Helga Flatland

Dad has thick grey hair, and even though I still see him with the dark hair he had in pictures taken when I was little, I can only just recall it; in my memories, he always has the same grey hair he has now. He locks eyes with me and smiles, and I wonder what he’s thinking about, if he’s happy, if things are how he imagined they would be. Perhaps he hasn’t imagined them at all; he tends not to predict what things will be like one way or the other, but he’s always commented on my own tendency to do so: You have to try to accept things as they are, Liv, he told me when I was young and shedding anguished tears over holidays, handball matches or school assignments that hadn’t gone as I’d predicted they would. It was impossible to explain to Dad just how critical it was that they should unfold exactly as I’d anticipated; any action or accomplishment, great or small, each one had to follow a predictable course to prevent things from becoming chaotic and intangible. But life couldn’t be planned in that kind of detail, Dad had said, you needed to accept that you couldn’t always control everything.