renewed love for its concrete drabness, its bitch-cold winters, its daunting elegance, its non-pandering hard-to-please-ness. There are streets in this city I have walked with my heart in my mouth and streets I have marched in excited anticipation, there are bars in this city I have loved because they felt like my living room and bars that I have loathed but returned to again and again just the same. There are buses I’ve been sitting in crying in the middle of the day, without making any effort to hide it, because I didn’t see the point; there are cabs I’ve been hailing in eagerness to get there faster and cabs I’ve been hailing in despair to get home. This is the city where memories wait behind every corner and people from the past constantly resurface, because like me, they can never leave.

This is the city where I brought the love of my life after finding him in New York. This is the city where we set up our first home, and this is the city where I decided, while biking over Strömbron one autumn night, that yes, I would go ahead and do something as crazy and mindboggling as having a child. This is the city where my daughter was born, a sunny Wednesday in August two years ago. This city will always be her hometown. And wherever I live, it will always be my home.

Karin Ström’s new song Stockholm is out now on Spotify. Read more about Karin’s relation-ship to Stockholm in the guidebook Uncommon Stockholm, out now on Laurella & Wallin.