Andrea

Emmi-Liia Sjöholm

Writer and screenwriter, who lives right near Karhupuisto.

Andrea. That's my name for one year, from May to May.

Andrea falls for a boy between two high schools, on the sandy field of Torkkelinmäki. The trees have just begun to green, the boy has asked her there, the next history lesson will be skipped.

Andrea has black-dyed hair, a too-short miniskirt, and the instincts of a skittish animal. The boy has no hair at all, but he has a girlfriend. Until the boy kisses Andrea on a Kallio balcony in the middle of the night, an unknown person screams drunkenly on the street, it's the last day of school. The old girlfriend is forgotten, Andrea takes her place.

The boy's sister has almost the same name; the family constantly confuses the two girls. Do you have any more first names, they ask, and so it's decided. Andrea.

Andrea twists herself into many knots, physical and mental, pairs a skirt with just a bikini top, experiences her first orgasm in another person's company, even though she's rehearsed the situation many times. Andrea is insecure, jealous, happy, and very sad. She finds out that the boy cheats on Andrea again and again. That's what love must be like, Andrea thinks, and stays, until she starts to feel ashamed. She doesn't want others to look at her with pity, she doesn't want to think about all those other girls. Those beautiful girls the boy has met, whose parents act in movies.

So Andrea ceases to exist.

Six months after the breakup, we go together to see Richard Linklater's Before Sunset. I haven't seen the previous part of the film that would later grow into a trilogy; in the seats of the Forum cinema, there are only Céline and Jesse, in their thirties, to whom I, at 19, compare myself. Will the boy and I ever be there, will we find each other again after years, will he regret how he treated me, will he want me back then?

We kiss and undress once after the movie, but Andrea stays away. The boy stays put, his parents learn the new girlfriend's name, I move on. Quite literally, I feel myself climbing to a new level in life, I start studying, I am more than the limits of my body. I gain self-confidence and for the first time experience feelings of anger; the boy is nothing, he sells washing machines and poorly working printers! I'm not going to look for anyone on the streets of Paris nine years from now, unless it's new love.

I don't think about Andrea as often anymore, nor the boy. I lighten my hair, wear pants instead of skirts. We still chat sometimes, the boy and I. He catches up with me, he's studied too, he's getting married. The boy becomes a man. I've forgiven him, even though he seems to remember mostly my body, what I was wearing at different times, some kind of connection. I try to understand why Andrea always tried so hard.

I also get married while Andrea waits for me to write about her. And when I finally start years later, I can't stop; I write about Andrea in my debut work and somewhat in the next ones, I write about her in this text. It's nothing, my friend says – we write again and again about what torments us. And what torments me is how love and sorrow might not be opposites after all, but an inevitable coexistence.

Andrea is a mirage and a muse, a hazy memory. A jar of self-tanner, wide smiles in a roll of film, a cramp in the pit of the stomach after sex.

I write and write and write, first for the pages of magazines, then between the covers of books, and finally for actors' mouths. I live in my thoughts, for which I'm mostly paid poorly and irregularly. I no longer know if I'm climbing up or down in life, but at least I try to articulate it all as clearly as possible.

In the autumn of 2025, I'll host Jesse and Céline on a screen set up in Karhupuisto, this time as twenty-somethings who have just met, wandering the streets of Vienna. I'll stay with my spouse and child in the dark evening to watch the first fifteen minutes of the film, comparing my 40-year-old self to them. I'm already on my way towards midnight, but would I ever have become me if I hadn't once also been the Andrea of the early morning? Enamored and broken, frantically searching for love.

I text my husband. I ask what he remembers about that movie we once watched together, I want to write about it, about us, about Andrea. I expect a nostalgic answer. He writes back immediately: "The only thing that bothered me about the movie was that (at least in the theatrical version) a boom mic was visible in one scene. I couldn't understand how that could happen in such a good movie."

It makes me laugh. My entire understanding of love, life, and desire is based on that cinematic experience. I have written about it and towards it. And my husband remembers a detail that I, in my passion, never noticed.

A few weeks ago, I dyed the tips of my hair black. Andrea might be saying hello, maybe she never really left.

Baby, you are gonna miss that plane.

I know.

 

Illustration: Taru Liikanen