April / Orange

April leaves behind tulip petals, orange photographs, one unnecessary vrijmarkt object and the quiet certainty that I am living exactly where my life is. #

April is ending with the window slightly open. That may be the detail I keep. Not King’s Day, not the flowers, not Easter, not even the orange photographs, although there are hundreds of them waiting for me to decide which thirty are somehow different from the other three hundred. The window. Slightly open at nearly midnight and the air coming through no longer carrying winter. Street sound entering the room in little pieces. A bicycle. Voices. Footsteps. Somebody laughing and then disappearing beyond where I can hear. This house changes when the windows open. It stops being a sealed warm object above the city and becomes porous. Amsterdam enters. I can smell food sometimes, rain sometimes, warm brick later in summer, cigarettes occasionally from somewhere I cannot identify, canal air, street air, other people’s evenings. April began with pink tulips and me wearing a lighter coat while mentally preparing to regret it. Then Easter arrived and brought Italy into the house through perfume, phone calls, food and memory without making Amsterdam feel less like home. I spent a day at a museum in comfortable shoes and considered this personal evolution. I photographed the same canals again and realised repetition has become one of the ways I measure change. I wrote too much about identity because apparently turning thirty has not cured me of examining my own existence, but at least the answer is less tortured now. Italian. Amsterdam. Milano. Genova. English at work. Dutch in pieces. Hardcore. Country. Angel. Bicycle. Code. Yuri. Mom. Dad. Hikari’s absence. Old friends. New routines. None of it needs organising into one clean definition. Then April twenty-fifth arrived with its seventy years of history and reminded me that dates can carry collective memory even when daily life around them continues normally. Two days later Amsterdam became orange and normal life surrendered completely for King’s Day. I love that those things can sit in the same month without competing. Serious memory and stupid purchases. National history and sore feet. That is how actual life works. It refuses thematic discipline. Today itself was almost aggressively ordinary. Work. Coffee. A small problem fixed. Lunch. Bicycle home. Groceries. Dinner with Yuri. He misplaced something and I found it. I should start charging. Mom called. Dad sent something. Tea at five happened while there was still plenty of light, four biscuits present and accounted for. I watered nothing because cut flowers do not require my gardening abilities. The latest bunch is beginning to fade. One petal fell on the table while I was writing. I left it there. The orange accessory is away. The little vrijmarkt thing is still on the shelf and looks as though it has always been ours, which proves how quickly objects acquire false histories. The Olympus is beside the computer with photographs still waiting. I wore Angel today without planning to and thought of Mom only after I had already sprayed it, which may mean the perfume has finally become fully mine as well as hers. Yuri passed behind me earlier, smelled it and touched my shoulder for half a second. «Bambolina.» Nothing else. He kept walking. That tiny gesture is still in my body while I write. Thirteen years of knowing someone reduces some conversations to one word and a hand. There is no need to inflate that into a statement about love. It happened. It was enough. Tomorrow is May. Amsterdam will become greener, evenings longer, windows wider. Work will continue. The bicycle will continue carrying me through streets I no longer need to consciously navigate. There will be Fridays, laundry, photographs, calls home, music loud enough to make Yuri comment, country mornings, hardcore afternoons, probably more flowers than necessary. I am not waiting for anything to begin. That may be the quietest difference of all. When I was younger I always felt as though real life were slightly ahead of me, waiting after school, after some decision, after some future version of myself arrived. I don’t feel that anymore. Real life is Yuri asking from the other room whether I have seen his charger. It is Mom’s voice through the phone. Dad asking practical questions. It is the code I closed at work, the bicycle downstairs, the flower petal on the table, the useless thing from the vrijmarkt, the smell of Angel still faint on my wrist, the crooked floor under my bare feet. The window is open just enough for cool air to move the curtain. Somewhere below, somebody has just locked a bicycle. I heard the chain, then the footsteps, then nothing.

Remember me, Eclipse.