Thursday, 16:12 There is a daub of grass shaded by the university library, tufted with sapling trees held up by planks of wood. It is home to a scatter of hedgehogs, who come and go like apparitions, to whom I retain a pious devotion. After three and a half years in the city, I have a deeper kinship with them than anyone else. They are allies more than friends – comrades, even. It is a comfort to imagine learning from them to back-and-forth unseen, to arm my flesh against the enduring dangers.

Their Swedish name is igelkott: the Old Norse ígull, meaning sea urchin, plus kottr, meaning cat. I found the etymology in an online dictionary once, and it’s lingered in my memory, the way the poor divil straddles marine and feline. Evidence of man’s talent for misassignment – an intrepid Viking, perhaps, on hearing a phantom purr, presumed the obvious and grabbed the wrong end of the ontological stick.

At home, igelkott is gráinneog – ‘detestable little thing’ – a moniker of almost un-Irish frankness. The hedgehog is a cross-culturally maligned and misunderstood creature: it may have an abundance of pricks but we’re in no state to pass remarks.

16:19 The streets are kissed with grey and the air shivers with traces of fog. A caustic, mottled sky cloaks the college town: Lund, an ancient, adamant place through which I move now like a breath released.

Drifting over mud-sodden footpaths hemmed by naked birches, weighed down by the spoils of the day: a rattling lunchbox, a veteran laptop and dozens of annotated printouts about Liberian wastewater. They had a civil war in Liberia and it did for their sanitation, among other things. As an indirect consequence I am halfway through a doctorate that my life has outgrown.

Most people come to the faculty because they want to save the world. I came to save myself, and, having done so, begin to wonder if the planet can wait. I labour over a homeopathy of human existence: dysentery and Ebola and mass death reduced to beats in a paper soap opera.

There is no succour in it: the lanyarded rope-throwers, the curiously funded internships in Geneva and New York, cut-glass people who speak briskly but say little, and corporate loveliness exercises by now reduced to arguing for their right to carry on failing. Sustainable, sustainable: the talk of it is anything but – we are honour-guarding conveyor belts at the platitude factory in the hope that we will one day get to pan for the raw material ourselves.

My routine is a garden above a sinkhole. Most of it has fallen away, yet still I tend to the jagged edges, for want of better; for want of something to want.

But nature compensates for these arrears of nurture. A carpet of Siberian squills in front of the library portends warmer days, dappled with the layered blue of midsummer twilight. The building itself is as much tourist trap as book depository – ivy clinging to its front changes colour with the seasons, and the Harvardian red bricks are now weeks from dissolving behind a pelt of late-spring green.

16:25 For once, my route is straight: past the observatory, the botanical garden, the fur-lined army of hand-held children returning from day care, the anarchic open-window swell of a brass band’s rehearsal. No detours, no embellishments. The city and I have an amicable understanding – we have nothing left to say.

The old town hums in the shadow of the domkyrka: two chalky towers like great slabs of frosted ice. They look translucent against the smouldering clouds, the better to diffuse God’s grace. The cathedral is surrounded by the young family it has mothered, in spite of itself: sushi bars, ice-cream parlours and falafel joints – long-ago houses in which modernity has grown quietly like a mass of mushrooms.

These streets are crooked with memory, of rock-hard wooden chairs and half-clean glasses, of music: loud, and people: louder, and me: saying nothing at all.

I was less a late bloomer than a late sprouter – I didn’t know what it meant to be a child until I grew up and left home. College towns are apt to arrest development, and there is a blitheness to this place, to the gaudy boiler suits and liquid picnics, ultimate frisbee and endless whizzing bicycles.

On days like this, though, Lund is self-contained. It hoards its own warmth. It is red bricks and yellow paint, brown and orange roof tiles, old wooden window frames, sky-blue and prolific green. It says: you need us more than we need you. It says: you will not outlast us.

It plays both ways, font and crypt. But, now, it and I live equally as ruins: old rotten into new, born into old, so that everything is ageless.

16:39 A small place on Sankt Petri kyrkogata, opposite the statue of Carl Linnaeus. Another repurposed old house, with a chalk board outside saying, You are what you eat, so eat something sweet, and low ceilings inside, ill-fitting.

The bite of early evening mingles with high-powered steam and the chime of plates and cups. The queue in front moves with the briskness of a warehouse floor. My order is a cortado – a dairy-heavy thing, new-fangled, to me at least. Spanish.

Cold green eyes prevail behind the counter – uneasy, then glazed as if by a confectioner. I’m asked if I want a cake but I demur, a firm nej, careful not to spoil myself. There are hissing sounds from machinery.

A second glance from the barista.

A third. He is efficient but not efficient enough.

I peer into my phone as I wait.

Until again I am on the move, threading myself through rush-hour pedestrians, paper cup in hand, warm as forgiveness. Past the supermarket beggars, past the sludging wheels of the city buses, past an art shop with a Warholian portrait of Olof Palme in the window, boyish hair and mannish nose. Cobbles dither beneath me, but I am resolute.

A person is no more than a contrivance of lessons, and, with enough new ones, I became someone else entirely. I used to fear solitude, and the way it left me putting out fires, but here I stoked them, and filled myself to the lip with sweet thick blackening air.

It was once a secret, a double life that in time became singular and various. Like love, like sickness – utterly human, I suppose, I reckon.

16:52 There is a tremor of chatter and artificial light and I feel myself the epicentre. It’s stuttered movement and standing room only, so Malmö is less an urbation than a form of purgatory.

Central, Triangeln, Hyllie – underground stations, placeless places. Rubbish bins and condensation, spotless platforms, a bilingual sign saying: Ballongförbud. No balloons. In my hand, a half-empty coffee cup, smear of nude lipstick on the lid, another day’s armour partly discarded.

Through newly built tunnels, not rattling but skating. Sharp-green emergency-exit lights repeat every second or so. The inside of the carriage is replicated on all sides, trapped infinitely, gradually losing distinction.

No one told me how jealously I’d need to guard myself. That I do it at all is proof enough it’s worthwhile.

I no longer live for the city, or the university. Lund was too small for me. It knew me too well. Its streets and shops and shared kitchens were painted with faces.

It is a very old story: a won war and a lost peace.

To stay would require me to talk, so I have replaced one form of dissemblance with another. There’s a reason the butterfly moves quicker after the chrysalis: she has secrets to keep. Now, all I have left of my larval city is a loveless doctoral thesis and half-spoiled vestiges of what I used to be. I have moved on, just like everyone else.

Once jolted above ground, out of Hyllie, out of Malmö, there is urban wilderness, nothing but these streaking carriages and the adjacent motorway surrounded by grassy wasteland. Bare vegetation besets this expanse like body hair.

The whole area is flat as an ultimatum. These horizons are aggressive in their endlessness.

The train inclines delicately as it curves towards the coast, scant shards of setting sun cutting through the carriage, devouring me, leaving me blind – alone with all I have lost, and all I have gained.

My name is Phoebe.

I am now over the water.

A bridge younger than me, diagonal girders undulating like the writhing of a sea creature. A train that was once a ferry – but that is someone else’s history. It is a truism to say things change and we adjust, that the past only controls us if we let it. Years from now, I will have discarded these impatient days. I will be remade again, older hands and lighter lifting.

Outside the window, Malmö drifts away, its evening flicker coughing into life.

Then I spot him, pretending to read his folded copy of Aftonbladet. He looks up – over his newspaper, under his bonfire eyebrows – at me. My only reference for these glances is the smile of strangers once received with ignorant enthusiasm. I want to grin at him, to acknowledge his contact, human being to human being – but I am not a child anymore.

I lower my gaze and try instead to focus on a raucous conversation in Arabic in progress elsewhere in the carriage, the two men’s words comfortably alien and impersonal, negating the effort of understanding.

I pull the coffee cup towards my lips a final time, but it is already empty.