When we met under the stars in the western corner of the Sahara Desert in Morocco, I invited Ilmari to a dune away from camp to tell me his story. I listened in pitch black to his faceless voice, dipping my fingers in the cool sand as he said he grew up raising reindeer in Lapland, the remote north of Finland, and escaped soon as he could to find tech work in Poland. It wasn’t till he left home that he first realized not everywhere has an aurora borealis. At sunrise, I photographed our camels as they left us.
When we met at a cafe in Helsinki, Ilmari announced that he was experimenting with rejection therapy. “The goal is to be rejected,” he said, “so you make requests you know people will reject. The purpose is to get past those unnecessary fears that stop us from living, to get used to being rejected. First, I went into the street in Helsinki and asked a random person for a ride 45 minutes away. The person stroked their chin, looked at me, and answered, ‘Sure, why not!’” Ilmari burst out laughing and shook his head. “So then I went to my barber and while she was cutting my hair, I told her, ‘Look, my dog just gave birth to all these puppies and I don’t know what to do with them. Will you take them?’ She paused, looked at me, and answered, ‘Sure, why not!’ So then I had to explain that I didn’t really have any puppies. Damn, I thought. How am I gonna get rejected in Finland! Everyone is too nice!”
When we walked down out of the sprawling Jewish cemetery on the Mount of Olives behind the Old City in Jerusalem, Ilmari stopped and stared up at the barbed wire surrounding the Dominus Flevit Church. I pointed at the shards of green glass embedded in the stone lip of wall and he gasped. “Damn. Why would they do that?”
