It’s 5:17 in the morning in Amsterdam and the canal outside is doing something I didn’t know canals did. A soft liquid knocking, like someone testing a door. My body thinks it’s yesterday evening. The kettle in this apartment has instructions in Dutch and I’ve been staring at it long enough that the word koken has stopped meaning anything, if it ever did. Helix and Poppy are ten hours away. Luis is asleep. The bed here is too firm in a way I’ll still get used to by the time I just leave.
And I’ve done this to myself on purpose.
That’s the part I keep coming back to.
I bought a ticket. I packed a bag. I agreed to be this loose in my own skin for five days. And yet the looseness itself, the particular quality of being unmoored from my routine and my dogs and my person and the angle of light in my own kitchen, feels almost identical to a looseness I did not choose, twice, years ago now. Once when a semi-truck hit me and I could not find the word for spoon for three weeks. Once when a marriage ended and I woke up for eleven months in a house that was becoming less ours by degrees, like a photograph left graying and curling in the sun.
The aliveness is the same. The aliveness of unmooring is the same whether you boarded the plane or the plane boarded you.
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The Wrong Light
By six the light is coming through wrong. Not wrong exactly, just different in a way my body notices before my brain catches up. Grayer. Lower. Almost filtered through all that canal water somehow.
I make the coffee badly. Apparently, even fancy European coffee tastes terrible in a hotel room.
I sit by the window in a bathrobe someone else washed. A man in a long coat walks a small dog past the canal and neither of them look at me, which is why I request high floors. To be a body in a window. To have no one need anything from me for five days.
Here’s the thing I keep trying to name.
I am more alive to this badly-made coffee and this gray light than I’ve been to a morning in weeks. And I am duller. Heightened and muffled at once. The part of me that usually narrates my life back to me as it’s happening, you know the part, the one that says oh, this is nice or save this for later, that part is off. The coffee is just coffee. The light is just light. Sharper and slower. No voiceover.
I came here to do a job. Show up at a conference room. Say a few things about the future of work. Eat delicious food (and I had the most amazing Dutch Apple PIE). Fly home tired and a little proud of myself.
I did not come here to be emptied out.
But something empties when you leave the life you know. Even for five days. Even on purpose. Even with the return ticket already in your phone.
And I have been here before.
