The Open Coordinate System

"My life is shit. Elämäni on paskaa."

The words surfaced on a moving bus one winter, as if they had been waiting in the static all along. A looped signal, impossible to trace to its origin.

The figure at the center of this account is not a hero, nor even certain of the role. A middle-aged man who sleeps twelve hours a day; a history marked by locked doors and institutional corridors; a past spent in code, in boardrooms, in half-finished art. His is a biography that resists the official narratives, but it is the only one available.

The season around him was stripped to its bones — short light, hard air, streets ringing with frost. Inside, there was only the open coordinate system: “avoin koordinaatisto”. The phrase sounds like freedom, but freedom without bearings is only another form of drift.

The dreams were maps of their own. In one, a cellar. A rat working its way into the soft skull of an infant. A flight through blood-soaked curtains into a bright courtyard, where the air was warm and still. A voice: “Sun on palattava — you must return.” But which was the cellar — business, or art? Which was the house?

Sometimes, the figure thought of abandoning the whole question. “Mä oon jo iso — I am already grown.” No need for ladders, for titles. Work could happen outside the gates. Amateur in name only. Exile as a method.

But the fear of vanishing — of being erased by time — always came back.

In the open coordinate system, there is no point of return. No straight path to arrival. Only the dim winter light shifting by minutes, and a lone cartographer, charting the slow movement of a self through the white noise.