world alone
Hey everyone. I hope you are all doing well. I have seen a recent influx of new subscribers to this publication. If you are new, welcome. If you are returning, welcome back.
It has been a year since I first started writing to you. I am unsure if anything has happened since.
I am in Amsterdam. I’ve been here for almost a month now. I was studying esotericism at the Universiteit van Amsterdam, but that ran its course, so now I am walking around in the rain. I have spent the past few days completely alone. Allow me to share.
A few days ago, maybe a week, I ended up at an Argentinian restaurant. The hostess sat me at the corner of the bar hidden behind two massive jugs of sangria. A handsome bartender who looked to be in his earliest twenties asked me my name, so I told him and I asked him his name and he told me in a British accent, “John”. I’ve never been a fan of the British, but he told me he left England for the Netherlands out of hatred for his homeland. We bonded on that and he shook my hand. He had a certain coked up energy I should be used to by now as I have lived in Montreal for some years, but as I had ended up at that restaurant by chance, dejected and kicking rocks, his enthusiasm to know me instilled a kind of coked up energy within me as well. We bonded on philosophy of religion, a topic I rarely talk about outside of classes and papers, but he seemed eager to parse through my thoughts and arrange them into convenient diagrams and schemas so as to most efficiently understand me. He made me a “fat cured” Negroni, a butter-smooth drink that made me feel more full than tipsy, and flattered me with compliments. He struck the right chords, saying I was smart, but did not seem like the kind of person to study religion. It is the kind of ego stroke that emboldens my sense of rebelliousness. I befriended the other bartenders and the patrons to my side. We spent hours at the restaurant chatting, being given generously poured cocktails. John, alongside the two other bartenders, the Polish businesswoman, the two Argentinians we had befriended, and I had decided to go to a jazz club after closing. We ended up in a jazz club cramped with dark wood furniture, sticky from years of alcohol and sweat, surrounded by twenty somethings, backpackers, and other insufferable groups I inhabit. The jazz was bad, but it was fun talking to John until he told me he was high on ecstasy. I wondered why. There was a desperation in his eyes. Not the kind of desperation that would have led us to sex, but the kind that made me wonder when he had last told the truth. We chatted about fashion, dumb nothing, and bullshit and he told me we should play guitar together in the park the following day. I said yes because I was in love.
It wasn’t until 4:30pm the following day John texted me back. We decided to meet at a park, certainly near his house and an hour from my dorm. I biked there, anxiously awaiting the kind of connection I unconsciously came all this way for. I arrive at the park and he is sitting with his friend. It turns out his friend is the intellectually disabled young man he cares for in exchange for living rent-free in his home. They seemed great friends and in my ignorance I had no idea he could have been disabled in any way. John pulls out his guitar, so I pull out mine, a green acoustic I bought in Rome, the cheapest in the shop. It is ugly and hardly plays in tune, but I had to ask twice for it in the shop, so I figured it must be special. John and I played, but he kept staring off in the distance. I asked him what was wrong and he told me him and his friend had eaten edibles earlier. I have nothing against drugs, really. I myself have practiced the art of fucking up my own brain in various different ways. The issue was that he was somewhere I was not. You can’t reach someone like that. He slept two hours the night before. He was still coming down from ecstasy and at the peak of his high from the edibles. That desperation I noticed at the jazz bar, it turns out, was indicative of some pursuit. Maybe the other way around. He was running. From what, I was, and am, in no place to discover. Then he mentioned his girlfriend. She’s in Bucharest. They met when she was fleeing from something too. He said they had lived together for a year. I tried to make sense of the timeline, but soon realized John, like me, lived a life hopelessly disconnected from the lines of cause and effect. The pieces are all there, moments floating around the snowglobe, pebbles impossible to sift out of the dirt and garbage of stories told and retold. I left the park knowing I would never hear from him again.
The other night I went out to dinner at some restaurant on the West side of Amsterdam, a quieter, quainter neighborhood mostly spared by the worst of the tourists and backpackers. I ate and after decided to go on a walk down the canals. I followed sights and noise to a waterfront bar packed with people just barely older than me. Everyone had their arm around someone. This must be the watering hole, makeout hill, the creek behind the high school. I had to work up the courage to make my way through the library of straight couples, beered up Dutch guys, and trios of two women with their designated gay man. I ordered a beer I couldn’t pronounce and sat at a picnic table by the water. Next to me sat a group of five or so Dutch guys and one man who mentioned to the Dutch that he was from South America. The South American man led the conversation about movies, talking about every major “film bro” flick from the last ten years and eventually leading the discussion toward Christopher Nolan, the director of all of our cousins’ favorite movies. One of the Dutch men said he had never seen Dunkirk and the South American guy said it was boring and proceeded to explain beat-by-beat the plot, setting, premise, and cinematography of the movie 1917 as though the two movies were one in the same. I don’t blame him, I like 1917 way more than Dunkirk, so I would much rather talk about it as well. The point is I was sitting alone. I took up half of the picnic table, the other half delegated to these larger, louder men crammed up against one another. I sat and stared at my beer and wondered how I could still be miserable somewhere like this. It’s a terrifying reality, knowing that you’re still a sick fuck even after you have gotten everything you could have dreamt of. I looked down into the water, only bothered by the wakes of impossibly slow boats cruising the canal, and saw a dead bird. It was a whole dead swan, head trapped beneath a rope and body bloated, floating how bodies do. There was no smell. No one seemed to notice at all, really. The bird moved with the wakes of smooth rolls of water.
It is my last weekend here. I’ve spent the whole time biking around. I love this city, but it’s not for me. I’m meant to be somewhere where it’s easier to disappear. I see too many familiar faces here. Give me somewhere loud or somewhere destitute. Nothing in between.
My only friend here says she has developed romantic feelings for me. I told her the truth, I do not feel the same way and I am sorry. I do not think I could ever love a woman the way I think I could love a man. I stumble for women, but I fall for men. Dumb metaphor. It really is a shame. I believe my life would be much simpler if I had no interest in men, really, but I play the cards I have been dealt. They’re all twos, threes, and fours. Men tolerate me insofar as I am their connection to the world of straightness. Feminine men ask me to recount stories of sex with women, delighting in the apparent simplicity of heterosexual hookups. They call their asses “pussies” and insist on positioning me as their butch, their beard, their friend with benefits. I have no interest in these men. I have no interest in resigning myself to being just gay enough to have sex with men, but still straight enough to flirt with women. It’s not an issue that exists anywhere besides in my own head. I go on runs to clear the air. I was biking the other day when that familiar dissociative cloud came over me. Like a pink fog, some kind of delight to be found in the haze of it all. I laughed thinking about being scattered across some corner of some street in Amsterdam by some car going a bit too fast. It is amazing how funny nothing can be.
My parents worry about me. I worry about my parents. Let’s drop acid and ruin our lives.
I love being alone because I can do whatever I want. I love being alone because I can not do whatever I do not want. I fear friends. I fear the things they carry with them. I fear the late night calls. I fear the passive aggression, the aggressive passion, the fact that they live lives just as, if not more, complex than mine. I fear the way my thoughts interact with theirs. I know I need to grow and I know how to do it too. I need to open myself to this world of pain, but I can’t allow twelve year old me to take another gut punch. I don’t know if I can take it anymore. I am weak, I know, you don’t need to rub it in. I’ll meet a man on a dating app. He will be naked in my bed. I will let him ruin the next four months of my life and never know his name. When they draw your blood at the lab they should say they are sorry for your loss. Every day is another condolence. Where are my postcards from the end of the world? Where are my time capsules? The notes to future me? How far do I need to dig to find the me who still believes in beauty? I am always a moment away from total annihilation. I cannot imagine watching this all go down. I dissociate and turn twenty one. When was I fifteen? When were we making out in the outdoor chapel? When did we sneak out that night and makeout in my brother’s car? When did that friend die? What killed him?
Sure, it’s July, but soon it will snow and soon that snow will melt. Where did the dirt go? Surely it is here somewhere. Surely the me who remembers birthdays, writes letters to friends, buys gifts for his family is in there somewhere. Somewhere I still sing. Somewhere I still write stories that are not my own. Somewhere I smile at strangers, make love to the world, fall in love with men without knowing their names. Somewhere I compose sonatas, symphonic fantasies. Sonata form: exposition, development, recapitulation. This must be development. This must be puberty. This must be growth. I must be growing. What’s worse? To grow tired or to never grow at all?