True by Riikka Pulkkinen

you, for starters,” the orange boy said with a smile.
    Anna is envious of these stories. She’d like to have similar stories of her own.
    She remembers Marc, last fall. She went to Paris four months after the breakup. A stupid idea, actually. She bought a cheap ticket. Alone in Paris! At home, the idea had seemed romantic and crazy, a symbol of freedom: her love had ended, she would shake off Helsinki and experience life as a different woman, by traveling alone in the city of love. When she got there she felt like an orphan. She wandered around, met a boy in a museum—Marc. They went to a cafe and shared a bottle of wine and their childhood fears. Marc kissed her on the banks of the Seine and suddenly asked, without any fuss, if she would move to Paris. He decided that they would fall in love and live happily ever after. But I don’t even know you, Anna said. Just throw yourself into it, Marc answered.
    And so she did: she threw herself into it in his apartment in the Marais. And it was over as quickly as it began. In the morning she gathered her things and slipped out without waking him. She never found out whether his promised love could have grown into something real or whether it was just a door to a brief and somewhat vague pleasure under a portrait of Che Guevara (how tasteless to hang a murderer’s portrait on the wall!) in Marc’s cozy but messy apartment. Maybe Marc was an impostor. Or maybe he was her great love story, and she passed it by. She’ll never know.
    OF COURSE SHE had that life, the one that ended on the floor by the front door. She would have liked to make that life completely real through love: to give her all and get the world.
    She saw black for a moment. She knocked a book from the shelf as she walked by, bent to pick it up, and straightened up again. She smiled blindly at her coworkers. The world took shape again, she picked the basket up off the floor and continued to the back of the store.
    WHEN SHE MET Matias, she didn’t feel anything special. One smile across the room at a party, a somewhat pointless conversation at a sticky kitchen table when all she was thinking was: that kind of boy.
    Matias asked her out, she agreed, since there was no one else. She noticed that she liked his smile. They drank cocoa at Succés on Korkeavuorenkatu, shared a cinnamon roll. In two weeks’ time she was thinking that maybe the easiness and comfort that was her overriding feeling with Matias was the beginning of love.
    In five weeks’ time they carried the sofa through the door.
    ANNA GOES TO the philosophy section, puts a book in its correct spot on the shelf. On an impulse she checks to see if any of her grandmother’s books are in the psychology section.
    There’s one copy of her most popular book, Recognition and Self. Anna was in high school when she finally read it for the first time, for a presentation on attachment theory for her developmental psychology class, and as she read it she felt a mixture of embarrassment and pride.
    Her teacher said, “Is Elsa Ahlqvist really your grandmother? Imagine. Would you give her my regards?”
    There was a picture of a child psychiatry clinic from the 1960 s in their textbook. There were researchers in the picture who later had hypotheses and charts of emotional development named for them. And Grandma. Seeing her in a picture in her second-year psychology textbook, she felt like she was looking at a different person.
    Anna opens her grandmother’s book. The introduction has always moved her. The case study of Luna, a girl found lying in a cardboard box at a railway station who rebuilt her trust in the world little by little, has haunted her. She returns again and again to these words:
    A risk to the self is always an unreasonable one, from a child’s point of view. This is the conclusion I came to after observing Luna’s weeks of painful development in the clinic. That moment when a child experiences