maastricht

Hello. I hope you are all doing well.

I have spent the last week in a smaller city in the Netherlands named Maastricht. It’s slower than Amsterdam, quieter and less dedicated to tourism. It is a lovely place.

I have been running in the countryside. The beauty of small cities is that the moment you leave town you are in the country. No hills roll in Holland. The countryside consists of endless fields of hay speckled with looming gothic clock towers, church steeples, and abandoned warehouses flanked by industrial garbage, moats of black trash and spent tractors. 

I’ve been gone. I met a man on an app and he invited me over. His apartment was on the fifth floor of an historic building by the water. He had just moved into the apartment, so it was filled with bags of belongings yet to be unpacked and unbuilt furniture. He had a stack of board games in one corner of his living room and told me his name was Clark. He said I could take my clothes off and I did. I asked to kiss him. His mouth tasted sour, but the sandpaper roughness of his beard against my fingertips felt real. It had been a month since I felt connected to another person. We stopped kissing and he began to do what he had asked me to come over for in the first place. His mouth around my penis felt fine, but I was focused on running my hands down his back, fingers through his hair. I could tell this was not going anywhere, so I told him he could stop and he said I’m nicer than most men he’s met online. I laughed and we kissed again and his mouth tasted more sour than before. I sat naked on the more comfortable of the two chairs he had in his new apartment and we talked about politics and the view from his window. I could not stop laughing, almost euphoric in the simplicity of the moment. Clark couldn’t tell why I was so happy, but I put my feet up on his lap and we talked for hours.

The next day I ran in an open space. The countryside is cold with wind and hot with sun. There’s nothing but power plants out there. Wind turbines and open country. I ran with my mouth wide open. Each impact on the ground sent electricity up my body. I noticed a bird and looked up and remembered the sky.

Outside of Maastricht.

I saw a boy and a girl on the bridge that connects one half of the town to the other. He was wearing a suit his mother surely bought for him to grow into. She was wearing a dress so black it became one with her leather jacket. He’s pulling up his pants, they’re too big. She laughs. It is a first date. They are maybe seventeen. I look at them and feel the kind of joy usually reserved for aged men watching their sons play sports. I am twenty one in a few days. How much of my life have I spent playing chess alone? No one is winning.

I felt feminine caressing Clark. My hand draping in such a way, my fingers studying the back of his t-shirt. He was not very handsome, but he was alive. I felt his head in my hands and stared into his eyes. I saw nothing but confusion. How did I end up here?

I met two Dutch men and they took me to their hotel room and we smoked weed. They told me about how their lives were falling apart while just coming together. One said he was moving to Thailand soon because he likes “small women”. They offered me the worst wine I have ever sipped and I sat and listened to their obscenities for a few hours. They were telling me stories about their nights on speed, coke, ketamine, amphetamines, and drugs one can only describe through basic chemical equations. One told me he was coming down off ecstasy, ketamine, and speed when he drove seven hours to get to Maastricht. The other laughed and I was impressed by their European nihilism. Driving a thousand kilometers per hour off the side of a cliff. A beer at noon, another at 12:30. It is a way of life, the product of a generation that revitalized smoking hand-rolled cigarettes and doing quaaludes .

I’ve been spending my nights walking in circles around a bar filled with young people. I feel myself drawn to their energy, but repelled by the thought of conversation. It’s not them, it’s me. I read books about people falling into life, the kind of life I don’t allow myself to experience anymore. I sat outside the bar for a few hours in complete silence. I read my book until I couldn’t, so I listened to two handsome genderless people next to me talk about dating apps. One swiped through their app of choice while the other rated the specimen on display. I wanted to say hello. I wanted to tell them I am here alone, I have no friends, but when I opened my mouth to speak, I realized I had nothing to say. Why connect when I can retract? I used to think this world was out to hurt me. I fear it may be the other way around. I fear the scars I leave on this place. I fear my presence in the room. I want to be so small I become nothing. I have worn the same brown pants and gray sweater for a month straight. I want nothing less than to disappear. The issue is, when I do disappear, as I have, I find myself incomplete. As though half of me is the mere act of being perceived, imagined by another. I walk by groups of young people and wonder what it is they think I am. I imagine how they imagine me. Am I brooding, mysterious, striking, frightening? It is a pathetic grasp at interpersonality. I want the reaction without the consequences. Life, no strings attached. I will live my life through the lines. I will live my life with my headphones on. I will live my life from outside the party.

2023/01/07 by Bryant Padron

Maestricht - Traiectum ad Mosam (16th Century)

The Dutch man who is moving to Thailand told me he is not usually like this. He said when he gets back to his hometown he will buckle down and focus on his future. He said he will only drink on the weekends and stop using drugs altogether. The other man laughed and said he will get drunk every night. They laughed together. Laugh at the utter terror of stagnation. My American brain is so intent on growth in any direction, I am baffled by the hilarity of a futureless future. These men are further along than I am. They have it all figured out. I am asked where I want to be in ten years and I think of a dog. I do not know if I will ever be able to love the way I am supposed to. I cannot write fiction and I cannot write the truth. I’d write stories if I could get past the beginning and the end. Where is the growth? How does that even happen? Have I lived enough of a life to write another?

In the Swiss countryside there is a man who spends every day sitting on a bridge overlooking the highway. I heard his family died under that bridge in an accident. He has been there for decades. Somewhere there is a mouse running in circles. Somewhere there is open country. The windmill still spins. The energy powers a whole city. Life will find you. These letters find meaning somehow. I can make something good out of this. I can tell you a story that will put you on your knees. Make me a scene. Draw me a picture. Show me where you feel it. Is that pain in your chest a heart attack? Is this finally it? Is it anxiety? Is it obsession? Do you feel obsessed? Are you addicted to a life of longing? What will you do when you have caught the car? Bite your tail? Eventually the sand will run out. The hourglass will be flipped and you will wonder where the time went. It’s a fact: everyone you love is dying. You’re the last great story. You’re the green light, the motel sign illuminating an entire highway town. Where do they go at night? What happens in those homes when the lights are off? Does the housekeeper make love? Towns so small the mayor is a dog, where do the gay boys kiss? Somewhere in there is love.