I woke up on Anna's sofa at four and knew I wasn't going back to sleep, so I took the recorder down to the water. Saltsjön, still dark, a sky that was thinking about it. I sat on the jetty and pressed record and did nothing for twelve minutes.
Back in Berlin I put it on the big speakers and listened properly. First: my coat, which I always forget is the loudest thing I own. Then water against the piles, a slow slap, irregular in the way only water is. A ferry, far off, its engine a note I could name if I had to.
And then, at 7:20 into it, a bird I didn't hear at the time. One call, close, then nothing. I've listened forty times. I don't know what it was. I've decided not to find out.
Twelve minutes. No music, no voices, no edit. Zofia wants it for her Kraków drawings. She can have it. It's the least Stockholm thing I own and the most.
