Utö

We danced for hours in a Utö nightclub, a windowless barn with its one square door leaking gasps of cool, Baltic Sea air. I removed my fogged glasses to dance to the foreign pop music. The tan, striped-shirt Swedish girls looked simple, clean even, amid the sweat and beer soaked scene.

There is a light there--more brilliant than the summer's long, lingering sun--that doesn't live anywhere else. A father and his children playing on the beach with a simple ball. A Swede making three American girls homemade herring, a recipe passed through generations in his family, to celebrate an already-passed midsommer. The timid "join us" becomes a bellowed "Skol" as you knock glasses, warmed and perspiring from their late afternoon Viking hands. And the absence of ice. Even in the rain, the lightening lit Utö in warmth.

Dennis had been giving me "the look," a term coined by Amy of how to know when to approach a Swedish guy. He would likely not approach you. I gulped my St. Tropez (Fanta mixed with Rose wine) and avoided his gaze. A slow, Swedish folk song brought us together. My fingers slipped from his shoulder down to his elbow, beads of sweat dripping from it and into my palm. I leaned into his neck to avoid eye contact.

We walked quietly back to the sailboat in the last hour of darkness, and watched the sunrise in silence. The next day he showed me how to pull the ropes of a sailboat, and my arms ached for the days to follow like the remains of intimacy.