Northern Return: A Circle of Fire and Silence (Sweden-Norway, 1988/2026)

And because, under equality’s sun,

All things wear now to a common soiling,

In the fire of images

Gladly I put my hand

To save that day for him.

— George Mackay Brown, Hamnavoe

* * *

The first time I took that road north, I was too young to understand what I was walking into.

In 1988, the map was smaller—not because the distances were shorter, but because I didn’t yet know how far a person could drift from themselves. Back then, Mayhem wasn’t a legend, just a name passed between tape traders and whispered in letters that smelled faintly of ink and cigarette smoke. I followed it like a rumor you wanted to be true.

I remember the grey light over Oslo, thin as a blade, and the way the city seemed to hold its breath in late winter. I arrived with a bag full of demos and the kind of certainty only the young possess—the belief that if something felt intense enough, it must also be meaningful. That was the currency of the underground: intensity mistaken for truth.

Now, shortly after my fifty-sixth birthday, with my second Saturn return approaching, I was going back.

Not out of nostalgia. Nostalgia softens things, wraps them in a glow they never had. There was nothing soft about those months. If anything, time had stripped them further, leaving only bone.

Back then, the journey had felt like ascent. North meant closer—to something purer, harsher, more real than the gray repetitions I had left behind. Coming from communist Poland, the West was supposed to be an opening. Even its margins held promise. Even a crumbling hostel, even hunger, even cold—these could be reframed as temporary, as the price of entry.

I believed in that price.

I believed in a kind of invisible ledger, where suffering could be exchanged for belonging. Endure enough, prove enough, and eventually the door would open—not just to a place, but to a circle, a recognition, a name spoken without hesitation.

What I didn’t understand then was that some doors only open inward. And some circles exist only to define who stands outside them.

The road looks different now.

Or maybe I do. Age has a way of flattening myth. The forests are still dense, still dark in that particular Scandinavian way—light filtered into something colder, more distant—but I no longer read them as symbols. They are just trees. Silent, yes. Indifferent, certainly. But no longer charged with the meaning I once forced upon them.

Astrologers say the second Saturn return is a reckoning. Not the dramatic kind youth imagines, but something quieter, more structural—a balancing of accounts you pretended did not exist. The first time Saturn comes around, you are still becoming. The second time, you are confronted with what you have become.

And what you have not resolved.

The ferry terminal in Gdańsk looks nothing like it did in my memory.

Or perhaps it does, and I no longer have the eyes to see it the same way. Back then, everything carried weight. Every departure felt symbolic, every threshold charged with meaning. I remember the anticipation more than the place itself—the sense that by stepping onto that ferry, I was crossing not just the Baltic, but into another version of my life.

Now, the act feels almost procedural.

Ticket. Passport. A short queue. People scrolling on their phones, families managing luggage, fathers carrying bags while children drift a few steps ahead, already half-absorbed into their own worlds. I watch them more closely than I expect to.

I think of my own father.

Of what I understood of him then, which was almost nothing. Fathers, at that age, are obstacles or absences—figures defined by what they deny you. I wanted distance from that gravity, from the expectations that seemed already written for me. The underground offered an alternative lineage: not father to son, but noise to listener, will to will.

Now I am a father myself.

And the symmetry is uncomfortable. I wonder what my children see when they look at me—authority, distance, failure, care? Some combination that refuses to settle into a single meaning. I wonder what they will need to reject in order to become themselves. Perhaps that is the quiet inheritance we all pass on: something to push against.

I board with the others.

The ferry smells the same, or close enough: fuel, salt, something metallic beneath it all. I find a place on deck despite the cold. The wind cuts through my jacket, immediate and unsentimental.

Scandinavia was always described to me as beautiful.

It is. But beauty here has a temperature. It does not embrace; it withholds. Even the sea seems restrained, its movements controlled, its surface rarely surrendering to excess. I remember thinking, back then, that this emotional coldness was honesty—that warmth was a kind of lie, a softening of truth.

Black metal grew well in that climate.

We spoke of rebellion, but it was a particular kind: not against power in general, but against the father. Against authority, structure, inheritance. Against the idea that anything should be given rather than seized. It was a music of refusal—of Christianity, of society, of softness—but beneath that, something more intimate pulsed.

A refusal of being shaped.

And yet, the scene itself reproduced what it claimed to reject. Hierarchies formed quickly. Authority condensed around certain figures. Approval mattered more than we admitted. We spoke of freedom while orbiting new centers of gravity.

I think now of Pelle. Of Euro.

Two young men, each in his own way at war with what had made him. Pelle dissolving into an identity that erased the given self entirely, as if becoming “Dead” could sever every prior bond. Euro constructing himself in opposition, sharper, louder, more absolute—as if by declaring enough, he could overwrite whatever paternal script he had inherited.

Rebellion, yes.

But also longing.

There was an intensity between us all that I did not understand then. We rejected softness, but craved recognition. 

We denied vulnerability, but performed it in coded ways—through extremity, through risk, through proximity to death. It was a language we barely understood, spoken fluently without ever being named.

I have thought about them more than I expected. Not out of reverence, and not quite out of forgiveness. Something closer to responsibility. The dead do not change, but the living do, and sometimes that shift creates an imbalance—a weight that needs to be set down properly.

To visit a grave is to acknowledge an ending.

But also to renegotiate your place in relation to it.

I do not believe I can help them rest in peace. That is too grand, too final. But perhaps I can quiet something—not in them, but in myself. The part that still vibrates with unfinished tension, with words unsaid, with gestures that never found their proper form.

Maturity, if it means anything, is not the erasure of the past.

It is the willingness to stand beside it without flinching. To see its structures, its repetitions, its hidden inheritances—and to choose, where possible, not to reproduce them.

I think again of fathers.

Of mine. Of myself as one. Of Pelle and Euro, in their different refusals. Of how easily rebellion becomes imitation when it is not examined closely enough.

The train continues west.

I follow the same route, station by station, not to relive what happened, but to place it within a longer arc. To see it not as a defining rupture, but as one movement in a larger composition.

A harsh one. A formative one.

But not the final one.

As the landscape slides past the window, I feel something shifting—not resolution, not yet, but alignment. A sense that the journey itself is the gesture required. That by tracing this path again, deliberately, I am acknowledging the weight it carried—and redistributing it across the years that followed.

Paying, if not a debt, then an attention long overdue.

The road west does not promise anything.

But this time, I am no longer asking it to.

And that, perhaps, is the only peace available to the living.

As the landscape slides past the window, I feel something shifting—not resolution, not yet, but permission.

To remember.

To speak.

And, eventually, to let the ghosts rest—not because they demand it, but because I no longer need to keep them alive in silence.

The towns are quieter now. Rain falls gently, erasing footsteps in seconds, and I am struck by how fleeting our presence is, how little the world cares for the passions that once seemed infinite. But memory, stubborn and tender, keeps its own vigil. It whispers of mistakes, of rage, of the reckless poetry of youth—and it whispers of mercy, of survival, of the small grace of being alive when others are gone.

I stop sometimes to look at the water, the fjords that run like dark veins through the land. I feel the pulse of the world still beneath the cold, and I think: the past is not a burden, not entirely. It is a teacher. It is a mirror of what we were, and a guide to what we might become. I honor them in silence, in empathy, in acknowledgment. I honor myself, too, for carrying on.

And in that quiet, I understand something I could not then: that survival is not triumph over death alone, but the courage to return, to remember without being consumed, to close the circle and finally see the story whole.

The ferry back to Gdańsk is calm. Wind drifts lazily against the rails, and I read through my journal again, tracing the emotional arc of the journey. I understand now that survival is not simply avoiding death—it is the willingness to return, to remember, to honor the past without being consumed by it.

I carry with me the echoes of Pelle and Euro, the northern wind, the cold and the fire, and a sense of closure that I could not have imagined in my youth. The circle is complete, not with triumph, but with understanding. And in that, there is grace.