I felt strangely at home yet simultaneously nothing like it, as I was walking down a street which I've walked down hundreds of times before. Yesterday, I walked it three days after a man killed four persons and hurt a much larger number, by careening a stolen lorry down Drottninggatan in central Stockholm city.

I'm lost for words, really, yet I continue typing.

Somehow, a memory from the late 1990s washes over me. My older cousin Zoran wrote to me over ICQ, about how the rule of Slobodan Milosevic, tyrannical war criminal, was coming to an end. I remember Zoran's excited words, almost with a bit of fear in them, as something truly indescribable was happening to him, and also to the entire geographical region that used to be former Yugoslavia. I couldn't really fathom what Zoran was writing about. I knew it was all-encompassing and life-changing, but I'd never experienced anything like it, as I wasn't living in a region marred by years of NATO bombings, corruption, and civil war. I didn't know how to fully empathise with him, as it was impossible for me. I lived in Sweden, marked by "neutrality" and no war. No shortage of anything.

I've no idea what my subconscious is trying to pulling that memory from a hat, if anything, really.

I've really lived a very charmed life in comparison with people who've feared and lived through death, torture, lack of food and water, isolation, who've had no shelter, people who literally lost family and friends and were forced to leave the place where they lived and felt was home.

I felt as though nothing was real, through part of Friday afternoon, as I - not completely without rationality - feared for the life of the love of my life. And for the lives of friends. People I know from work. Fear and a stop-clock second's worth of panic let me go, I calmed down, and was ready to try and travel home. All subway and train traffic had been suspended. Still, that didn't stop me from feeling fear, even though I was quite sure that I was far away from harm.

Friends sent sympathies. Strangers opened their doors to other strangers. Time went by. Police received flowers. People started writing on the plywood wall that sheltered the warehouse where the lorry stopped, hitting the wall. I've heard the P3 Dokumentär episode about the day, produced only 24 hours after the fact. Read papers. Spent the weekend hearing news, rumours, seeing how social media and the Swedish tabloids making things worse.

The above cover of Dagens Nyheter from Saturday is beautiful. It makes me sad, but I can still find some kind of strength in knowing that the sadness will pass. I just don't know what it will be substituted by, if anything. A sense of loss? Of somebody, somehow being convinced that killing people was a thing he had to do?

I hope the political aftermath in all of this won't spawn a Swedish version of the American "patriot act", that turned up just after 9/11. I also hope that people will keep their minds - and continue doing so - just as open as some people did with their front doors on the evening of last Friday. Let love rule.