I grab a blue-and-yellow rip-stop plastic tote with IKEA repeated up its handles. A worker greets me. Other customers disappear on their way to the ballroom. No thank you. The bag is for show. I don’t need any help. What I came for does not appear in any catalogue. I take the escalator past a miniature farmhouse with its candles, books, and modular kitchen, the promise of all needs met. It recedes below me as a black and white mural of a smiling face invites me further, all the way in. It will be wonderful! The white teeth beckon. The subject is ordinary, not a model but a real live person, unable to disguise her joy. Everyone, the woman seems to say, will find something at the Ikea warehouse. Perhaps she means me. But how could she?

As I rise, a humid smell suggests the hot bar with its chicken fingers, baked salmon, Swedish meatballs with lingonberries. These are my childhood foods. Ikea is an outpost of my mother’s country, and her aesthetic. I grew up in the embrace of oversize flowers, birch veneer, and herring roe. My mother immigrated from Sweden. I have been to Ikeas all over the world. They all smell like this, like potatoes and dill, ammonia and babies, vanilla ice cream and sawdust, the essence of a certain sensible, comfortable family life, like the eighteen years that I had a mother.  Though, our relationship was always tenuous, in modern parlance, dysregulated. It is not my intention to overstate my position. Some things are unknowable, others are secret, still more, lost in translation. I have spent my whole adult life sifting, through memories, through literal ashes. (They smelled terrible, like melted plastic and singed wool.)

Some facts I know for almost-sure.

When I was a teenager, my mother accidentally burned our house down.

I rode out houselessness by moving between places, babysitting my younger brothers in an island cabin, working overseas, school years in different houses either borrowed or rented. Arriving at my peaceful small college felt like completing a marathon. I couldn’t believe my luck.

That year, my mother was diagnosed with frontotemporal dementia. She died exactly one year after that.  I was a sophomore. I felt like something had knocked me out of my body, so I stood only partly inside my skin. Losing my mother was too big an occurrence for me to fathom, surrounded by the exact same brick buildings and shady trees as before, attending the same lectures, writing the papers that came due just as rapidly. With no options at hand, I just kept going to class.

Perhaps my muted reaction attracted the attention of her spirit. Because a few weeks after her memorial service, a fire ghost started haunting me. I didn’t decide that it was a ghost. Nor did I believe in haunting. I was not the hysterical type. My group-house roommates became convinced a spectral being lurked around the basement laundry area. Two of the girls insisted they had seen it with their own eyes. Emotions ran hot. Not mine, of course. My affect was flat. I had taken up smoking cigarettes and speaking only when spoken to. Everyone seemed to me like actors in a play underwater. Only late-night phone calls with one of my older brothers felt real, my feet propped on the wall like a girl in a television show. I don’t remember what we talked about, only that we talked for hours. Maybe the ghost heard us, maybe she didn’t like what we said, or that we left her out of the conversation.

A fire broke above the haunted basement, rising to burn all of my possessions. Everyone noticed the strangeness of the situation. Mine were the only items lost. I listed them out on yellow legal paper. There weren’t many. I hadn’t had time to amass more than some clothes, my bike, a typewriter. My roommates held an intervention. They said I had best get my grieving over with. It was a nuisance. I burst out laughing. I was nineteen.  I turned twenty in England, surrounded by my homestay family, one of the best birthdays of my life, eating roast chicken and wearing a paper crown. My grandmother and aunts came down from Sweden to visit me. When they left, I sobbed on the tube.

Senior year, as I typed my thesis in an off-campus apartment, I noticed a fizzing. I thought it was my diet Seven-Up. The garage outside my window was rapidly turning from shingles and timber to a column of black smoke. I watched the fire crews douse the flames. At night, I refrained from looking for weird shadows or white vapor. No, I said to the ghost. I was getting over a broken heart, trying to keep going until graduation. I rode a bike deep into the fields, past the prison. I made friends with girls who didn’t sleep, who crept into kitchens and stole food there. I picked up cowboys, stepping right from their pickup trucks into the classroom. I refused to be haunted. I held up my middle finger any time a door slammed. It was a matter of staying alive.

I graduated, moved again and again, eventually to Los Angeles. I felt welcome the moment I arrived there. Soon after moving into my first LA apartment, I woke to weird shadows on the wall. A dumpster blazed out my window. I sat on the bed, laughing. Up went my finger.

I began to list the conflagrations I had been close to, quizzing friends and dates. Were they like me? Did they attract fire like some people attracted lovers? I started working long hours on movie sets and studio offices.

The fires stopped.

When we were small, my mother taught me and my brothers to make Swedish meatballs, gingerbread, and saffron buns. We placed clip-on candles on the Christmas tree, and I dressed as Santa Lucia, in a white gown with a crown of branches and candles, delivering a tray of coffee and buns. I held the plane steady, proud not to spill. We read books about snowy villages, mushroom people and fairies who mistook an orange for the sun. My Morfar dressed as the Christmas Goat, the Julbocken, dragging a Radio Flyer covered in gifts to the Christmas Eve feast. As he passed behind, singing and making small threats, I felt his foreign world enter into me, and I grew afraid of this wild presence. My familiar grandfather became a strange apparition, there to teach me I was a child of distant magic, gifted and noted, accordingly. I didn’t cry. I only stared, while my brothers laughed in delight.

We were changelings. Part of our life existed in Morfar’s world.

We traveled to Sweden by airplane, arriving in the middle of a bright blue night, and I staggered through someone’s strange house, looking for the bathroom. I found myself outside a friend’s farmhouse, squatting by a tree, alone with a pasture of sheep and the strange midsummer twilight. I remember realizing that this was a different country, but the idea wouldn’t stick.

Sweden was familiar, homelike, noisy with the voices of relations and friends. I was confused by the fact of nationality, but not by the language, which I had always heard, and not the food, which I knew very well. I loved everything, the white birches and red houses, the shining stoves and card games, our trips to the shore to catch crabs with string, afternoons spent running on the granite rock faces that stretched for miles, rusty pockets of ponds with blue harebells and long, wild green grasses. The books captured everything clearly, only minus the cold sea, the brine of shrimps’ heads, our arguments over who was meant to borrow the bikes and pedal for ice cream, what the runes in the churchyard meant, if the weather was warm enough to take the boat out for a picnic. I was always watching my mother with her unspoken rages, her secret feuds, the stormy ways of sisters I didn’t understand. I was a girl of brothers, of bruises and chess games and clandestine food theft, of playing chicken on the ferry and arguing over ownership of the veins of quartz that ran jewel-like through the rocks. I could always eat another hot dog. I certainly caught the biggest fish.

I knew nothing of my mother’s life, only that she was angry and tearful, and someone was usually to blame. I made sure it was never me. I disappeared up the rocks, out in the boat, away on the bike. I was gone all day. I befriended the wandering cows, lay for hours staring at the sky while the heat of the day seeped into my back, following the quartz rivers until they disappeared into knots of blue harebells, mussel shells dropped by seagulls and rusty old loops from when ships tied up to the quarries. Sweden was a wonderland, its only dangers in proximity to my mother. Everywhere else, I was free to roam. No one missed me.

Returning to the states, I was amazed by all the new buildings that had appeared in the months we’d been gone. I loved the trees. But the freeways and buildings hurt me with their ugliness. Going back to school was like squeezing into borrowed clothing. I disappeared into the darkness of September, my classmates with their stories of trips to California and other mysterious states I didn’t know, the significance of their parental origins lost on me. I was in fifth grade before I realized that we went to Sweden for six weeks, not six months. Either way, the trips were long. But not for the Swedes, who believed in summer vacation for everyone, not only children.  

I didn’t understand my homesickness for Sweden until I was working at my first job after college. There was a long-distance call. Mormor was dying. My father bought me a ticket to Arlanda. When I arrived, my dazed Morfar drove me to the hospital, where my grandmother told me I needed to marry and have children. Promise me, she said. I was twenty-one, juggling the kinds of boyfriends who would disappear if the word marriage was mentioned. But I promised.

I drove to the summer house in my rental car. It was my first trip to Sweden any season other than summer. I passed a pond lying silently within the granite, the storm blowing in from the North Sea reflected in its water. Two swans glided between the mirrored planes, as if levitating between water and sky, their feathers creamy valentines. I pulled over, not for the first time wondering if my body belonged in that water with them. Did I not want to become harebells, birches, grass for the gentle Swedish cows? I did. I do.

Like two of my brothers, Ingvar Kamprad was dyslexic. When he founded Ikea, he developed a naming system by category of item, so he could keep them straight. Outdoor furniture was named after islands, rugs after towns, bed and bath accessories for flowers and plants. He was always pointing his work back toward the places he loved. He was always looking around himself at the country that formed him.

My brothers and I visit the cousins, to see the old summer house, visit the old warship Vasa, watch the costumed people churn butter in wooden vats. We share a favorite story of camping by a fjord, when a man remarked to my brother on the children’s fluent English, and when did they have a chance to learn to speak without accents? One beautiful, aged aunt lives on, heiress to the family standards, the vanished days of sisterhood. She quizzes the youth, looking for faults or deviance from propriety, finding none. The children are American, which is understood to not be their fault. Otherwise, there is nothing really wrong with them. My daughters are grown now. They visit countries I have only seen on television, China, India, Tibet, Bolivia. They live in New York City.

Once they came with me to play in the dressed-up tiny houses, pretending their world was a 500-square foot display, or the inside of a bunk bed, a play tent, someplace cozy amidst the vastness of Ikea. Now they thrift their household goods. I taught them this as well. The past is a friend. Objects contain meaning. Ghosts are only dangerous if you want them to be.

And now, I am ready for that risk. The ceiling here is wired with sprinklers. We will be safe if flames erupt.

Flat packs rest on wheeled carts outside the café like blanks at a mint, awaiting their own specific destinies. I can no longer see the grinning woman, but I know she is there, a mute witness. Maybe she is laughing because she knows that life can never be contained within particle board and ripstop plastic. It is only comforting to try. My children might not exist but for the promise I gave in Sweden. But they do exist. I have put down my middle finger. Confusion is the hallmark of trauma, according to one of my therapists. If you can’t make a regular system, then tie your logic to plants and flowers, to islands and towns, to bodies of water.   

I carry my tray to a birch veneer table. Next to me, a mother feeds her toddler. Two women pass, holding containers of cake, discussing matters in hushed Farsi.

I wait. I imagine my mother’s ghost sitting across from me, her perpetually dated 1970s clothes, her blond cap of hair, her clogs. When she comes, I will ask for reassurance that there is a way to fix things, to create a world that is clean and bright, a safe home. Surely such a powerful spirit knows how to create as much as destroy. I know she does. I am here, one of her babies dropped carelessly on her way to important business. Even her casual gestures still ripple, over decades. Some trace is left. I am sure. I must simply be willing to bear the consequences if she blazes back to me. I feel ready. Bring on your worst, I think to myself. There’s nothing you can do to me now.

I dip my first Swedish meatball into gravy and lingonberries, its meaty-sweet taste a familiar comfort. I listen for my mother’s voice. I will recognize it when it comes. It is the same in every language.  

-Lisa Loop

Lisa Loop is a poet and author with a background in film. She received an MFA in fiction from University of California Riverside/Palm Desert in 2023. Her work has been published in NBC.com/THINK, The Coachella Review, and in Kelp Journal and Ballast Journal, summer of 2024. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband and their Aussie Shephard mix.