All That’s Left Is the Winter Light

2015 was coming to its end. The year was already at its shortest when I wrote: "Hitsi tätä kaamosta. Kyllä se verottaa. Päivät on niin lyhyitä ja valivali. Toisaalta mitä päivänvalolla nyt tekeekään. Eihän se välttämätöntä ole." (“Damn this darkness. It does take its toll. Days are so short and complain complain.”)I told myself it wasn’t essential, that we’ve survived winters before. But that’s a lie. Light is essential. Without it, everything feels like a half-forgotten rehearsal for a play that will never be staged.

Back then I still thought in terms of “art for business.” Galleries, publishers, ticketed events. A clean equation: creative output in exchange for validation and survival. But the Deloitte memory came back—those "hymyileviä mut selkäänpuukottavia" (“smiling but backstabbing”) smiles from the corporate world—and I wondered if I was just trading one sterile stage for another. "Paint-by-numbers jobs." I had switched sides. I was no longer inside the glass towers; I was watching from the street below.

I lived on the kind of money that announces, without apology, that you are not a participant in the economy. My apartment was a mess. Not a bohemian mess—just the unremarkable disarray of a man alone. "Ei sen ihmeempää." (“Nothing remarkable.”)

I told myself I’d "luiskahtanut taiteeseen." (“slipped into art”) It sounded romantic until it didn’t. Because the truth was I wasn’t sure I wanted to make art. I wanted to be relevant. To belong somewhere. Maybe to be seen. Invisible Friend made me think of Jochen, and the rare, crystalline moments of love we had. Moments that still cut into me years later. "Huok. HUOK." (“Sigh. SIGH”)

The days were a carousel of nothing: sleep, wander, eat, avoid. I could lose whole afternoons without memory of how they’d gone. And yet I kept circling this question—did I want the discipline of an artist’s life, or just the title?

Then there were the mirrors. The barbershop mirror that told me I was "vanha ja ruma." The camera phone reflection that made me wonder why I was still trying, as if it were already too late. And yet, I lived in "kaksinkertaisessa maagisessa realismissa" (“double magical realism”) —my own private world, and the one that occasionally let me in. That tension kept me breathing.

Art, when it came, wasn’t the clean, minimalist concept work of the institutions. I rejected that. "Ei yksiulotteisuudelle." (“No to one-dimensionality.”) I wanted rönsyily, excess, words burning white-hot until they disintegrated. I wanted intensity that threatened to unmake me. But I rarely reached it. Most days I just followed prompts, tried to keep the connection alive. I wrote: "Melankolinen ylevöityminen, kyynelten rajoilla. Universumin salat avautuvat, maailma on rajaton." (random rambling) It reads now like a transmission from another self—someone who still believed the door could open.

By New Year’s Eve, the thought had softened. Maybe there was room for all kinds of artists. Maybe positioning was optional. But deep down, I knew the years had gone: "2009 ja 2010 meni sekavissa merkeissä… 2015 toipuessa." (“2009 and 2010 were a mess … 2015 has been a recovery”) That’s almost a decade of trying to get back to the start line.

I ended that winter thinking 2016 might be different. That I might be different. That I wouldn’t "kilahda uudestaan." (“go crazy again”) The pills would hold. The seasons would turn. And maybe, just maybe, the light would come back.

It didn’t. Not in the way I thought.