And Every Time They Look Different

The bridge repeats. The water repeats. The woman holding the camera does not. #

I compared two photographs tonight, one from 2012 and one from this week, taken close enough to the same place that the buildings line up almost perfectly. At first glance, Amsterdam appears to be the stable element. Same canal. Same narrow houses. Same basic geometry. Different bicycles, different light, different small details, but recognisably the same view. Then I remembered the person behind the older camera. That is where the photograph changed completely. In 2012 I was still learning how to live here. I knew routes but still thought about them. Dutch sentences required assembly. Work was new. Our house was new. The stairs were still absurd rather than merely stairs. Milano sat closer to the surface of every comparison because I was constantly measuring new life against old life. The woman who took this week’s photograph was thinking about dinner. That almost makes me laugh. Same canal, radically different internal landscape, and the evidence is invisible. I love that. It makes me suspicious of photographs when people treat them as complete truth. They show what stood in front of the lens. They do not show what was behind it. The 2012 image cannot tell you I was still surprised by being here. The 2015 one cannot tell you Amsterdam barely crossed my mind because I was wondering whether we had enough food at home. Yet when I look at them, I know. I can feel the distance between those two versions of myself more clearly than the visual distance between the pictures. I showed them to Yuri after dinner. He looked at both. «Your hair is different.» I stared at him. «That is your analysis.» «It’s true.» It is true. He has a gift for returning my elaborate reflections to material reality. My hair is different. He was different too. We both were. Three years is not long until I start listing what became normal inside it. Work. Language. Cycling. This house. Friends. Routines. Shops. Streets. The tiny practical map of where to get what. Knowing how long something takes. Knowing which route to avoid. Knowing that a particular floorboard will complain. Knowing that Friday night has its own shape. Knowing which Dutch words no longer need English. Home is perhaps just an accumulation of things no longer requiring conscious thought. I nearly wrote that as a conclusion and immediately disliked it because home is more slippery than one sentence. Fine. Delete the philosophy. What remains is two photographs. Same canal. Different hair. Yuri wins.

Remember me, Eclipse.