In Which We Reduce Ourselves To This

photo by Arno Minkkinen

Finnish

by SARAH SALOVAARA

“I don’t even know why it exists.” He drew my eyes to the pin perched on his breast pocket: an Argentine flag and a Finnish flag, their poles crossed at an axis. It’s always made me uncomfortable when someone puts stock in my heritage. 

“Where are you from? Spain? Italy?” 

“No, but I get that a lot. It’s Finnish,” I say of my surname. Or, “I’m Finnish,” even though I have only ever been to Norway, and I only know two words in my grandfather’s language — hyvää päivää — that actually function as one in mine.

photo by Arno Minkkinen

“People always think that, but I don’t think I look Latin at all,” I hear myself say, again and again, like a ritualized prophecy. “But I guess I don’t look very Finnish, either.” I flick my wavy brown hair over my right shoulder, dripping in vanity.

“Where did you get that?” I gape at the pin.

“I—I don’t know.”

“Is it a football thing?”

He laughs. “Who knows.”

“That’s so cute.” 

He orders a pulled pork sandwich, and we talk about how that used to be my weakness before living in Spain made me a vegetarian. (I still eat fish. And birds.) A few nights ago, after he took me to dinner, he went to get ice cream, alone. He texted me that it was delicious, and that we’d have to get some sometime. Familiar with the outpost, I told him it better not have been the vegan flavor. “yo. i’m from argentina,” my screen read. “i get steak flavored ice cream if it’s avails, okay?”

photo by Arno Minkkinen

We talk about how I drink and he doesn’t. We talk about how he lives alone and I don’t. He orders me another Jameson. The bartender stumbles over and I wonder what her BAC is, right at this very moment. Then he kisses me. Hard. Open. And in that second, my attraction to him leaves my center and dissipates down my extremities, till it evaporates from the very tops of my arms.

Later, when he walks me home, and we say goodbye, after a long kiss goodnight, I will turn around in my hallway, and run past my neighbors, back outside, to kiss him once again. And I won’t know if I mean it, or if it’s just another thing I do, like how I act when someone asks if I’m Italian, because I feel like I’m supposed to.

Sarah Salovaara is a writer living in Brooklyn. She blogs about film here, and you can find her twitter here.

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